Max wrote that

'It helps that much government work has been put out to private contractors, who are poorly regulated.'  

This lack of regulation has just been revealed by the news of the uncompleted building projects farmed out to the Learning and Skills Council, which seems to have 'lost' some of the project funds. The Council is yet another private enterprise, this time a quango. Read Steve Berkman, The World Bank and the Gods of Lending (Kumarian Press 2008), which inter alia, demonstrates how by not monitoring and persecuting embezzlers, the World Bank in fact fosters corruption. (That is my reading of it.)

Maybe the British emigrants littering the world should be asked to return to this small island.