The flight-to-integrity starts here
Our politics has led business and society into moral crisis, writes George Pitcher. We now have the opportunity to build something much better
In the financial markets, there is a long-standing phrase at times of economic turmoil and uncertainty for a shift in investor sentiment towards safer assets, such as gold. It’s called a flight-to-quality. What we’re witnessing currently, in what we might call the political markets, is a flight-to-integrity.
The word integrity is now on every political lip. Resigning as health secretary, Sajid Javid wrote that the British people “rightly expect integrity from their Government”, while Rishi Sunak, quitting as Chancellor, echoed the public expectation that “government be conducted... competently and seriously” and effectively defined integrity as standards “worth fighting for”, meaning we had to “make sacrifices and take difficult decisions.”
Ponzi-scheme
An anonymous retired civil servant on LBC called on his former colleagues to “act with integrity” and resign. Meanwhile, new Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi, bless him, even briefly claimed that prime minister Boris Johnson still had integrity, like a hedge-fund manager pointing to his favourite ponzi-scheme even as his punters are scrambling to dump his scams.
To his credit, within a matter of hours Zahawi had realised that this wasn’t a good look and, mustering some integrity, wrote an open letter to the PM telling him he must go.
And so the flight-to-integrity gathers force, like a mistral wind sweeping through the nation, from the BBC on College Green in Westminster to voters in a vox pop behind a wall turning red again. This wind of change is defined as much as by what it’s against – corruption, deceit, duplicity, lies – as what it’s for.
In that, it bears closer historical characteristics with the Reformation than with the Enlightenment. If that sounds too grandiose, call it a paradigm shift, if you will.
Important here to stress that this is not a “herd instinct”, as our ultra-bovine and busted prime minister called the parliamentary move against him. It’s more like a multi-cellular response to cancer, an immune response by the body politic to an invasive and destructive foreign body.
It begins in politics, because that’s where the disease started. Expect the contenders in the forthcoming Conservative leadership contest to be setting out their stalls laden with claims to integrity (anti-Green MP Steve Baker was the first out of the integrity blocks).
Fish rots from head
But it will spread to industry and the way we do business too, because the fish rots from the head – and politics sets the example that business leaders follow. Some companies have followed politics into the pit. They now have the opportunity, indeed the imperative, to join the flight-to-integrity.
The other word being bandied about is trust – as if trust is something that politicians and business leaders can generate organically through a flight-to-integrity.
But trust is a subset of integrity. The trouble with those who manage reputation professionally is that they talk a lot of nonsense about it. We’re told that trust is about what you do rather than what you say and therefore has to be earned rather than claimed. Who knew?
The truth is that trust, like the financial markets, is transactional. You can make a market in it. Stakeholders invest their trust in an institution and those who run it had better repay that trust in kind. The currencies in these markets are stakeholders’ hopes and fears, which are auditable.
Traded in fears
We need to know what the former are and deliver on them, with dividends. We have for too long traded in fears – fears over immigration, fears for the economy and the union, fears of failing to perform or of unemployment. The losses to us in political capital and integrity of trading in fears rather than hopes are incalculable.
So how do we book a decent seat on the flight-to-integrity? A start is to remind ourselves of the classical cardinal virtues, which underpin our cultural values, and update them so that they’re compatible with new-millennial means of exchange.
The virtues for Aristotle were prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, which were adopted by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas and became the bedrock of European Christian culture. These might translate today as discernment, fairness, courage and self-discipline.
The original virtues prevailed until the Enlightenment of the 17th- and 18th-centuries, which brought limitless social benefits to western Europe, not least democracy and literacy. It also brought the hegemony of individualism and the state.
Unbridled cult of self
Recent history has seen those factors grow into powerful political movements. In our own era, Boris Johnson has embodied the unbridled cult of self and individual. Enough said; to adopt the vernacular of the financial markets again, may he be a final settlement of that particular derivative.
A massive mistake is to believe that our polity can be corrected by the removal of a catastrophic leader, any more than a failing corporation can be rectified only by the replacement of an inept chief executive. What we look for now is a flight-to-integrity throughout our bodies politic and corporate.
Business and political leaders – and especially the one who has just been defenestrated in Downing Street – have too often and for too long worshipped at the altars of selfhood and individualism, the ugly sub-idols of the Enlightenment. But there really is such a thing as society. And it longs now to be led on a flight-to-integrity.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest
A version of this column appeared on Premier Christianity