Political rule-breakers in the moral maze
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Political rule-breakers in the moral maze
Is pragmatism or principle most important in our leaders?
On this week’s BBC Moral Maze, we discussed whether expectations of our politicians are unrealistic and unfair, or whether their behaviour falls far short of the standards they should uphold.
Britain’s prime minister, Boris Johnson, is currently under pressure to resign over accusations that his officials held “parties” in 10 Downing Street where they were all working, in apparent defiance of the Covid rules against mixing with others during that period.
People are furious and upset that, while they were often having to endure painful separations from loved ones as a result of those Covid restrictions, there seems to have been one set of rules for them and another set for the people who made those rules. The charge against Boris Johnson is not so much that he broke the law as that he crossed a moral boundary.
But is that moral boundary clearly defined or is it grey and fuzzy? Is it more important to have a leader who delivers actual results rather than have a PM who might be a useless paragon of virtue? Is it hypocritical to expect political leaders to stick to the rules when so many of the public are themselves breaking them?
My fellow panellists were Anne McElvoy, Mona Siddiqui and Matthew Taylor. Our witnesses were former Conservative MP Edwina Currie, anthropologist Dr Oliver Scott Curry, political theorist Dr Stephen de Vijze and philosophy professor Quassim Cassam.
If you can access BBC iPlayer, you can listen to the programme here.
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