 My name's Paul Webley. I'm standing on this step that you've insisted on, Helena, so it's very odd. I'll step down. My name's Helena. My name's Paul Webley. I'm the director of SICE. It's a very real privilege to welcome you all tonight to this, which is our third president's lecture. It's a very special occasion because this is Helena's last president's lecture before she steps down as SICE president this summer. Tonight she's going to be speaking on ethics in a changing world. It's good to see such a mixed audience, staff, students, alumni, members of the SICE governing body, international advisory board members, people from out of the school. I'd also like to welcome these people watching this streaming in our JCR, so welcome to you too. That's a particular pleasure for me to introduce Helena Kennedy. She's been president of SICE since 2001. She's now in the last year of a second five-year term as office. Now, every year at graduation I introduce her with about three or four sentences. But this evening, I know you want to listen to her and not me, but I have just a little more time to introduce her. So I can just give a slightly fuller introduction and say a bit more about why we're so proud that she's our president. Now, Baroness Kennedy is a very active barrister. She's been involved in a large number of prominent cases, including things like the Brighton bombing, the Michael Betteney espionage trial, Guildfield 4 appeal, the bombing of the Israeli Embassy. But for me, it's not her work as a barrister, outstanding as that is, but the combination of her exceptional skills as an advocate with her desire to bring about change and her quite exceptional energy, she manages to do more in a day than most of us do in a week that makes her so special. A few years ago, there was a profile of her in the Guardian, and she was asked to describe a normal day. I'll ask you afterwards to place the year, Helena. This is what she said. First, I was at the Old Bailey making a closing speech to the jury in a murder trial. I spoke for an hour and a half, which is like doing several rounds with Muhammad Ali, but that's the bit I really enjoy. It's real advocacy. I then went to the House of Lords where I gave evidence before a select committee about the Human Genetics Commission, which I chair. Then I ran to Port Cullis House where I was taking part in a meeting for the British Council about how we can persuade the G8 to take Africa seriously. That took in things like how marginalisation and poverty can breed terrorism, so it was almost a perfect working day for me. All my current passions came together, and whilst it was tiring, it was also exhilarating. I've seen this also in so has been an occasion a couple of years ago when I was getting really worried that Helena was not turning up for graduation ceremony because she was giving a closing speech. She delivered that she'd given a very long closing speech in a trial turned up with ten minutes to spare, went on to the graduation, delivered her speech perfectly, engaged with everyone, that kind of energy I wish I had it. These passions, this desire to make a difference to change the world is something she shares with our students. They've taken her into many different fields of activity. So just a few examples from 1992 to 97, she was chair of Charter 88, the Constitutional Reform Group, which persuaded the new labour government to make devolution and human rights legislation key parts of the manifesto. 94, 2002, she was chair of the London International Festival of Theatre. For many years, she'd chaired the British Council actually through its most dynamic phase, I would say. She's also been extremely active in promoting greater participation in education. She was a commissioner on the Hamlin National Commissioner on Education from 91 to 93. She wrote the report Learning Works for the Further Education Funding Council, and a foundation to help disadvantaged students to get into higher education has been established in her name. That's the Helena Kennedy Foundation. On top of all of that, she's of course a very active member of the House of Lords, where she often contributes on issues concerned with human rights, civil liberties, social justice and culture. Every year, she gives up significant amounts of her time to sow us. What she says each year, when she's presiding over degree ceremonies, moves me on each occasion. Her honesty, her humanity, her concern for the world, and her desire for our students to make the most of the world shine through. And if all of that wasn't enough, she's also found time to write two books, both of which have had a major impact. Eve was framed, Women and British Justice, and Just Law, in the changing face of justice and why it matters to us. Eve was framed as an examination of how the British legal system ignores, downgrades, underrates and discriminates against women. It was described by one reviewer as brave, forceful and eloquent. And I've said to Helena before, brave, forceful and eloquent, those are the words that sum up our president. We're very fortunate to have you. Over to you Helena. I'm on this little step because last year, apparently, some people said that they couldn't see me behind this lectern, so they've found something to raise me up. It's wonderful to be here, and I want to thank Paul for saying those very nice things about me. I can only say that my time here at SOWAS has been truly wonderful. I love SOWAS, and I can think of no greater privilege than to have been the president here for 10 years. It's wonderful, and I really will cherish it as one of the great periods of my life. The students are truly exceptional, and the staff are just the best. So it's going to be a sad moment for me when I say for a while, but I will still think of myself as part of this family. Tonight I'm talking about ethics in a changing world. It's always dangerous to start talking about ethics, I think. It's a kind of high-risk