The Citizen Ethics Network
Steve Punter | CreativeCommons
Like Nick Baines, I welcome the launch of the Citizen Ethics Network, an initiative that can only be positive and that I, too, will be following. The wider and more democratic this conversation is, the better. Like every other reader I have favourites and, let’s say, "lesser favourites" among the contributors to the launch pamphlet but what really matters is to hear voices other than the great and good. I hope the debate takes off.
Again like Nick Baines, I admire politicians on the whole, and think it’s important they not be misunderstood. Undoubtedly they are motivated to a great extent by ideology: that is the aspect of the political mind that is most often ignored by journalists and the public, it seems to me. They are also motivated by personal ambition – by no means a bad thing – and calculation as well as conviction pervades everything they do. If we want politicians to be valued, we need to recognise and accept that. Robin Cook’s resignation over Iraq was widely admired, and rightly so. But the public ethics that denies Tony Blair’s genuine conviction over Iraq is the same distorted ethics that beatifies Cook for a move that was also, looked at realistically, a powerful marker for a Labour leadership bid. Many in his party wish he were still here.
What I think is wrong, though – and 180 degrees wrong, in the particular case of the Telegraph’s revelations about "expensesgate" – is to see the media as having some sort of duty to go easy on politicians, or to build up confidence in them. Expensesgate – not so much the claims themselves as the attempted cover-up satirised in last night’s BBC drama On Expenses – was a public scandal of such a scale that the Telegraph’s conduct was amply justified, and deserves both applause and reward. The same should go to Heather Brooke. An iron law of politics, and public ethics, is that the friendlier the media are to politicians, the less free citizens are. In Venezuela, the President even has his own, over-lengthy show. More Paxmanlike scrutiny is needed here, not less. And one positive change would be if we showed more appreciation of those politicians – Peter Hain, Ben Bradshaw and Margaret Beckett come to mind on the Labour side, but they have their counterparts in other parties – who are often ready to face such scrutiny, including that of studio audiences.
What I do worry about, and something I do think puts good people off politics, is today's routine invasion and even more routine surrender of privacy. People will always be interested in the lives of public figures: there was a joke in the 1970s about Ted Heath looking down on "the unemployed". But Heath’s solitary life would today be subjected to wholly wrong and damaging inspection; he would be expected to justify and explain himself. I have no ready solutions to the problem, though I support the Human Rights Act and agree with Max Mosley about privacy. But I do think we need to avoid a situation such as exists in America, where it is unimaginable that a single person could enter the White House. I fear we may be moving towards a new public hypocrisy in which gay people are more visible at all levels in society then ever before – yet anyone but married parents is effectively barred from the very top by a deeply conservative public morality. In the US, again, admirable republic though it is, no one could reach the White House without money. Or faith.
Mention of which brings me eventually to Rowan Williams, whose superficially anodyne article in the pamphlet complains about our society being influenced by a distorted version of Darwinism. I wonder in passing what social movement opposes, misunderstands, distorts and slanders Darwinism more than Christianity does. But I won’t pursue that. I’m more interested in Williams’s apple-pie thought that
the importance of the family isn’t a sentimental idealising of domestic life or a myth of patriarchy; it is about understanding that you grow in emotional intelligence and maturity because of the presence of a reality that is unconditionally faithful or dependable.
I like the way he tries to deflect feminist suspicion simply by the choice and juxtaposition of two words. Perhaps I'm hyper-sensitive about this marginal comment. But it seems to me to reflect just the kind of questionable "pro-family" attitude I’ve been complaining about, to my mind impliedly ranking Ted Heath below Gordon Brown as a public servant simply because Brown has a wife and children.
A real threat to our public ethics comes from the determination of some religious believers, and the readiness at least of their leaders, to justify and maintain discrimination on the grounds of personal sexual conduct. Parts of the media join in with glee. If we could get rid of that thinking, and the kind of hypocrisy that dares complain about bigotry after forcing a man to withdraw from a bishopric precisely in order to appease prurient bigots, our public ethics would be the better for it.
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