Every day, Cameron, Brown, Clegg and the current crop of public figures show how clueless they are when it comes to mending ‘broken Britain’. We won’t get a better Britain until we rebuild the concept of ethics.

English is a bizarre language (even for the English) and an infuriating one for foreigners. There is no other language of which I know, for instance, which employs the word shameful to describe an act which is shameless. But despite this oddity – whichever way you cut it – when thousands of shameful acts each day become the norm, one knows that the culture has become shameless.
Because politicians never meet real people, they introduce laws like that which created the ASBO. ‘Name and shame!’ they shouted. It quickly became apparent that feckless people on the whole regard ownership of an ASBO order as the entirely welcome confirmation of how well ‘ard they are.

There’s nothing new in that observation; but even since the advent of ASBOs, the cultural ability to banish shame has got considerably worse. Whatever the walk of life, shameless behaviour isn’t rife – it’s damn near universal.

England captain John Terry is caught bonking a team-mate’s wife. It transpires he’s been at it with loads of other women too – and fraudulently letting out a viewing box for additional money…he only earning £120,000 a week and all. Terry doesn’t resign immediately as a disgraced role model – he waits to be fired. His main concern (we hear) is the negative effect on his sponsorship contracts.
Three politicians accused of falsification of expenses invoices vow to ‘vigorously ’defend themselves. Their defence is…parliamentary privilege. Most other MPs insist that by troughing as opposed to falsifying, they were only obeying the rules.
Over the last few years between them, the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian have exposed seven separate cases of senior police officers manipulating crime figures in order to ensure promotion. (This is the police we’re talking about here).
The banking community shoots the economy dead, bankrupts the nation – and then treats with disdain the public outcry against continuing bonuses with “You micro-gnats just don’t understand”. They immediately start inventing risible ways of getting the money anyway while staying ‘within the rules’.
A Chairman of the Conservative Party sells £45 million of shares in his company just weeks before a profit warning. It’s as clear-cut a case of fiduciary fraud as you’ll find, but he’s ‘irritated’ by the way it’s been reported.

One could make blasé remarks about observing ‘the spirit as well as the letter of the law’ but the situation is infinitely more ghastly than such platitudes suggest. Last week I was asked to debate Parliamentary reform on Radio Four with Benedict Brogan. The Beeb eventually decided it wouldn’t work “because you both want to change everything – so there’d be no debate”. But Brogan and myself were chosen because of a column he’d written in the Telegraph, and one I’d written in the Guardian.

As with the police fraud reporting noted earlier, the investigation and reporting of contempt for the law and morality in Britain is no longer a matter of political slant: the problem is a cultural one. Significantly, however, last week Cameron commandeered a Telegraph column, and Brown did the same in the Guardian. Both were profoundly depressing.

In his completely transparent attempt to defend a purely political position, Cameron wrote:

‘One of the things that works in our current system is that a general election gives people the power to get rid of tired, useless and divided governments like the one we have today. The truth is that people don’t want a new voting system – they want a new politics…’
Apart from displaying zero awareness of how voters see all Parties as ‘tired, useless and divided’, Dave also fails to grasp an obvious point: that a new politics will never emerge without a new voting system – and a whole lot of other stuff besides.
As for Brown’s attempt, the kindest thing I can say about it is that it tended to confirm the belief held by many that the Prime Minister is delusional. I think that too, but then why should I be kind about a man who has done such dreadful things – not just with an absence of shame, but constantly incredible denial of those acts? So I will make it plain: it was, from start to finish, a mendacious attempt to suggest that the window dressing is actually a brand new suit. For example:
‘…it is also about opening up government. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has worked with us to open up more information to citizens: on health, education, crime and local communities…’
This is an assertion so ludicrous and misleading as to make the eyes bleed in frustration. But this one is a cracker:
‘….Faith and trust in parliament has taken a severe knock in the past year, but I do not believe people have lost their appetite for politics, or for the change it can bring….’
Like I say, delusional. And as I’ve written many times before, going blind….as well as borderline OCD: three mentions of ‘everything I can do’, this month’s verbal security blanket.
When people ask me for a summary of what I’m on about in the Slog, I paraphrase Clinton thus: ‘It’s the culture, stupid’. And that’s why, for instance – deeply supportive as I am of the euthanasia cause – I believe the idea of overlaying such a practice onto our amoral society would have precisely the same effect as 24/7 booze laws have had on our binge culture. The abuse of it would be widespread within weeks.
And herein lies the crux of my point. A population one can’t trust at any level must inevitably produce not just a controlling, surveillance-obsessed form of Government: an utterly stagnant culture with no means of progressing will be the inevitable result. From the bottom up and the top down, only a radically rewired culture will effect real change.
The best definition of ethics I’ve ever read is ‘doing the right thing when nobody’s looking’. In Britain today, when a celeb or a major public figure does the right thing, they insist on everyone looking. This immediately renders the act morally worthless. The view increasingly held by the security services, the police and government is ‘everyone will do the wrong thing when nobody’s looking’. By and large, they’re right.
But the answer is to use every institution available – education, medicine, the law, local government, families, communities and (of course) socio-political strategy – to cure the illness at source. The Establishment, by contrast, are drifting towards the only answer they understand: giving orders, incarceration, and taking photographs every second of every day. In short, treating leprosy with the use of high-security leper colonies.
Politics for some of us is no longer informed by a sterile, antediluvian debate about Right and Left. Politics now is first and foremost constitutional politics. A tiny, privileged and intellectually average elite is stuck fast in the quicksand of polemic fundamentalism – aka survival and self-interest. They must all begone – and as quickly as possible.