subject. You'll remember poor Robin Cook when he took office as Foreign Secretary, said that he was going to introduce an ethical foreign policy. He was roundly attacked, accused of self-righteousness, and indeed insulting the honour of the Foreign Service going back so many years. So I'm going to make it very clear from the outset that I make no claim to righteousness, that I, like everyone, I am ethically compromised, we all are. None of us can lay claim to purity. Each and every one of us is at the mercy of our own human frailty. So let's get that right from the start. As soon as anybody speaks about global warming, I've noticed that their own flights to faraway places are immediately itemised by eager journalists. As soon as mention is made of the poor, your own self-indulgence is examined, your sins of property owning, the value of your house, your eating in fancy restaurants, the schooling of your children, the medical treatment that you've had for your varicose veins, all of it will be exposed to show that you've got no right to say a word about bankers' bonuses or the cuts to public services. Nobody, apparently, is allowed to criticise unless we too share impoverishment. Well, I'm going to break that embargo. When the news of the world hacking scandal first came to light, Metropolitan Police said it was just the work of one bad apple journalist and his wicked associate, a private detective. The two were quickly put on trial and given short, sharp, shock prison sentences. It turns out that this was not true. It wasn't just one bad apple stuff. The abuse of practice of hacking into cell phone messages of politicians and celebrities was widespread. A number of questions immediately arise. Why now that those chats who were given not very long sentences and are now out and about, why is it that they haven't blown the gaff and told their stories to the highest bidder about all that went on? Is it because they've been paid off? Is it that their silence has been secured? You would have thought that perhaps a journalist who had been the one amongst many journalists, as it now seems, who was using private detectives for this purpose, might have wanted to make that clear. The silence is interesting. Why did the police team of investigators, led by Andy Heyman, an assistant commissioner, decide it was a one bad apple case and not endemic inside News International? It's clear now that there was evidence available to them at the time that senior people inside the news of the world were indeed involved. And then isn't it interesting that Andy Heyman on making an early exit from the Met, having been found to have made extensive personal use of his expense account against the rules, went straight into a job with News International with a column in the Times. Of course he's joining a growing tradition of senior Met people taking jobs with the Murdoch Press. Lord Stevens, the former commissioner, also enjoys that benefit. Close relationships have oiled the wheels of many a good story. We have to accept that that's what happens. But I want to remind you that Rebecca Wade, now Rebecca Brooks, one-time editor of The Sun, admitted to a select committee of the House of Commons under cross-examination that a fund had existed to pay police for information. It was no surprise to me. All through my life in the law, I have known that the police get pay-offs for tip-offs and more for deeper intelligence. All through my life at the bar, I have encountered noble corruption, as the police would call it, where the police would gild the lily, they would say, adding perhaps things that were not quite right to the evidence to get a conviction on those that they believed were guilty. And in some ways, once that's allowed, it eats in to systems. So all I would say to you is that every time you see a celebrity like Mike Hutnall or Pete Townsend being escorted into a police station, just remember that someone's bank account has been enriched. When the hacking scandal grew, a former Member of Parliament who sat on the Department of Culture, Media and Sports Select Committee that looked into the hacking issue, separate from the police investigation, but they too looked into the hacking issue, and that Member of Parliament lost his seat at the last election and was more open to speak about that committee's working. And he said that in fact, when they were hearing evidence about the hacking scandal, those who were on the committee had discussed summoning senior murder press executives before them, but then decided not to do so. Why? Because they feared that their own private lives would come under intense scrutiny. It would be open season from the paparazzi. And so all I would say on that is that we're in a sorry place when the power of the Murdoch media is such that our own Parliament is unable to do its job properly. Why am I mentioning these issues? Because there has been over the last few weeks quite a bit of debate in some of the press about the ethics of journalism. Why is it that newspapers are feeling this pressure to get the story that their competitor won't have? Why are they prepared to bend the rules in this corrupt way? And the answer is the imperatives of business now cancel out many ethical standards. So you might ask me why has the issue of ethics become my preoccupation? And of course a number of things over the recent years have perhaps caused one to pause from time to time. The dodgy dossier. No one ever seemed really embarrassed or ashamed about having put together a dossier and to present it as if it were an official body of evidence. The MP's expenses. The bankers' bonuses. I don't pretend to you that there was a golden age when everyone behaved well, far from it. But the only way to maintain ethical standards is by constant scrutiny. Why have I chosen to give this lecture on the subject today? And I say it quite clearly because the world is changing. It's becoming much more complex and as a result unethical conduct