“Ought, ought, ought, ought ought!
Are you going to spend your life saying ought, like the rest of our moralists?
Turn your oughts into shells, man.
Come and make explosives with me.”

When any organisation promises, a priori, to fully comply with the recommendations of an independent scrutineer of its behaviour, you should be suspicious - but you should be doubly suspicious when that company is an arms manufacturer.

Undershaft used the O word with abandon in George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara. BAE Systems knew there would be a lot of “ought” in Lord Woolf’s report, and so there is, and now the company will go about scrupulously complying with Lord Woolf’s recommendations.

There will be lots of committees and there will be elaborate box-checking procedures and commodious files. There will be regular reports that repeat verbatim the ponderous recommendations as if to say: “Look, we have done all this, just as you told us to do. We have established a code, we have reviewed, considered, complied and reported.”

This is a victory for BAE and for the status quo. Lord Woolf’s recommendations will not prevent corruption and they might do worse: they could provide the mechanism that ensures that bad behaviour goes undetected, by cloaking every transaction in a veil of procedural goodwill. The awful bureaucracy that will be erected within the weapons dealer is a small price to pay for being left to get on with the unpleasant business of arming our more unsavoury allies.

Nothing in the Woolf report addresses the fundamental question of how we catch the corrupt and how you proscribe behaviour that is never unilateral and always complicit.

Where there is a corrupter, there will be found those willing to be corrupted. Unusual commissions and facilitation payments are normal business practice in most of the world, notably those emerging markets where British firms and their European and American rivals are desperate to get oil and sell guns.

There is an OECD convention (of which Britain is a signatory) that denounces bribery and the US Department of Justice is active in the pursuit of American executive corrupters.

Yet there is a reluctance to take all this seriously in Britain and not only because, under pressure from 10 Downing Street, the Serious Fraud Office scrapped its investigation of BAE’s Saudi contract. It is because, deep down, we suspect that Shaw’s amoral arms manufacturer may be right. Let’s be honest: privately, we would rather that BP or Shell got the oil deal than did some less friendly Russian or Chinese company. If the price for petrol is an under-the-table payment to a dictator, so be it.

Moreover, we have no idea what is really going on. Consider the Extractive Industries Transparency Intiative (EITI). Launched in 2002 with great fanfare by Tony Blair, the EITI was intended to be a system that would publish all payments by foreign companies for mineral extraction rights in developing countries.

It has the support of leading oil and mining enterprises and 23 developing countries, mainly from sub-Saharan Africa, have expressed agreement in principle. Six years on, not a single signing country has been validated as compliant with the disclosure initiative. Only one Middle Eastern state, Yemen, has agreed to take part.

It would be safe to say that EITI is probably dead. It has been suffocated by fear among these failed states that cupboards might be opened, accounts scrutinised, curtains in dark rooms opened to daylight. Without agreement over the disclosure of payments, our effort to properly police multinationals is probably doomed to failure. If we cannot ensure that a contract to supply us with oil or copper is above suspicion, is it even worth worrying about a deal to sell missiles to a tyrant?

If we are to continue this amoral trade, the answer ought to be similarly pragmatic. We need to ensure that if bribes are to be paid, they are justified for the “national security” reasons that our Government cited in preventing the investigation of BAE’s Saudi arms deal. The authorisation of the bribe could be reviewed by an independent arbiter, perhaps Lord Woolf.

If that sounds grotesque, it is all to the good. It is at least halfway to disclosure and the “ought” that causes us so much trouble.

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