The claim asserts that people in the UK are "much less tolerant of corruption" than people in Mediterranean countries, framing this as a cultural divide. The available evidence is mixed on this specific point. On one hand, data from around the time of the interview supports the general direction that corruption is less prevalent and less experienced in the UK. The 2011 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (published the same month as the interview) scored the UK at 7.8 (ranked 16th), while Mediterranean countries scored notably lower: Spain 6.2, Portugal 6.1, Cyprus 6.3, Malta 5.6, Italy 3.9, and Greece 3.4. Eurobarometer surveys from 2007–2013 also found that UK respondents reported very low personal experience of bribery (no more than 5%), and the UK's perceived corruption was consistently below the EU average, while respondents in Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal were more likely to say corruption was a major problem and had increased. However, the claim is specifically about *tolerance* of corruption, which is distinct from perceived corruption levels or personal experience of bribery. Academic research on "Tolerance towards Corruption" (TtC) complicates Farage's generalization. A peer-reviewed study using European Values Study and Special Eurobarometer data found that TtC "does not follow the 'north–south divide' tendency when dissecting European data." Notably, some Nordic and Iberian countries showed remarkably similar tolerance outputs: Finland (13.6%), Portugal (15.6%), Sweden (17.1%), and Spain (17.54%) all had among the lowest proportions of tolerance for public-office corruption. The study also found that tolerance was primarily explained by individual-level factors (about 92% of variance), with country-level factors accounting for only about 8%. This suggests that while the UK does generally have lower corruption levels and less bribery experience than Mediterranean countries, the specific claim about a broad cultural difference in *tolerance* is an oversimplification that is not clearly supported by the tolerance-specific research, and is in some respects contradicted by it (e.g., Spain and Portugal showing tolerance levels similar to Nordic countries rather than clustering as "more tolerant" Mediterranean nations). Thus, the claim has some support in terms of the general direction (UK has less corruption, less bribery experience), but the specific cultural assertion about tolerance is an overgeneralization that the relevant academic evidence does not clearly support and partially contradicts. Sources: Transparency International, 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index, https://files.transparencycdn.org/images/CPI2011_map.pdf; UK Committee on Standards in Public Life, "Public Perceptions of Standards in Public Life in the UK and Europe," https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7db9b8e5274a5eb14e6ce6/2901994_CSPL_PublicPerceptions_acc-WEB.pdf; Special Eurobarometer 374 (Wave 76.1), Corruption, February 2012, http://www.kpk-rs.si/storage/uploads/e6de912e-70da-4818-90c7-baf9f99d54ec/Eurobarometer_ebs_374_en.pdf; Moreno et al., "What We (Don't) Know so Far About Tolerance Towards Corruption in European Democracies," Social Indicators Research, 2021, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8078392/