The Cultureship Blog

How the UK parliamentary expenses scandal reveals a frightening lack of integrity within the body politic.

The debate about the MPs expenses scandal – and, make no mistake, this is a scandal of quite breathtaking proportions – is beginning to show some signs of moving on from identifying the sustained excesses of individuals into the core issue of how this debacle came to pass.

One wonders how far and how deep this analysis will go, or whether it will remain focussed in the main on personalities. After all, we live in an age where personal narratives and the cult of the individual dominate over discussions of organisational culture and how such cultures come to pass.

Having said that, it would be all too convenient for the MPs who are quite frenziedly building property portfolios through the public purse, or those who think items down to the everyday level of sweets and nappies are above the threshold of personal payment, to push all blame off onto institutionalised habits.

Indeed, one only has to listen to Gordon Brown talking of “The system doesn’t work” and serial housing support claimant Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, echoing this view when saying, “The system is wrong; it needs to be changed.”

This kind of taking away of personal responsibility and burying it outside within a deep hole labelled “The System” is deeply disingenuous and reprehensible. It is the defence of “Don’t blame me, I was only following established practices” taken to ludicrous extremes.

We need to be absolutely clear that there is no coercion in these instances. There is no social imperative. There is no rule book that insists that everything in it must be stretched and manipulated to the absolute limit. These are elites we are talking about, people with high autonomy and supposedly highly nuanced moral judgement.

What has happened is that there has been indulgence, followed by complicity, followed by irresponsibility, followed by greed, followed by denial, all of it now compounded by hypocrisy.

So let’s indulge in a little speculation about how all of this might play out.

There will quite possibly be a few embarrassing and in some cases quite large tax bills to be met. A few individuals will probably be demoted in status but will keep the vast majority of their pay and perks. That will take care of the personality-obsessed media by offering up a few sacrificial lambs.

As for “The System” side of things, the rule book – which was by many reports quite adequate anyway via any reasonable reading of it – will probably be rewritten to take away any possible opaqueness and opportunities for flagrant exploitation.

And any fundamental debate about the big stuff simply won’t get off the ground. At The Cultureship Practice we place integrity central to our notions of sustaining and sustainable organisational culture.

We define integrity as “Doing the right things, well”. There is much, much more to great corporate culture than wagging a finger at the absolute worst transgressors (though there is no reason why the most outrageous should not be sent packing immediately on their way). There is also much, much more to it than the letter of the written rules.

That our so-called leaders are apparently utterly missing these core points is infinitely more worrying than the sweets and the nappies themselves. But it is so often the case, it is in the smallest of things that the biggest messages are often to be found.

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