Category: Modern Life

Collecting

My experience is that most people are generous. Not showily so, not ostentatiously generous – but quietly, reflexively open. Present them with a collecting bucket and a good cause and something in them responds before the rational mind has finished its cost-benefit analysis.

A Saturday afternoon earlier this month bore this out yet again. I was one of about thirty volunteers collecting for The Exeter Chiefs Foundation at the Chiefs’ match against Gloucester. The Foundation supports several charities across Exeter, including Citizens Advice, who organised our team. So it was buckets, card readers, and enough layers of clothing to survive a February afternoon outdoors.

The response was overwhelmingly warm. People gave. People smiled. People paused to ask which charities the Foundation supports. Taps of cards, clinks of coins, words of encouragement. The generosity of strangers.

At half-time, we took our buckets into the hospitality boxes.

In one, we were immediately welcomed. Wallets appeared, phones came out, a young boy dropped his change into the bucket with quiet concentration. Generosity as reflex.

In the next, we managed perhaps half a sentence before one of the party waved us away. No words, no explanation. Just a hand raised and lowered, and the very expectation that we would leave.

As I said to my collecting companion: clearly hadn’t read the manners manual.

To be fair, people decline for all sorts of reasons; and that’s entirely OK. A polite “not today” is a perfectly good sentence; nobody minds hearing it. What stays with you is not the refusal but its texture. The wordlessness, the brevity, the assumption that a gesture would do where even a few syllables were called for.

But proportion matters. One silent wave against an afternoon of open wallets and kind words. The Foundation and its volunteers had a good day. The generous far outnumbered the curt, as they usually do. Most people are decent. I keep finding this out, and it keeps being reassuring.

Don’t do it (part 2)

A blistering piece in the FT this morning by Cat Rutter Pooley (paywalled) – City lawyers cannot hide behind the law over Russian clients – on the dilemma for law firms.

And a very clear message that this should not be a dilemma,

But mealy-mouthed statements should not be allowed to provide cover for a lack of real action. Firms do not need to shout about dropping Russian clients. It nonetheless needs to be clear that they will not carry on as they were before Russia invaded Ukraine.

Lawyers always profit in bad times. You’d be naive to think otherwise.

Nonetheless, how they do it is what really matters. And how we will judge them.

The really difficult bit – don’t do it. Stop acting. Walk away.

I was very struck by a comment, reported in today’s FT (paywalled), by Vladimir Ashurkov, executive director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, set up by Alexei Navalny,

[M]y experience in international finance has taught me not to expect moral-based decisions by professional services firms.

What are the City professional services firms with links to Russia going to do? What are their internal ethics advisers telling their management boards? What are the pressures they will feel from clients, their staff, their alumni, if they aren’t already? Are they ready to walk away? Are they already looking for the right weasel words?

Who knows? I don’t – but do they?

20 years ago Bill Knight, who had just stepped down as Senior Partner at Simmons & Simmons, wrote an article for PLC titled Practical morality for lawyers. It is still available if you have a subscription. He referenced the then recent financial scandals – Enron, Anderson, Tyco, Worldcom etc. Remember them?

It’s a short article. It is also as applicable today as it was then, possibly more so. It ends with a clear and simple message,

Don’t let anyone tell you that you are not the guardian of morality. We all are. If not, who? Politicians? Now I really feel safe.

If it were only this simple

In the FT this morning I came across this

While declining to discuss specific cases, Leppard, who was commissioner of the City of London Police until 2015 and was awarded a CBE for services to policing, defended the use of deception and undercover surveillance as necessary tactics. “It’s quite lawful to deceive people if you’re doing it for the greater good,” he said . . .

The problem, of which Leppard seems wholly unaware, is who gets to decide how you define ‘greater good’ – and whose.

But then he was once a policeman . . .