The Rotten Tree Known as Parliament

There is a bright side to the British Parliament expenses scandal. For one thing, many M.P.'s had the fortitude to walk right by that enormous parliamentary trough and eat at home instead.

Second, Parliament showed the world how a failure to do the right thing and do it transparently — seek larger incomes — and instead to take public money clandestinely and then, when news started leaking out, to deny and obfuscate, can completely undermine trust in a public institution.

Too often, government ethics is seen as dealing with bad apples. But the biggest problem in government ethics is not the bad apples, but the bad ethics environments, the environments that allow or encourage officials to put their private interests above the public interest, to act in secret, and eventually to commit crimes against the community.

Bad apples can be picked off a tree, and no one opposes this. But bad ethics environments pollute the tree, so that the rot spreads too easily through otherwise decent apples. And it becomes in the personal interest of all officials to keep the rot from going public.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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