today can have much more lethal consequences. And the cost to the fabric of our world is huge but the cost closer to home with smaller kinds of unethical behaviour is destroying the things of value in our society. The recent spate of I think heartwarming uprisings in the Middle East have shown a stark light on some of the most egregious hypocrisy of the West. That our Prime Minister should have made a grand tour of the region only a week ago to preach democracy with a posse of arms manufacturers in tow while tyrants are turning the sophisticated weaponry we sold them last year on their own people. It's a source of revulsion. I watched as Egypt's people took to Tario Square and I noticed that Hillary Clinton and Obama both people whom I have admired were slow to declare a view on events there. Perhaps they were worried about burning their boats with the regime in case it managed to survive. Of course Egypt's Mubarak had been a lauded ally in fact even while he was hanging on by the skin of his teeth he was described by Blair in positive terms and a revolt by his own people about his behaviour and cruelty and about their poverty was underway. Politicians nods sagely and say we have to do business even with tyrants and I think the terminology says it all. Egypt had provided the United States with an outsourced torture service. I know that because of the cases that I've done over the last few years. It was one of the rendition sites with Suleiman who's now the preferred US choice as a Mubarak replacement acting as a pointsman for the interrogations and the torture that was outsourced. No doubt the Americans were all too aware as they sat watching events on Fox Television all too aware that the £2 billion that is paid annually by them to Egypt by way of aid for defence purposes comes back to them on the international trade roundabout in huge orders from Lockheed Martin for £3.8 billion worth of arms and tanks over the previous five years up until now. Or to Boeing $1.7 billion worth of military helicopters and planes. It's a sort of corporate welfare. The US Republicans squeal about paying welfare checks to the poor in America but they happily line the pockets of the corporates. The lobbyists for these companies were probably on the phone to the White House when the solution was underway worried about their contracts. And of course those companies had probably contributed to election funds. And let us just for a moment consider the disgraceful role Britain has played with Gaddafi. Now sneeringly spoken of as mad by our senior politicians on all sides but not so mad that we did not clutch him to the prime ministerial bosom of the world trade and other financial benefits we saw in the offing despite the fact that we believed his regime was responsible for the exploding of the Pan Am flight 103 and the mass murder of 290 passengers. And indeed the slaying in cold blood of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. As Gareth Pierce, a solicitor for whom I do much work and who's a great human rights champion as she has put it not a mouse squeaked in Libya without Gaddafi knowing yet we were prepared to forget all of that if the price was right. It was claimed that engaging with Gaddafi was to bring in from the cold a dictator who was a threat to global security because he too had weapons of mass destruction another Saddam Hussein but he got luckier than Saddam Hussein. And what's interesting is that those weapons of mass destruction have failed also to materialise. Gaddafi had funded terrorism for years not just the IRA but also the popular front for the liberation of Palestine general command. Now that, let me make it clear is not any part of the PLO. It in fact was a maverick group which was prepared to hire itself out to regimes that were known to be state sponsors of terrorism. It's believed by many that the PFLP, that group was in fact responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. It's also felt by many that the deal to send El Magrahi home was also shaped by the fact that his appeal which was due at any time would not only have shown that he was framed as a convenient cover for mercure business but his appeal would have exposed the fact that other regimes regimes with whom we in the west did not want to inflame greater his hostility were probably involved. This is real politic they say. This is the way the world shakes out. Only the naive think it can be other. Really? The events currently taking place are showing that real politic backfires. People yearn for freedom and the new communications technology has expanded the power of the people. Social networking sites don't create revolutions but they create opportunities for connection. Paul Mason of Newsnight describes it brilliantly in a blog that he's produced if you want to have a look at it. It's really interesting where he describes the way in which the young of this part of the world connect to each other, share ideas and know as much about how the world is ticking on and the way in which they get so small a part of the cake that their rulers have taken from them. People in the old days in the times of previous revolutions communicated their ideas sometimes by travelling physically hanging on the underside of trains carrying subversive tracks tied inside their shirts. Well, the WikiLeaks phenomenon has also changed all that. Elits will not be able to keep things secret anymore. The leaks showed just what their rulers were doing and how they were thought of by Western governments. People have seen that whistleblowing gives power to the governed against their governors. There has been too much silence for too long and the thing that we're most silent about is money. We're fast creating a world where we know the cost of everything but the value of nothing. Einstein said that while that which has real value cannot be measured usually that which can be measured has little value. But it's because money has become the supreme value that we're seeing so much corruption so much ethical failure within our societies. Unethical conduct doesn't just, of course, happen in the field of foreign affairs. Consider the lies about the economic crisis. It was caused by a runaway city by turbocharged capitalism which politicians felt powerless to control or in many ways supported. Indeed politicians bought into the greed and the hyperbole. The end of the Cold War brought the arrogant claim that we'd reached a history. Not only had communism been vanquished but liberal democracy and capitalism had triumphed throughout Europe and was bound to triumph throughout the world. 