Waist to height ratio 'more accurate than BMI'

Your waist should be no more than half the length of your height, according to experts who claim that having too large a trouser size can dramatically shorten your lifespan.

Keeping your waist circumference to less than half of your height can help prevent the onset of conditions Photo: Alamy

By Nick Collins, Science Correspondent

12:01AM BST 14 May 2013

391 Comments

Measuring the ratio of someone's waist to their height is a better way of predicting their life expectancy than body mass index (BMI), the method widely used by doctors when judging overall health and risk of disease, researchers said.

BMI is calculated as a person's weight in kilograms divided by the square of their height in metres, but a study found that the simpler measurement of waistline against height produced a more accurate prediction of lifespan.

People with the highest waist-to-height ratio, whose waistlines measured 80 per cent of their height, lived 17 years fewer than average.

Keeping your waist circumference to less than half of your height can help prevent the onset of conditions like stroke, heart disease and diabetes and add years to life, researchers said.

For a 6ft man, this would mean having a waistline smaller than 36in, while a 5ft 4in woman should have a waist size no larger than 32in.

Related Articles

• New BMI: do you win or lose? 
  22 Jan 2013
• 'Forget BMI, just measure your waist and height' say scientists 
  12 May 2012
• Men 'underestimate waist size' 
  07 Oct 2011

Children in particular could be screened as early as five using the waist-to-height ratio to identify those at greatest risk of obesity and serious health conditions later in life, it was claimed.

Researchers from Oxford Brookes University examined data on patients whose BMI and waist to height ratio were measured in the 1980s.

Twenty years later, death rates among the group were much more closely linked to participants' earlier waist-to-height ratio than their BMI, suggesting it is a more useful tool for identifying health risks at an early stage.

By comparing the life expectancies of various groups of people at different waist-to-height ratios, they were able to calculate how many years of life were lost as people's waistlines increased.

For example, a man aged 30 with a waist-to-height ratio of 0.8, representing the largest one in 500 men, stood to lose 16.7 years of life due to their size.

A 50-year-old woman with the same ratio, accounting for about one in 150 women of the same age, would lose 8.2 years of life on average.

Dr Margaret Ashwell, whose previous research has suggested that the waist-to-height ratio could be a better tool than BMI for predicting a range of diseases, presented her findings at the European Congress on Obesity in Liverpool.

Measuring someone's waist is important because it accounts for levels of central fat which accumulates around the organs and is particularly closely linked to conditons like stroke and heart disease.

She said: "If you are measuring waist-to-height ratio you are getting a much earlier prection that something is going wrong, and then you can do something about it.

"The beauty is that you can do it in centimetres or inches, it doesn't matter. We have got increasing evidence that this works very well with children as well, because whilst they grow up their waist is growing but also their height."

Petrol price 'rigged for a decade'

Motorists may have paid thousands of pounds too much for their petrol over the last decade, after two of Britain’s biggest companies were raided on suspicion of manipulating oil prices.

European investigators said the alleged price-rigging could have had a 'huge impact' on the cost of oil Photo: ALAMY

By Rowena Mason and Emily Gosden

9:57PM BST 14 May 2013

425 Comments

MPs and energy experts tonight raised fears motorists have been “taken for a very expensive ride”, after officials searched the offices of BP and Shell for evidence of price-rigging.

The companies are suspected of distorting the oil price since 2002, meaning drivers have potentially been ripped off for more than 10 years.

Over that time, petrol prices have risen dramatically by more than 80 per cent to around 135p per litre.

European investigators, who raided the London offices of BP and Shell, said the alleged price-rigging could have had a “huge impact” on the cost of oil, including the price of fuel for consumers.

The investigation into market-fixing already has echoes of the Libor scandal, which saw the banks falsely report key interest rates used to calculate mortgages. It cost several British banks hundreds of millions of pounds in fines.

Related Articles

• Petrol prices slashed for second time in week 
  19 Apr 2013
• Motorists face postcode lottery on fuel prices 
  03 Apr 2013
• Petrol sales plummet to lowest level since 1990 
  21 Mar 2013
• Our fortunes rest on the Bank’s great money-printing machine 
  21 Mar 2013

Robert Halfon, the MP for Harlow who has long campaigned for an investigation into the oil market, said high prices have been “crushing families across Britain”.

He called for UK authorities to launch an urgent inquiry and for oil companies to “come clean and show some responsibility for what is happening to the international price”.

