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If you believe Essex University’s research findings, honesty is a vanishing commodity: we’re turning into a sly nation of deceivers. A study published last week showed that tolerance of what Prof Paul Whiteley, the report’s author, called “low level dishonesty” had increased right across the social classes – although the younger generation was, on the whole, even less scrupulous than the older one.
I took the “integrity test” myself, and I tried to be honest about my level of dishonesty, although some of the questions – “Is it ever, rarely, sometimes or always justified to drive faster than the speed limit?” – could have sustained a dinner party in heated debate for several hours.
I have always considered myself reasonably honest: I have never shoplifted, and as a child even anxiously confessed to my mother that I had filched a couple of sweets from my grandfather’s Fox’s Glacier Mints jar without asking, and duly returned them. On the test, however, I came out as a bit of a rule-bender – “more honest than average”, but inching perilously near to the “relaxed about the rules” category.
Yet the more I looked at the jumble of considerations in the Essex survey, the more perplexing I found it. It may be wrong, dangerous, and illegal to drive above the speed limit, but is it inherently dishonest? Only, I would have thought, if one subsequently lied about it.
Alexander Pope said that “an honest man’s the noblest work of God” but I’m not sure that he was entirely right. Honesty is laudable, but it can be trumped by other qualities, such as courage. It is also distinct from blind adherence to the rules, which is where the Essex survey grows fatally confused. Rules – for good or ill – are externally imposed, while honesty is an impulse from within.
True heroes are often fiercely complicated people. The German factory-owner Oskar Schindler, who saved more than 1,100 Jewish workers from the gas-chambers, was an opportunistic businessman, a plausible womaniser and dissimulator who was a suave guest at SS parties. Yet he had nerve and a powerful sense of decency, which led him to bribe and lie to government officials to protect his Jewish employees. Had Schindler taken the Essex University integrity test, I’ll wager it would have come back with “does not believe in living by the rules” stamped all over it. I have the distinct feeling, on the other hand, that Heinrich Himmler would have emerged with flying colours.
We are not, of course, living under a despotic, genocidal regime, and therefore our relationship to the rules must be more compliant than in Nazi Germany. But most of us have experienced, particularly in the last 10 years, the sense that many rules governing large tracts of British life have become skewed to the disadvantage of the ordinary public, which in turn influences our inclination to obey them.
I awoke yesterday, for example, to news of Dave Hartnett, the Permanent Secretary for Tax at HMRC, inveighing against people who pay builders or cleaners in cash, and are thereby complicit in “diddling the country” out of tax. Yet MPs last month accused Mr Hartnett of agreeing “sweetheart deals” with large companies such as Goldman Sachs and Vodafone which allegedly let them off taxes worth many millions of pounds to HMRC.
Much of what the public instinctively feels to be dishonest behaviour in our institutions is none the less within the rules: but who makes the rules? The MPs caught up in the expenses scandal – with the exception of a few whose behaviour was so outrageous that it landed them in jail – were operating at the decidedly elastic limits of what was permitted by the Fees Office. Our wealthy Chancellor, George Osborne, flipped his second-home designation to claim the maximum remuneration from the taxpayer.
Goldman Sachs, which helped to create a world market in toxic risk, then profited from that situation by misrepresenting the market to the company’s own clients. No one has yet been punished in relation to that: indeed, politicians closely associated with the firm have been installed as prime ministers in Italy and Greece. Every taxpayer in Britain will have to spend decades paying off the spiralling costs of PFI schemes signed off under Gordon Brown, and the fresh lot sanctioned by Mr Osborne.
Of course, one mustn’t let such behaviour affect one’s own integrity. Were I to find a wallet full of banknotes on the street, I would certainly return it to its owner fully intact – but how I wish that the authorities could be restrained from repeatedly mugging me for the contents of mine.
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Would Oskar Schindler have passed the Essex University honesty test? - Telegraph
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