20 years on that swaggering arrogance seems pathetic because of the many horrors that followed. Western democracies had long years of illusory economic growth. An asset and credit bubble was created during which a negligent failure to regulate led to the inevitable bust. The market ruled. Doctrinair, laissez-faire capitalism, had turned Russia into a criminal sewer. Brutal and despairing. But we encouraged it. And of course, the West, so vocal about fundamentalism everywhere else was more committed than anyone to a fundamentalism of its own. Market fundamentalism. And it was market fundamentalism that was also captured the World Bank and the IMF. The trickle-down theory of economics was a complete fiction. And so, people at the bottom who were supposed to reap some benefit from what was happening at the top never did. We saw the privatising of water in the deserts of Africa. Privatisations in places that were still struggling for a mere existence. The extraction and exporting of oil and gas to the rich north. The beneficiaries being international corporations and kleptocratic rulers that we nurtured in the places that were being plundered. Was that ethical? And now China too has joined the global market and she too is spreading her economic power beyond the East, whole swathes of Africa in financial hawk, parts of Pakistan and South America. Exploitation is an ethical issue. And then closer to home we have been experiencing the fallout of a financial crisis that was undoubtedly caused by untamed capitalism. And in fact is likely to be repeated again if nothing is done about it. Public disaffection is extensive and the political class seem unaware of how deep that anger runs. There was anger against the bankers and arrogance and greed but there was also anger at the people who should have checked their conduct. The people on the boards of banks who are supposed to represent the interests of shareholders they had no notion as to how the huge profits were being generated but were happy to reap personal rewards without asking questions. The blue chip accountancy firms who were supposed to audit and ask difficult questions also filled the test. No shame there either. And the lawyers. We can't be soft on lawyers either who were turned to for legal advice and they were no better than any of the others. Signing off transactions is legally ethical and they barely fathomed what they were about. And indeed our politicians for the most part were happy to see what they saw as growth having not a clue as to what its source was. But most of those professionals took the fees and ran. And then of course there were the appointed light touch regulators who were often so close to those that they regulated that there was no independent scrutiny really taking place. There was no way the very big banks could be allowed to fail because of the effects on our society as a whole and in this knowledge they had taken huge risks for which government in the end had to pick up the tab. Government that means us. They privatised the profits but socialised the risks. And the people who are paying now, the general public had no part in creating the problem. The public are realising that it was they who are having to underwrite the consequent debt with higher taxes, cuts to public services, job losses and a whole shift in our quality of life. And then there's the understandable anger that that central institution in our country, Parliament had failed to curtail the excesses of the financial sector with effect of regulation. And that's why new labour was ousted because of their failure. They too drank the Kool-Aid buying into the neoliberal world view that you only survived if you embraced the market tightly. Central left parties in Europe have been eclipsed since the Cold War because they're unable to present a coherent response to globalisation. And the parties of the right, the natural inheritors of the Cold War legacy are also now fumbling in a fog of old politics. Our political elites are failing us. The coalition government came into being out of that political crisis. But it has been incapable of curbing the extraordinary bonuses of bankers. And it's been interesting to me to discover how little tax is paid on any of those bonuses. Because of course the masters of the universe who run the banks and the huge corporations float above the nation state. So they don't pay tax like the rest of us. Money is kept in offshore tax havens. Money like bonuses can be taken wherever you choose to take that bonus and you choose the place with the lowest tax regime. I'm told that many are taking their bonuses in the United States because bonuses are capital gains there and capital gains there have very, very low tax thresholds. Others will take them in other places. I'm told that Murdoch pays all of his business accounts and taxation in Israel at 3% because it's the lowest that he's managed anywhere in the world. Money in tax havens and yet governments are paralysed by the threat that these business people will take themselves off to more conducive countries if any steps are taken to rein them in. The boast of government has been no more boom or bust. It began to look as though they too had no idea of the unethical sources of the wealth generation that had taken place over the last 20 years. And unethical it