Highland World with Sharon Pottinger
WHEN Vince Cable announced at the recent Chamber of Commerce dinner that every morning the Government started at 9am with a red tape reduction session, I was momentarily heartened.
Surely, I thought, with such a dedicated effort it would take time but it was a step in the right direction of reducing the myriad, complex, conflicting or downright nonsensical rules that have invaded every aspect of our daily lives. A cloud of cynicism dampened my initial enthusiasm with images of Hercules and the Augean stables or, worse yet, ill-fated Sisyphus – pushing a rock uphill only to have it roll back again in a never-ending cycle. I had visions of cutting paperwork in the morning and creating it in the afternoon.
The image was not as deprecatory of government as it seems at first glance. Laws and rules and initiatives and public inquiries are an important part of the business of government but it is a grievous mistake to conflate government and governance. A casual browse of the dictionary may make them synonyms but governance has its own advocates now who suggest it is more properly thought of as the framework which regulates how organisations (including government) relate to each other and to the principles that define their roles.
This distinction between government and governance is important because without appreciating it, we can believe, as in the recent Leveson report, that another law is needed to ensure no egregious moral lapses such as occurred with the News of the World phone hacking scandals. The very language we use to describe the affairs suggests no-one needs another law to know the behaviour was unacceptable: hacking, lying, scapegoating, using private detectives to distance oneself from the obvious moral lapses.
Sadly, morality and ethics cannot be legislated into journalism or banking or parenting. I wholeheartedly wish it were that easy and perhaps it is that vain hope that leads us to believe in more and more legislation.
New legislation can neither ensure future ethical behaviour nor compensate those whose lives have been turned upside down by the invasions of their privacy and consequent loss of trust.
Again, I wish for their sake as well as our own that another law would make things better again. Legislation cannot ensure proper behaviour; at best, it defines consequences for breaking the behaviour.
I believe there is more than its ineffectiveness to worry us about the rush to create new legislation for behavioural lapses by individuals or organisations. If we come to rely on legislation to define our behaviour, we create the sad state of affairs where the DJ who made a foolish prank with tragic consequences can say, "I didn’t break any laws". I am not suggesting this individual was trying to excuse the behaviour but we set a dangerous precedent when we rely on laws to define right and wrong for us.
Starbucks, Amazon and Google were all operating legally in not paying any taxes. Their corporate behaviour, although legal, was perceived to be objectionable, and, once exposed, there has been a reaction to it.
Starbucks, even if it is viewed as primarily a publicity stunt, has said it listened to its customers and because it is part of its corporate ethos, it will change its behaviour. Twenty million pounds over three years may well be a drop in the bucket tax-wise but it is an example of governance – a change in behaviour based on the ethics inherent in the relationship between the organisation and its customers and the greater society in which it operates. And that change was made possible because the media made the public aware.
The temptation to pass a new law or make a new initiative will always be strong because we need to feel as if we are taking action when we are affronted by scandals or behavioural lapses: saying "No" to phone hacking allows us to feel as if the proper order of things has been redressed but the answer is longer and harder to achieve than that and requires the co-operation of all our organisations to achieve.
Here are some of the questions I would like to see us discuss in earnest: in a secular, multicultural state, where do we look for moral/ethical authority? What is the proper role of government?
How do we ensure journalists have both the freedom and the tools necessary to develop careful, thoughtful oversight of our society?
An essential part of governance is for all participants to be engaged in the process. We need to engage with all our institutions to ensure they are held accountable to ethical standards of behaviour.