The raids were part of an investigation across the continent by the European Commission’s competition authorities. Offices owned by Platts, a price-reporting agency, and Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, were also raided.

European officials said several companies may have colluded in manipulating the price of both oil and green “biofuels”.

This could have happened if the oil companies provided false information to Platts, the main reporting agency that collects and reports prices to the wider market.

“Any such behaviour, if established, may amount to violations of European antitrust rules that prohibit cartels and restrictive business practices and abuses of a dominant market position,” the European Commission said.

“Even small distortions of assessed prices may have a huge impact on the prices of crude oil, refined oil products and biofuels purchases and sales, potentially harming final consumers.”

It said the raids were a “preliminary step to investigate suspected anticompetitive practices” and “does not mean that the companies are guilty of anti-competitive behaviour nor does it prejudge the outcome of the investigation itself”.

The inquiry comes after The Daily Telegraph revealed growing concerns about the reliability of oil prices last year.

A study for G20 finance ministers, including George Osborne, said traders from banks oil companies and hedge funds have an “incentive” to distort the market and are likely to try to report wrong prices.

Scott O’Malia, a top official at the US Commodities Futures Commission, has also previously drawn attention to the “striking similarity” between the potential for manipulating oil and Libor. The price reporting agencies strongly deny any similarities between their methods and the way Libor was calculated.

The information published by Platts and other reporting agencies is used widely by companies as a guide for pricing their oil-related products, including petrol.

Brian Madderson, chairman of the Petrol Retailers’ Association, tonight said any manipulation of the benchmark oil price over a decade could have cost motorists “thousands of pounds each”.

He said the PRA has repeatedly warned the regulators that the oil price appears to have been manipulated.

An 8p rise in the price of petrol last winter cannot be explained by basic supply and demand, unusual geopolitical events or other factors, he said.

Like Libor – the interest rate measure that banks were found to have rigged – the market is unregulated and relies on the honesty of the firms to submit accurate data about all their trades.

Lord Oakeshott, a senior Liberal Democrat and former Treasury spokesman, urged the UK authorities to take a closer look at the oil market.

“Rigging oil prices would be as serious as rigging Libor,” he said. “The price of energy ripples right through our economy and really matters to every business and families.

“All credit to the European Commission for taking action if they have evidence of collusion-but why have we had to wait for Brussels to find out if British oil giants are ripping off British consumers?

"I will be putting down parliamentary questions asking who has UK regulatory responsibility for ensuring fair and open competition in the oil market and what action they have taken in the past 5 years to investigate and enforce it.”

The oil companies tonight confirmed their offices have been raided.

A spokesman for BP said the company is “cooperating fully with the investigation and unable to comment further at this time.”

A Shell spokesman also confirmed its companies are “currently assisting the European Commission in an enquiry into trading activities”.

“We are fully cooperating with the investigation. For legal reasons we cannot make any further comment at this stage”.

Platts, the price-reporting agency, said the European Commission has “undertaken a review at its premises in London” and confirmed it is “cooperating fully”.

FTSE 100's use of tax havens – get the full list

Research has found that the UK's biggest public companies have more than 8,000 subsidiaries or joint ventures in tax havens – but which businesses have the most?

• Get the data
• More data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

Tortola, the capital of the British Virgin Islands, which in turn is the global capital of offshore finance – how many UK companies have subsidiaries there? Photograph: Neil Rabinowitz/ Neil Rabinowitz/CORBIS

Which major UK corporations keep subsidiaries in tax havens? The short answer, according to updated research by development charity ActionAid, appears to be almost all of them.

The research found 98 of the 100 companies in the FTSE 100 – the hundred biggest publicly listed UK corporations – had subsidiaries, associates, or joint ventures in countries defined by the charity as tax havens.

These included well-known offshore tax havens, such as the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands, as well as larger "onshore" countries which have been criticised for low taxes, lax regulatory regimes, or stringent corporate secrecy rules. The charity has provided a full rationale for its list of havens here.

The figures were collated through a months-long process began in September 2012 (and using the FTSE 100's composition at that date), using official corporate documentation.

In their extensive annual reports, many companies list a small number of "principal" subsidiaries – but buried in further filings, or in documents submitted to US authorities, lie dozens or hundreds more, scattered across the world. However, even once the existence of the offshore subsidiaries is known, no further information can be obtained, due to strict secrecy rules in most offshore jurisdictions.

