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The Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR) was a good Tory innovation – so long as it’s genuinely independent and not merely a Treasury creature.   But ever day the news cries out for another good innovation – an Office of Corporate Responsibility (OCR).   Take today’s news.   BAE wined and dined the Air Chief Marshal of the RAF and the Permanent Secretary of MOD 52 times over 3 years in an effort to get on the inside track in landing more nulti-million pound deals than their rivals, and succeeded in doing so.   Shell is accused by Amnesty of spilling 9 million barrels of oil in the Niger Delta over the past 50 years, twice as much as the 5 million barrels spilled into the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon blowout, though Shell is almost exonerated in a new UN report – why? because Shell paid for in full for the $10m report!   And this is just the tip of recent news about corporate corruption.

Last week Barclays was indicted in a Washington court for “knowingly and wilfully” violating international sanctions by handling money transfers totalling $0.5 trillions from banks in prohibited countries (Cuba, Iran, Libya, Sudan and Burma) over the decade to 2006.   The penalty was a fine of $298 millions, but Judge Sullivan pointed out that the average American caught robbing a bank is not given a deferred prosecution deal or an opportunity to escape retribution by refunding the proceeds from the crime – he is sent to prison.   So why weren’t the Barclays directors who supervised this massive financial crime not sent to jail, when benefit cheats whose misdemeanours are miniscule by comparison are sent to jail?

Earlier this month a British businessman working the the UK firm Innospec, David Turner, was found guilty of “directing and approving” bribes of more than $7.8m to Iraqi and Indonesian officials in order to sell tetraethyl lead (a toxic fuel additive) to their countries although it was banned from cars in Western countries because it was linked to brain damage in children.   The bribes were designed to ensure that Iraq and Indonesia failed the field test of an alternative, safer product which a competitor was offering.   Yet Turner was only fined £25,000 and Innospec was not closed down.

There are dozens and dozens of such cases being reported on a regular basis.   Even where prosecutions do take place, they’re almost always launched by the US authorities, not by the UK.   Since the Anti-Bribery Act was passed in 2002, only one prosecution has been undertaken in the UK, and when the SFO was assembling a massive bribery case against BAE over the £40bn Al Yamamah sale of fighter aircraft to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, it was arbitrarily stopped by Blair after persistent lobbying by BAE.

That’s why this country urgently needs an OCR to reverse the steady rise in recent years of corporate dishonesty, fraud and corruption.   Never has it been more true that there is one law for the rich and powerful, more pitted with holes than Swiss emmental cheese, and quite another for the poor.   Obedience to the law is only for the little people.