was. Can it be right to press prime mortgages upon people who couldn't afford them? Encouraging less well off in our societies into serious debt and the risk of home foreclosures in default. Is it right for high-risk casino banking to be underwritten by retail high street banking? Your money and mine. How can off-balance sheet accounting ever be deemed ethical? On top of this, the political class has been exposed as abusing public trust themselves by making claims for allowances which could not in good heart be deemed necessary for the fulfilment of the roles as MPs. And those scandals around expense claims have still somehow not been responded to with I think the right level of shame, embarrassment. And what was much more egregious than the cost of cleaning moats or the purchase of porn was the acquisition of property whereby not only were the mortgage repayments met by the taxpayers but also the cost of upgrading kitchens and bathrooms and gardens enhancing the value of the property which they would then sell on and they would pocket the profit. As a result of exposure, of course, as you know, a whole number of MPs had lost their places at the election, they lost their seats and another small cohort had been put on trial and are facing imprisonment. But it really did fade away and still people feel unconstrained. In case it's thought that I'm drawing a veil over abuses in my own neck of the woods of the House of Lords similar practices operated there where people would claim that their country cottage was their main residence or where they claimed that their parents' home in the country or in some other city was the place where they really lived so that they could double up their allowances. And like MPs, this was dangled before new Lords who went into the House as being something that everybody did and that was to make it all right. Of course, as I said at the beginning, none of us is wholly virtuous but the fact that none of us is beyond reproach does not mean that we have to surrender to the inevitability of moral wrongdoing or deny the needs for ethical standards. Like many of you, I was left wondering why it was that essentially decent people, some of them people who were my friends and are my friends and who entered politics for good purposes somehow got caught up in behaving in this way. Very few of them were acting criminally but somehow or other they didn't feel what they were doing was terribly wrong. It was the culture of parliament created to somehow boost up salaries that they thought ought to have been higher. And it's not new because it went on in Tory years as well. You'll remember Neil Hamilton's saga of receiving cash in brown paper bags and free nights staying at the Ritz Hotel and the need to introduce Lord Nolan to create rules of what was acceptable in public life. Now we have an unwritten constitution in Britain. Ethics were supposed to be understood in a similar way without having to be written down in a codified form. We were supposed to have breathed in what was right. Some inner voice was supposed to tell us when our actions crossed an invisible line. Well unfortunately our inner voices seem to speak with many tongues or have been subdued into a whisper. So where do ethics come from? Are they to any extent innate? Is there such a thing as moral intuition? And in our individualistic world where narcissism rules are ethical standards as various as we are. Are all ethics becoming privatised? Do we get to decide like Tony Blair who would claim that he was doing what he believed was right when he made his decisions? As though that personal evaluation was enough justification even if others didn't share your idea of what was indeed right. From the early stages of our existence societies have created rules and proprieties to help people live together. Legal systems come out of these foundations and traditions. I always describe the universal declaration of human rights not as the creation of universal law but as a moral template developed out of universal values against which all law should be tested. Ethical rules are codes of conduct directed at the maintaining of behaviour which is respectful of others and conducive to the well-being of the group. However the atomisation of our society and the breakdown of community ties may mean that the community no longer exercises a restraint on the conduct of others. I believe that people are potentially good and potentially bad. They are socially conscious as well as selfishly assertive and antisocial. My own work around human rights has convinced me of the universal value of those capacities the universal nature of those capacities though I optimistically believe that the capacity of a goodness is the richer seam and that societies have to devise ways of appealing to our better selves. The golden rule that you treat others as you would wish to be treated by is a preset in all societies but I saw recently that sometimes we don't take account of the ways that societies might be different. Nepotism is something that we have sought to excise from British society although let me tell you now with all these gifted internships we've seen at return. Nepotism however doesn't have meaning when people were brought up to feel really strong responsibilities to their wider family members, their kinfolk and I saw this clash recently when I was reading it in an American journal about projects in Afghanistan and then it was discovered that jobs were readily being given to family members and so there was great objection taken to this but Klansmen explained that of course they were going to employ their cousin's son as a builder and it wasn't just to help family if he failed to turn up for work or was slacking the cousin would beat the living deal heights out of him and the construction work would be completed so they felt that they could basically ensure that the work was done. Ethically we have decided that the fair society requires jobs to go and merit