Of course, a company's presence in a given jurisdiction doesn't itself demonstrate tax avoidance in any country, and there is no suggestion any of the listed companies have any offshore structures not permitted under UK law – and many of the FTSE 100 companies are keen to note they are major UK taxpayers.

However, given the renewed focus on offshore secrecy, and pressure on tax havens for greater transparency and accountability, an insight into the extent of the jurisdictions' usage is telling.

The top ten companies by offshore usage are listed below (note WPP's list is based on a 2011 SEC filing, and as in more recent submissions the company has taken advantage of an exemption allowing it to list only a small number of "principal" subsidiaries)

The research also shows which sectors make the most use of tax havens. Four out of five overseas companies operated by real estate companies are located in tax havens, compared with about one in three travel and leisure businesses.

We've included a summary table showing the total number of subsidiaries each FTSE 100 company has in tax havens, and how many of those are in countries with ties to the UK (Crown dependencies like Jersey and Guernsey, or British overseas territories like the BVI) – and the full country-by-country data is in the linked spreadsheet at the foot of this post.

Do you spot anything of interest in this data – or have you got thoughts on visualising it? Let us know what you make in the comments, or via Twitter @GuardianData

Data summary

FTSE 100 subsidiaries in tax havens

Company	In British Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies	Total
FTSE 100 composition as of 1 September 2012. Ashmore Group Plc has now left (replaced with Melrose Group Plc), data taken from available Companies House filings at that date. Information has been drawn from the latest available annual return submitted by each group head company to the UK company registry, Companies House or other available public records. Source: ActionAid

Lies, damned lies and Iain Duncan Smith

The way the work and pensions secretary manipulates statistics is a shaming indictment of his department's failings

• 
• • Nick Cohen
  • The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2013

The work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, was reprimanded by the UK's statistics watchdog over his claims about the benefits cap. Photograph: Ian Nicholson/PA

When you see rottenness in a system you must ask: does it come from one bad apple or does the whole barrel stink?

The rank smell emanating from the coalition is impossible to miss. At first sniff, it appears to come from the blazered figure of Iain Duncan Smith. It has taken me some time to identify its source, because appearances deceive. From his clipped hair to his polished shoes, Duncan Smith seems to be a man who has retained the values of the officer corps of the Scots Guards he once served. Conservative commentators emphasise his honour and decency. They speak in reverential tones of his Easterhouse epiphany: the moment in 2002 when he saw the poverty on a Glasgow estate, brushed a manly tear from his eye and vowed to end the "dependency culture" that kept the poor jobless.

Duncan Smith's belief that the welfare state holds down the very people it is meant to serve is pleasing to Conservative ears. To maintain his supporters' illusions, he has to lie. Last week, the UK Statistics Authority gave him a reprimand that broke from the genteel language of the civil service. The work and pensions secretary had claimed that his department's cap on benefits was turning scroungers into strivers – even before it had come into force. "Already we have seen 8,000 people who would have been affected by the cap move into jobs." How sweet those words must have sounded to Conservative ears. The government was forcing the feckless to stop sponging off hard-working taxpayers. (Taxpayers are always "hard working" in British politics, in case you haven't noticed. We never try to get by doing the bare minimum.)

The figures did not show that, the statistics authority said. More to the point, they could not possibly have shown that. Duncan Smith's claims were "unsupported" by the very statistics his department had collected.

If this were a one-off, I would say Duncan Smith "misspoke" or "lacked judgment" or, in plain English, that he was an idiot. If every politician who spun statistics were damned, after all, parliament would be empty. I would use stronger language; indeed, Andrew Dilnot, the chair of the statistics authority, is thinking about sending his inspectors into the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) because Duncan Smith is a habitual manipulator.

As journalists know, Duncan Smith's modus operandi is well established. His "people" – all of them scroungers, not strivers, who sponge off the taxpayer from their Whitehall offices – brief reporters with unpublished figures. The Tory press uses them, and, as theFinancial Times explained, when his spin doctors meet an honest journalist, who asks hard questions, they end the call and never ring back. By the time the true figures appear on theDWP website , and informed commentators can see the falsity, the spin, the old saying applies: "A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on."

