Truth in Public Life by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: European, Public Affairs & Administration, Political Science, World, General
ISBN: 9781912208906
Google: OA2YzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 54298450
Publisher: Haus Publishing
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

My Grounds for Hope

Let me describe two sources of comfort, one about public service – whose moral underpinning Westminster Abbey Institute exists to foster – and one about belief.

In 1995 the Committee on Standards in Public Life, established the previous year by John Major, published as its first report ‘The Seven Principles of Public Life’ – the Nolan Principles – which set out a code of good practice for all government departments.30 These seven principles may be self-evident to some, but they are important for us all as a guide to excellence in public service generally. They have survived the test of time and bear repeating: they are selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. These principles are in their essence a reaffirmation of the central place in public service of truth as I have defined it. They reflect a striving after truth. Truth inhabits them all. Without a powerful sense of truth lying at the heart of them they would have no meaning or impact. That identity with truth as a goal matters. As theologian Janet Soskice put it in a lecture for the Institute, ‘Truth is both a given and work in progress.’31 If the Nolan Principles do define the framework within which public service is expected to work, we have not lost our understanding of why truth matters in the ordering of our society, and where good may be found.

But these principles are not a magic key. The task of public service in striving to do the right thing is hard and complicated. If a fundamental part of the civil servant’s role is to work for the good of society, given the multitude of conflicting pressures and constraints which they must work under every day, doing what is right is impossible without a moral road map. That map is the Nolan Principles. Those principles are defined by a striving after truth. But whose truth? One government’s ‘truth’ is not another’s. Governments set the boundaries of where they want the ‘truth’ to be, and that will direct and may distort the role of the civil servant to ‘tell truth unto power’ since, as we have seen, a government is capable of defining the truth only in terms of what it wants to believe. Once a government is set upon a particular course of action, the civil servant’s task will then be only to deliver the best answer – best in relation to that defined path of truth – that they can achieve in the circumstances. Think of the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003. Think of the Brexit negotiations where, whatever side of the debate you are on, a civil servant’s task is to make the best of the excessively challenging hand they have been dealt.

And there are occasions when the action needed relates only to a part of the truth, not to the truth of the entire issue, or where the issue is such that different aspects of the truth have different weight. There is one such example in my own painful experience of an episode in 1989.

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