but we should of course be conscious that the other side of that coin is that our overseas friends think our ethics are wanting in the way that we fail, fail to care for the elderly in the heart of our families. We can be grandly superior about ethical standards in developing countries and levels of corruption but the picture is not so plain here there can be elasticity about our own principles there is often a tension between our commitment to the common good and on the other hand our self-interest and desire to look after number one and it may be that this conflict of impulses is growing. The moral voices in our heads are very often those of our parents and our teachers if we are religious, our religious advisers or our mentors it's wrong to hurt others to cheat to take what should go to someone else it's wrong to spread malicious rumours there's a sort of set of commandments that may not be the big ten but they're about subtler harms that we can commit and which cause pain to others and which erode our sense of society and community those notions are usually entrenched in us as children and what we care about is the loss of adult approval as we get older the pool of influence that contains our ethical standards enlarges as we expand our community of peers who will we feel we're letting down if we behave in a certain way whose knowledge of our conduct would invoke shame whose view do we care about for me I always say is my Glasgow mother's voice still living there in my head one of my own friends recently left his wife after a long marriage and he admitted that he had felt unable to do it while parents were alive our moral universe will also be affected by the novels we read the stories we hear the conduct we observe what will determine how we act will often be the culture around us as many studies have shown we're socialised by the context in which we find ourselves and that will be true as professionals as businessmen, as politicians and so on a politician can be torn between his loyalty to his party or prime minister or against his personal ethics the pressure to remain with the party group especially when the whips are leaning on you but a different tune is painful ambition can also create moral equivocation a minister with his iron promotion may be more willing to review his deeply held opinions on for example the legality of war pleasing those you look to for protection or advancement can mean self-interest, trumps principle the whistleblower or the person who tenders her resignation is not always lauded and it's often a painful process Elizabeth Wilmshurst is the example that I always have in mind that woman lawyer in the foreign office who resigned over the war going against the momentum of the pact takes courage because the political spin machine can be set in motion to destroy you it happened of course you remember to Scott Ritter the weapons inspector who said there were no weapons of mass destruction and then suddenly was confronted with allegations involving child pornography the ostracisation of the person who expresses objection can be cruel our ethical conduct is also affected by the norms of behaviour we witness unethical conduct has a capacity to cascade down the ranks if we see others behaving badly up above and all around we too are more likely to fall from grace I think it actually did happen in Iraq where a certain tone was set by the United States forces in their handling of Iraqi detainees our own intelligence officers also lost their ethical position over the interrogation of detainees where torture and unacceptable practices were being carried out by others but in which they were prepared at times to turn a blind eye research on taxation found that people were content to pay tax if they felt it was set fairly and if everyone else was paying the tax too if everyone seems to be avoiding tax or taking home stationery or claiming for taxes that they don't take why should you be the patsy who doesn't if every other MP is claiming for a new kitchen why not you but there's an even wider scenario that concerns me if a national culture develops in which wealth and earnings become a superior measure of value than anything else those whose life's work has been about service to others start to feel undervalued in recent times the overwhelming sense has been that if you are any good at what you do you should be making a ton of money everyone else's money has become the measure of value anyone on a middle or modest income is deemed a loser people who have chosen jobs in the public sector have felt denigrated many of the ethical shortcomings and petty corruptions we have seen in recent times have reflected this obsession with money and an elevation of the private sector above all else and particularly above the public the complaint of low pay by MPs that are rushed from the cabinet or the ministry that they've worked in to boards and consultancies that revolving door where they're looking for the next opportunity or the willingness of peers to make interventions on behalf of paying corporate clients or lobbyists the corrupting sense of entitlement to freebies and benefits in kind that flowed from Downing Street in the Blair years the rush to riches once out of office how people behave affects cultural values and cultural values affect how people behave people don't people often adjust the rules to suit their own interests according to how they see the context we're all expected in Mandelson speak to be totally comfortable with people being filthy rich but should we be so comfortable if the gap between rich and poor grows to such an extent that we're not only seeing injustice but also the destabilising of our society in the 1960s chief executives of companies on average are nine times the annual earnings of their average worker they now earn 66 times in some places in the United States is far, far greater than that indeed I'm told that the heads of Walmart earn 900 times what their