Before the benefit cap, it was the work programme, which is meant to provide training for the unemployed. The statistics authority criticised the "coherence" of Duncan Smith's statistics and, once again, the manner in which his department presented them to the public. Far from being a success, the programme found work for a mere 8.6% of the desperate people who went on it. Meanwhile, Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and a former chief economist at the Cabinet Office, has convincingly demonstrated that the Tory claim that "more than a third of people who were on incapacity benefit dropped their claims rather than complete a medical assessment" is false and demonstrably false.

Numbers are stronger than words. When the powerful lie with statistics, they do so in the cynical knowledge that the public is more likely to believe them. But the manipulation does not just tell us how sly operators view the credulous masses, but how they see themselves.

The UK Statistics Authority has a fine phrase that guides its mathematicians: "Numbers should be a light, not a crutch". Duncan Smith does not wish to shine light on his policies, for he fears what he may see. He uses his twisted figures as a crutch instead, to help his dogmas hobble along. Francis Wheen once said that the one fact everyone believes they know about a public figure is always wrong. Whatever they think about his policies, the public assumes that Duncan Smith is a gentleman. He is anything but.

Portes thinks there is no wider decay in British government beyond Duncan Smith's department. I am not so sure. The British right is riding off with the loons. Like the Republicans with the Tea Party, the supposedly mainstream Conservatives have decided to woo Ukip rather than fight it. To show that they are "listening", they must pursue policies that make little sense and invent the evidence to support them.

Welfare is already at the centre of the deceit. Duncan Smith's duff data always suggests that the unemployed are on the dole because they are workshy, not because there are no jobs for them to find. If he were to admit for a moment that the distinction between strivers and scroungers was meaningless and all of us could be in a job one day and out of it the next, the rightwing argument on welfare would collapse and then where would the Tories appeal to angry, old white men be?

It is not just Duncan Smith. The health secretary says he will stop foreign "health tourists" costing the NHS hundreds of millions. He has no reputable evidence to support that figure. David Cameron says he wants tax breaks for married couples, when there is no evidence whatsoever that they encourage lovers to marry.

The policies may not work, the ills they seek to combat and the benefits they hope to reap may be illusory. But fear holds Conservatives in its grip and the general election is drawing closer. When pressed, they say that they want to "flag up" their support of marriage, "signal" their dislike of scroungers or "send a message" to illegal immigrants.

Our language has been so corrupted by the euphemisms of advertising and public relations that we no longer realise that what they mean is that they intend to lie.

History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought

From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about the future

• 
• • Tristram Hunt
  • The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2013

Historian Niall Ferguson: 'Part of a worryingly conservative consensus when it comes to framing our national past.' Photograph: Channel 4

The bullish Harvard historian Niall Ferguson cut an unfamiliar, almost meek figure last week. As reports of his ugly suggestion that John Maynard Keynes's homosexuality had made the great economist indifferent to the prospects of future generations surged across the blogosphere, Ferguson wisely went for a mea culpa.

So, in a cringeing piece for Harvard University's student magazine, the professor, who usually so enjoys confronting political correctness, denied he was homophobic or, indeed, racist and antisemitic for good measure.

Of course, Ferguson is none of those things. He is a brilliant financial historian, albeit with a debilitating weakness for the bon mot. But Ferguson is also part of a worryingly conservative consensus when it comes to framing our national past.

For whether it is David Starkey on Question Time, in a frenzy of misogyny and self-righteousness, denouncing Harriet Harman and Shirley Williams for being well-connected, metropolitan members of the Labour movement, or the reactionary Dominic Sandbrook using the Daily Mail to condemn with Orwellian menace any critical interpretation of Mrs Thatcher's legacy, the historical right has Britain in its grip.

And it has so at a crucial time. The rise of Ukip, combined with David Cameron's political weakness, means that, even in the absence of an official "in or out" referendum on our place in Europe, it looks like we will be debating Britain's place in the world for some years to come. And we will do against the backdrop of Michael Gove's proposed new history curriculum which, for some of its virtues, threatens to make us less, not more, confident about our internationalist standing.

For as Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.

He did so in magisterial style, providing an intimate chronicle of the brutality inflicted on the English labouring classes as Britain rose to be the workshop of the world. Thompson focused on the human stories – the Staffordshire potters, the Manchester Chartists – to build an account of an emergent, proletarian identity. It was social history as a political project, seeking to lay out all the tensions and conflict that really lie behind our island story.

