Why be honest?

Last week in Hull, a town in the North of England, an ATM machine was giving up double the amount of cash their customers were registered as taking from their accounts. Instead of these customers reporting this fault a line of over one hundred people soon formed. All of them, apparently, taking advantage of this error to cash in. None of them seemed to understand that this was wrong. The photographs of the event show them laughing triumphantly.

When I was a young man, a long time since, I was driving with some friends in France. My case was strapped to the back of the small MGB sports car. Somewhere along the route my case had fallen off. We retraced our route and entered the police station in a rural town. My case had been collected by a passing local man, he had returned it, after opening it and finding my wallet and passport inside. There was nothing missing and he wouldn't accept a reward. Has the world changed this much, or are these two isolated, unrepresentative incidents?

I like to believe in the inherent goodness of the individual. However I am not so confident of our behavior in groups. I think a great many people when confronted with a choice between honest or dishonest behavior will choose the former, even when they don't gain by it.

My despair is born from the apparent collapse of this moral code in our banking and political systems. These are clearly now peopled by men and women much less principled than that simple Frenchman years ago. Our leaders as represented here by senior politicians and bankers should be paragons of probity, instead of which they have consistently proved to be venal, greedy, cheating and mean spirited. They have become pigs at the trough and have lost all respect from the general public. It was inevitable that some of their behavior is copied by the public, hence the scenes outside that cash machine in Hull. What else can our society expect when our leading figures don't know how to behave?

What makes this situation even worse is the bombastic and breathtaking hypocricsy of these liars and cheats about anyone else behaving remotely like themselves. Of course not every politician or banker falls within these categories, but enough do for us to resent them all. I will not list examples of the fiddles, lies, fraud, corruption and theft undertaken by these leaders, suffice it to say that none of us can fail to have been confronted by examples in our news every day and we all suffer the cost and damage.

There is also a breathtaking arrogance around many of these political and financial leaders in which they appear genuinely astonished that their atrocious behavior over the last decade or so is called into question. We would all be well served by a genuinely new broom sweeping them away. I think that might be about to happen. If our economy does dip into some kind of recession bordering on a depression there will be a reckoning and those that have helped cause this plight will be swept away by it.