average worker earns the salaries of chief executives are often ludicrous to criticise is to be accused of engaging in the politics of envy rather than the politics of justice we now also have debate about the incredible levels of pay of senior civil servants of chief executives and local authorities of the senior executives in the BBC they've spiralled out of all imagining but this must be seen largely as a reflection of the wider problem that we've become as a society mad about money and seduced by the business model why shouldn't I be paid what I would receive doing a similar job in the private sector that's the claim we will not get anyone who's any good says the headhunter if we don't pay the going rate in the city the simple answer is that public enterprises are not profit making it's about the creation of common goods common goods that we no longer talk about if you want those commercial rewards you're in the wrong place that should be the answer the ethos that's serving the nation in certain capacities carries a steam and value unrelated to money is evaporating why? in reading ourselves of the class system the idle hope was that decency and values and talents may have become the measure of the man but no, somehow the new measure has been money that's what's replaced the old calibrations money and wealth instead of attaching real value to the contribution someone makes to the common wealth of our nation we see everyone in monetary terms we see everything in monetary terms perhaps in our shaking the ancient dust out of institutions we've done something disturbing to the institutional loyalties which operated as a preventative check on unbecoming behaviour we've abandoned the notion of honour we used to be so good at inventing ways of reinforcing ethical standards one of them for example in my profession is the QC system and I recently had the experience of working with a young lawyer and he was being encouraged by a solicitor and by somebody else to hold back on a report that we'd received from an expert and you're supposed to make those disclosed at an early stage to the other side and I said to him, you know, you've got to hand that over don't hold on to it and I said to him, you do realise that if at any stage in your life you want to become a Queen's Council you want that promotion you want that esteem within the profession you ain't going to get it if you get the reputation of being somebody who plays fast and loose and is considered to be of the highest ethical standards and so in fact those strange and bizarre things operate inside professions are often ways of disciplining human behaviour so as we have urgently sought to democratise our politics we've ended up it seems to me now with career politicians politicians who start off but the politics degree become a researcher for a member of parliament end up standing for parliament and volunteering themselves and so their whole life has and they decide that their job deserves the rewards that are commensurate with other high calibre jobs and so that was what led people to the behaviours that we saw which seemed so highly unethical I also think that some of the distortions as a result of introducing market values into places where they don't belong are really to the detriment of our society we've seen a blurring of the public-private divide and failed to take account of how the underlying principles in the two spheres are different efforts to make public services more efficient and cost effective have meant replacing heads of public institutions with executives from the world of business or introducing market methodology and competition to sharpen up performance the ethic of the market which is about profit is different from the ethic of the common good and I say that without dismissing the value of business or entrepreneurship and the importance of it in our world or to suggest that all business people are unethical that's not true but the ethos is different and the whole process of privatisation of public services presents serious challenges because it's trying to drive down costs and in trying to do that there's a tendency to drive down quality and the ethical consequences can be very serious we had it recently over the scandal of nursing care of the elderly what would possibly make people fail to wet the mouth of somebody who's dying to find a glass of water for people who are seriously ill and elderly and what you find is that the nurses are at the computer station and what they're trying to do is meet targets and that the imperatives of the business model are driving some of the decisions in health rather than care which has been absolutely fundamental to the professionals that I've ever known who work in it today's garden carried a newspaper carried two stories that were very interesting given the lecture I was giving tonight one was concerned being expressed by professional organisations about GP fund holding of huge sums of money and being able to use that money for patients but it become the GP who was expected to be there running basically enormous businesses and what the concern was that it would lead in the end to occasions where there would be corrupt practice concerns being expressed by doctors about how that would undermine their professionalism and their esteem within the community there was another story told by a very renowned journalist Hugh O'Shaughnessy whose wife just died in the last week describing the care that she'd been given by wonderful people in the National Health Service and saying that the only failings that he ever saw towards the end were about privatised care where it fell short of what one would expected because in driving down costs competing with others to do it cheaper you end up getting a service that's less and less good I firmly believe that the public sector has a lot to learn from business that means being business-like and efficient in working methods but there's a folly in seeking to run