As his fellow Marxist Eric Hobsbawm put it, social history was "the organisational and ideological history of the labour movement". Uncovering the lost lives and experiences of the miner and mill worker was a way of contesting power in the present. And in the wake of Thompson and Hobsbawm's histories – as well as the work of Raphael Samuel, Asa Briggs and Christopher Hill – popular interpretations of the past shifted.

In theatre, television, radio and museums, a far more vernacular and democratic account of the British past started to flourish. If, today, we are as much concerned about downstairs as upstairs, about Downton Abbey's John Bates as much as the Earl of Grantham, it is thanks to this tradition of progressive social history.

It even influenced high politics. In the flickering gloom of the 1970s' three-day week, Tony Benn retreated to the House of Commons tearoom to read radical accounts of the English civil war. "I had no idea that the Levellers had called for universal manhood suffrage, equality between the sexes and the sovereignty of the people," he confided to his diary. Benn, the semi-detached Labour cabinet minister, felt able to place himself seamlessly within this historical lineage – lamenting how "the Levellers lost and Cromwell won, and Harold Wilson or Denis Healey is the Cromwell of our day, not me".

But despite recent histories by the likes of Emma Griffin on industrialising England orEdward Vallance on radical Britain, the place of the progressive past in contemporary debate has now been abandoned. So much of the left has mired itself in the discursive dead ends of postmodernism or decided to focus its efforts abroad on the crimes of our colonial past. In their absence, we are left with Starkey and Ferguson – and BBC2 about to air yet another series on the history of the Tudor court. How much information about Anne Boleyn can modern Britain really cope with?

This narrowing of the past comes against the backdrop of ever more state school pupils being denied appropriate time for history. While studying the past is protected in prep schools, GCSE exam entries show it is under ever greater pressure in more deprived parts of the country.

Then there is the question of what students will actually be learning. Michael Gove's proposed new syllabus has rightly been criticised by historian David Cannadine and others as too prescriptive, dismissive of age-specific learning and Anglocentric. While the education secretary's foregrounding of British history is right, experts are adamant this parochial path is not the way to do it. Indeed, cynics might wonder whether Gove – the arch Eurosceptic – is already marshalling his young troops for a referendum no vote.

For whether it is the long story of Britain's place in Europe, the 1930s failings of austerity economics, the cultural history of same-sex marriage or the legacy of Thatcherism, the progressive voice in historical debate needs some rocket boosters. Niall Ferguson's crime was not just foolishly to equate Keynes's homosexuality with selfishness. Rather, it was to deny the relevance of Keynes's entire political economy – and, in the process, help to forge a governing consensus that is proving disastrous for British living standards.

That is what we need an apology for.

Psychiatrists under fire in mental health battle

British Psychological Society to launch attack on rival profession, casting doubt on biomedical model of mental illness

• Jamie Doward
• The Observer, Sunday 12 May 2013

British psychologists are to say that current psychiatric diagnoses such as bipolar disorder are useless. Photograph: Justin Paget/Fuse/Getty

 

There is no scientific evidence that psychiatric diagnoses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are valid or useful, according to the leading body representing Britain's clinical psychologists.
In a groundbreaking move that has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society's division of clinical psychology (DCP) will on Monday issue a statement declaring that, given the lack of evidence, it is time for a "paradigm shift" in how the issues of mental health are understood. The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry's predominantly biomedical model of mental distress – the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. The DCP said its decision to speak out "reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems", used by psychiatry.

Dr Lucy Johnstone, a consultant clinical psychologist who helped draw up the DCP's statement, said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes.
"On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse," Johnstone said. The provocative statement by the DCP has been timed to come out shortly before the release of DSM-5, the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

The manual has been attacked for expanding the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders. For example, the fifth edition of the book, the first for two decades, will classify manifestations of grief, temper tantrums and worrying about physical ill-health as the mental illnesses of major depressive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder and somatic symptom disorder, respectively.

Some of the manual's omissions are just as controversial as the manual's inclusions. The term "Asperger's disorder" will not appear in the new manual, and instead its symptoms will come under the newly added "autism spectrum disorder".

The DSM is used in a number of countries to varying degrees. Britain uses an alternative manual, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) published by the World Health Organisation, but the DSM is still hugely influential – and controversial.

The writer Oliver James, who trained as a clinical psychologist, welcomed the DCP's decision to speak out against psychiatric diagnosis and stressed the need to move away from a biomedical model of mental distress to one that examined societal and personal factors.

