Lord Patten
Main Page: Lord Patten (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Patten
My Lords, I shall make three points about where business and society meet from an ethical point of view. First, there is surely no iron curtain between business and society because, after all, the shared values of business people and people in society are the same. They try to help and look after each other, doing good not bad, being supportive and helping people in ways that they can. That is at least the best reading of that shared value. Equally, most businesspeople such as my wife and me go back at the end of our business day into society. We are not some other class. Most people in business look to society as a haven and a home, just as most people in society look to business to supply their needs. There is no iron curtain of any sort there.
Secondly, all of us should be extremely cautious when things go wrong in business, such as giving in to the sound bite delights of, say, bad banks and the rest, because I fear that that will discourage a lot of those who are not bad but good bankers. There are a great many of them, and that is why I very much welcome what the noble Lord, Lord Sacks, said about the ethics that drive his religion. They are sometimes very different from those that drive mine but, with due respect to some of the cassock-wearing classes—I entirely exonerate the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester—there has sometimes been a bit too much bad bankery around, which distresses a lot of people. One has to be careful, moderate and modest in what one says.
Thirdly and lastly, society has a lot to learn from business and big business. I recently looked at the ethical code of an extremely successful global corporation, which has got away without having any ethical problems in the past two or three decades because of the high levels of ethical training that everyone in that business has to go through. They have to sign up each year to a final question: “Would I be pleased where conscience meets ambition? Would I be pleased to see what I am going to do today in the media tomorrow to be seen by my loved ones?”.