public services as businesses the introduction of markets creating huge layers of bureaucracy and often bringing a deep professionalising of the people who are at the heart of the service whether it's teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers the introduction of the market to services in my view is bringing about a shift in ethics the best description of different ethical approaches operating in different spheres comes from a man called Robert Hind the distinguished behavioural scientist and I met him recently over in fact the Iraq war about which he had great concerns and felt that there had been terrible ethical failures in the run up to that war but he sent me his book and in the book we had a discussion about ethics he really does present a very good argument about the ways in which the sort of imperative I will do the best which is the ethic of legitimate business and legitimate business practice and legitimate competition is I will do the best for myself because I know you're trying to do the best for yourself and the rules of the game are known to each party and each expects to get the best deal possible for himself the benefits to the consumer and the market economy is that by and large you get a better price but it's not like that when you're talking about services like education or health or social services in our communities and I make it very clear that I'm not suggesting that there aren't ethics within business there clearly are but of course we also know that there are also huge unethical practices environmental disasters wouldn't take place if everything was done to a high ethical level the exploitation of workers, child labour risk taken with the lives of the poor I'm currently chairing an inquiry into human trafficking and I'm seeing that here in our midst in Britain not just in terms of sex trafficking of women and children but also of human trafficking of migrant labour of domestic servitude of people being treated in the most horrifying ways in the workplace the point I'm seeking to make is that the world of business has its own precepts which citizens and developed market economies accept because the market model brings the benefit to the public of competition and lower prices but by being persuaded that that same system can work in public services we are being deluded and I'm afraid it's going to be at a cost so what do we do? the common good has figured large in the post-Second World War consensus and I believe it has been one of the reasons why we have a nation at ease with itself a good place to live but that consensus is now being unraveled especially with the massive programme of public service cuts in Britain we've had a high and independent high calibre civil service an exceptional justice system uncorrupt judges by and large very rare that you will ever come across corrupt judges we might not like some of the decisions but they don't receive money around the back we see committed medical professionals and public servants and scientists and they're admired throughout the world for the high level of their skills and integrity and I would suggest that the property of the British professional is unsurpassed but I think we're putting it at risk and so what do you need? we need better institutions we need better debate about the loss of ethical standards and the ways in which we are denuding our public realm of some of the things that have made it so wonderful we have to talk about capitalism and our unregulated markets we have to talk about living wages and about social and economic rights and we have to protest these cuts and we have to talk about creating a different kind of social contract the Robin Hood tax where every share transaction should carry a tax which could then pay for so many of the impoverished things that take place in our world we should be saying no to the Philip Greens of this world who arranged their affairs so they pay no tax in this country still get a knighthood and before I close I want to emphasise alongside some of the reductions in ethical standards and some of the huge ethical failures in foreign affairs that we've seen we've also seen, I think, some interesting and important advances the rising resistance in this nation to racism and sexism the concern for human rights and increased tolerance in our society of those who are different which is an awesome ethical shift and very different from how it was when I was young and what I love about being here for example at SOAS spending time with a new generation is that they care about the world that they live in and I feel that is true of many of our young and we certainly see as being true when we look at the pictures on our television screens of the young around the world exercised about war and poverty and about our failure to be good stewards of the environment they are hugely ethical and long may it continue to be so a famous American jurist it was often invoked when I was young and studying law and it was about ethics and what was explained to us was that there was a certain conduct that lawyers might be involved in which would be criminal and would lead to prosecution but ethical standards were somehow short of that but there were actions which involved the breaches of established standards which dishonoured the profession and could lead to disciplinary action when which dishonoured you but the real question that came at the end of it was the question that he said should be asked by all of us what kind of person do you want to be we too have to ask that question in a collective sense and we have to restore our sense of the collective what kind of society do we want to be a good society has to be ethical and so the lesson must be that at all times we must be alert to the ways in which we are selling the pass at all times we must remain conscious of how each of us in the small daily acts of living we set the standards and in the end we are all our society's ethicists thank you