Writing in today's Observer, James declares: "We need fundamental changes in how our society is organised to give parents the best chance of meeting the needs of children and to prevent the amount of adult adversity."

But Professor Sir Simon Wessely, a member of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and chair of psychological medicine at King's College London, said it was wrong to suggest psychiatry was focused only on the biological causes of mental distress. And in an accompanying Observer article he defends the need to create classification systems for mental disorder.

"A classification system is like a map," Wessely explains. "And just as any map is only provisional, ready to be changed as the landscape changes, so does classification."

Scandal: Just how corrupt is Britain?

Rotten banks, dodgy cops, MPs on the fiddle. A conference on public life has evidence to
topple long-held assumptions

Jonathan Brown
Friday, 10 May 2013

Looking across the seas at political scandals surrounding the likes of Silvio Berlusconi and
Jacques Chirac, at match-fixing in Pakistani cricket and Italian football, or claims of tax
avoidance on a nationwide scale in Greece, it was said jingoistically for many years that
humble Britain could never compete with the explosive corruption scandals that "Johnny
Foreigner" seemed to specialise in.

Yet recent British scandals can compete with the best Europe can offer. Besides MPs fiddling
their expenses and Jimmy Savile's history of paedophilia, racing has been hit by Frankie
Dettori's six-month drugs ban, we've seen London-based banks Barclays and UBS
embarrassed by the Libor rate-fixing scandal, and BAE Systems has been investigated over
its arms deals.

The police have become embroiled, too, with Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn jailed
for offering to sell information to the now defunct News of the World and evidence of a
cover-up on the Hillsborough disaster. And while none of our Prime Ministers have yet had to
stand before a court, MPs including Jonathan Aitken and Margaret Moran have been
convicted and Neil Hamilton famously lost his libel claim against Mohamed al Fayed over the
cash-for-questions affair.

Even royalty has not been immune, thanks to the tabloid sting that saw Sarah Ferguson
offering access to Prince Andrew for cash.

With this weighty list and other cases to examine, it will be claimed today that corruption
has in fact become an everyday part of British national life.

A conference of campaigners and academics, entitled "How Corrupt is Britain?", will hear
evidence that wrongdoing is not confined to a few corrupt officials but is systemic within
leading institutions.

The conference organiser, Dr David Whyte, of the University of Liverpool's School of Law and
Social Justice which is hosting the event, said the aim was to challenge two "long-outdated"
assumptions.

"First, that corruption is a problem that happens in far-away places, in governments that do
not have our traditions. Secondly, that corruption is something that we can understand
merely as a problem that stems from the actions of a minority of public officials who are 'on
the make', rather than something that is routine in our most venerated institutions," he said.
Among the speakers will be Carole Duggan who has campaigned on behalf of her late nephew
Mark Duggan who was shot by police in Tottenham, north London, in an incident that
sparked the summer riots of 2011.10/05/2013 Scandal: Just howcorrupt is Britain?

An Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) report into his death is still not
complete and investigators have not spoken to the firearms officers involved. She claims she
has faced persistent collusion between official bodies preventing her bid to find out the truth
– with her lawyer, Michael Mansfield, arguing earlier this year that the cases showed the
IPCC was "not fit for purpose".

She believes that society as a whole has become more corrupt because of the anger at the
high salaries and bonuses still paid in the City despite its financial failings.

"Corruption is now endemic – just look at the bankers," she said. "They are teaching kids to
just take what they want – which is why they were taking trainers from shops in the riots.
That is what they are being taught by the greedy people."

Joanna Gilmore, of the Northern Police Monitoring Project – an organisation which brings
together campaign groups across the north of England – said many sections of the
population were losing faith in public bodies particularly the police and the IPPC.

Ms Gilmore said: "Corruption and violence is central to what people have experienced.
Communities feel powerless when they try to seek redress through official channels. They are
hitting a brick wall when they make a complaint."

Organisers hope that by sharing their experiences groups can pool expertise and find new
ways of dealing with systemic corruption across the whole of public life.

Co-organiser Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, said there
was an urgent need to view corruption as a nationwide problem that spanned both public and
private spheres of national life.

He said: "In Britain it has often been thought that corruption is something that happens in
other countries, not ours. The conference will join the dots across the public and private
domains, and begin a dialogue between campaigns for police accountability, tax justice,
executive pay, political and corporate accountability.

"Rarely, if ever, do we talk about those things in the same place. This conference will make
links across those different spheres of public life."