As usual, Rowan Williams speaks with a combination of moral imagination and common sense. His most recent intervention into the outrage-fest over the abuse of the expenses system set up by MPs for MPs expresses the deeper concerns behind the scandal.
Individual Members of Parliament who have cases to answer have undoubtedly ranged between errors of judgement, to deliberate maximising of personal advantage, to outright abuse of a system intended to be generous but not to be open to wholesale exploitation. Their behaviour sparked a competition for the best verb to describe them – the winner was "trough-jostling".
The Archbishop warned that the systematic humiliation of MPs would in the long term erode public trust not only in the capacity of people to work generously and justly as MP's, but in Parliament itself and even in the entire democratic process. Already he has been rubbished by a labour peer who described Williams' conerns as rubbish. That sounds also like a response not likely to strengthen our faith in peers to conduct debate in a public discourse underpinned by levels of civic respect.
But I've felt for over a week now, that the press are now indulging in the mentality of the striptease artist or artiste. What is revealed is intended to provoke, to create hunger for more, to pull the voyeur into that half-way world between reality and fanstasy where ethical judgement and respect for the other dissolve. It is this lust for the humiliation of the other that is morally corrosive of respect, and is ultimately abusive.
There are good, honest MPs whose public record, and the expenses records, are above criticism – but we are not hearing of them. There is also a difference between those who have stepped over the imaginary but well known line of honest interpretation, using the necessary and intentional hermeneutic latitude in well conceived regulations, and those who have made a second career out of turning these same expenses criteria into a deregulated free for all expressing ludicrously elasticated self-interest – some now shown to be requiring criminal investigation.
The frequent defence that claims were within the rules exposes so much of what is wrong with contemporary ethical discourse and conceptuality. How so many MP's are to be entrusted with framing laws, paying due regard to moral, legal, economic and fiscal justice, when some of them seem incapable of making basic ethical distinctions or demnostrating rudimentary characteristics of conscience in relation their own affairs, is to be sure cause for public concern, anger, even ridicule.
So perhaps the most significant gain to come out of this scandal (original meaning was stumbling block), will not be the increased transparency of out-sourced auditing and changed rules. It will be public insistence that our public servants rediscover and recover inner personal ethical dispositions and virtues such as integrity, honesty, respect for persons, social compassion, and these as a prerequisites to public trust. Rules and auditors don't make people moral, they enforce compliance and honesty. The deeper questions are about the inner transformation of the person. I don't need ritual public executions. Genuine repentance evidenced by changes in behaviour would be a more durable outcome.
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