Standards in Public Life

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, the committee chaired with distinction by my noble friend Lord Bew is the guardian of the seven principles of public life first promulgated by the standards committee in the mid-1990s, under its founding chairman Lord Nolan, as my noble friend reminded us. The most cheering finding in the committee’s 2012 survey, which we are debating today, is that the public continue to support those principles to an overwhelming degree.

Should the British people become so jaundiced with those in public and political life that, when asked about the behavioural lapses on the part of their Ministers, officials and legislators, they shrug disdainfully and reply, “Well that’s the way they are; what can you expect?”, then we would be in deep trouble as a country and a polity. Mercifully, we are still shockable.

However, the standards committee report makes for truly depressing reading on the low levels of trust in politicians. But, in my judgment, it is the findings on political engagement which leap most dramatically out of its pages. It is the level of alienation from all parties, big and small, across the spectrum that is searing. Place this finding alongside the Hansard Society’s 2013 Audit of Political Engagement and the picture is truly grim. The Hansard Society found that, in terms of general elections:

“The number of young people (18-24 year olds) certain to vote has declined 10 percentage points in a year (22% to 12%)”.

The reasons for such indifference and alienation are multiple and have accumulated over a decade of historically low general election turnouts.

I will finish by mentioning but one aspect that has long worried me: the language in which we conduct our national political conversation. George Orwell argued, in his classic 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, that if the main instrument of political exchange and argument—language—became stale, clichéd and debased, we would be seriously impoverished. Nearly 70 years on, in our deeply sound-bitten political culture, we have much more to worry about than did Orwell. Between now and the general election of May 2015, can our political class raise its game? Can our politicians find the tone, the pitch and the vocabulary to break through the indifference, especially of those 18 to 24-year-olds? I live in hope.

I have one final thought for the noble Lord, Lord Bew, and his committee, the work of which I have always admired. How about a review of the quality and clarity of language used in government White Papers? That is a question of standards, too. Doing an Orwell on White Papers would be a service to us all.