London : A British businessman Thursday provoked further controversy over the country's political honours system by announcing that he rejected receiving an award from Prime Minister Tony Blair because he was "morally corrupt."
"I believe that the way and the methods with which Tony Blair took Britain to war in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside George Bush were dishonest. They were based on a lie," said lingerie entrepreneur Joseph Corre.
"We did not enter these conflicts for moral reasons; we entered them for economic ones. That much has now become clear," said Corre who was named in last weekend's Queen's Birthday honours list with the award of a Member of the British Empire (MBE).
His rejection comes after British Muslims accused Blair of rekindling the 18-year old controversy over Salman Rushdie by his decision to give the notorious author a knighthood, the highest honour in the list.
"Many will interpret the knighthood as a final contemptuous parting gift from Tony Blair to the Muslim world," said secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, Mohamed Abdul Bari.
Corre said that the result of the prime minister leading Britain into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been that hundreds of thousands of people have "now suffered intolerably."
"They have suffered death and torture, and they now live in hopeless situations as a direct result of Tony Blair's invasion. What is going on daily in Iraq is a tragedy," he said in an article for the Independent newspaper.
"Someone has to be held responsible for that. Someone has to stand up and hold up their hand and say sorry for the lies, and sorry for that dodgy dossier (on Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction)," the 39-year-old businessman said.
He said that instead the UK has become "a more dangerous place, and a bigger target for terrorists."
Whole communities have been "alienated and still nobody from Tony Blair's government has said sorry," he added.
In a separate statement, Corre also underlined that he could not accept an award "chosen by an organisation headed by a Prime Minister who I find morally corrupt, who has been involved in organised lying."