Following the recent outrage over MPs' expenses, Sean Carey talks to Gerald Mars, who provides an anthropological take on the scandal.

Gerald Mars, a social anthropologist, has written several books on occupational crime and deviance including Cheats at Work and Workplace Crime. He is currently honorary professor at the Department of Anthropology at UCL and also works as an independent consultant. Here he talks to fellow academic Sean Carey about fiddling and fraud in the UK and elsewhere.

Why do people fiddle?

Most jobs as they are formally defined are relatively rigid but to make them tolerable and operate efficiently human beings are very good at introducing flexibilities of one sort or another – in fact, there is often an informal agreement between management and workers to allow this. Now everybody knows that there is a degree of elasticity in what they can get up to in their own job but they tend to think quite differently about what other people can legitimately do. In other words, the trouble starts because people tend to have two sets of perceptions about the same kinds of behaviour -- the inside perception about how they think about themselves and the outside perception of how they think about others. Put simply, as I said in my book Cheats at Work, one man's fiddle is another man's perk.

OK, but why do some people not fiddle?

Well, there are always people who are ultra cautious and highly moralistic and are very careful about what they are willing to get involved in. Often these people just don't want the worry involved in fiddling or they can imagine the possible consequences of their actions somewhere down the line which puts them off. On the other hand, there are others who positively enjoy the buzz and the tension involved in trying to beat the system. But these are really psychological variations between individuals which is why you get quite a range of actual behaviours in any particular social context. But the main thing to bear in mind is that it is the way a job is organised that determines the range of possible fiddles.

Is fiddling found in all cultures or only in advanced economies?

In many traditional, small-scale societies based on agriculture where face-to-face relations are dominant the choice of jobs isn’t wide anyway – where most people use a plough or a hoe there is no great mystery about what's involved in work and so everything is out in the open and very transparent.

But fiddling is a particularly prominent feature of advanced economies because in these types of societies work and other roles are compartmentalised – there’s a complex division of labour, in other words -- which makes it possible for people to hide what they get up to to a greater or lesser extent. Of course, how these behaviours are judged will vary between cultures. I'll give you an example. Around 20 years ago I worked as a consultant for a Nigerian parastatal body and became friendly with the director-general. One day, I raised the question of corruption in the country and he told me that what someone from the UK classified as corruption was not how it was perceived locally. "What I call corruption is putting large amounts of money in a Swiss bank account for my own personal gain," he told me. "But I don't call it corruption if the resources at my disposal are redistributed to help people I know."

Now, that's interesting because what someone in his position is responding to are the calls and demands of kin and neighbourhood. And that's considered legitimate in a society like Nigeria where there is a significant gap between those who have access to resources and those who don't. In fact, one of the ways that makes the society work is for people in positions of power to redistribute to those who are less well off.

So what do you make of the current outrage in the UK over MPs who have been asking for reimbursement for anything from a floating duck house to church donations as well as flipping homes to avoid capital gains tax?

Well, the comparison here is not with the simple agriculturally-based societies that we talked about earlier but other European countries like Italy. Italians, for example, will be laughing their heads off at the fuss surrounding British MPs because first, in their country the fiddles are much greater and second, they are expected and accepted. Put simply, in many cultures people are not perturbed by fiddling. Having said that, I should point out that every fiddling culture sets limits on what is acceptable and it’s a threat to everybody if someone goes well beyond what is normally tolerated.

But an important point in all of this is that you tend to find that in Roman Catholic-oriented cultures like Italy the concept of the split self is dominant. This means that someone can behave quite differently in different roles without doing damage to their public reputation. The result is that if somebody like Silvio Berlusconi is caught up in sexual shenanigans of one sort or another it is not really perceived as interfering with his official political role as prime minister of the country.

However, the pattern is very different in Protestant-oriented cultures like Britain. Here the self is indivisible and if one part is contaminated it contaminates every part. This is why any excessive behaviour on the part of MPs is perceived so negatively by members of the British public. Another factor in all of this is that MPs are peculiarly insulated from mainstream society by virtue of their status -- the prestige, the trappings of office and all the rest of it. And it hasn’t helped their cause that MPs have a long-standing tradition of writing their own rules, which in the absence of monitoring by outsiders, lends itself very easily to a high level of fiddling. The general rule is that peer groups left to their own devices will tend to look after their members’ interests very efficiently. That needs to change -- and quickly of course otherwise trust in the political system will disappear.

So the Westminster village has been too much of an enclave, then?

Indeed it has. But another reason why people are outraged is that there has been a massive increase in differential levels of pay in UK society generally. This has also been amplified by the celebrity culture which as well as being all-pervasive strongly emphasises status and income distinctions. This pattern means that there is increasing resentment towards those on board the gravy train from those who aren't. And comparisons arising from the credit crunch haven’t helped MPs either. So if there is a chance to attack members of the political establishment for perceived financial misdemeanours the public seizes on it and puts the boot in with great vigour. However, I should point out that the basic formal salary of our MPs at £64,000 is very low relatively considered and it is the sensitivity of the UK electorate about paying them that has been compensated for by the undercover expenses racket.

It’s interesting, nonetheless, that a significant proportion of the beneficiaries of the fiddles carried out by MPs have been family members, especially sons and daughters, who have sometimes received salaries for little or no work as well as rent-free housing. British MPs, then, come across less as party functionaries and more like Nigerian general managers in many ways.

That’s right. And we should always bear in mind that kinship is always a basic aspect of human social organisation. And in our culture parents have obligations to other family members especially children. It's also worth bearing in mind that there are always contradictory expectations in any role that people find themselves in -- obligations to the job have to be balanced by obligations to kin and other considerations. British MPs are no different to anyone else in that respect.

So do you think that the Great British public as well as the commentariat have been rather too quick to pass judgement on parliamentarians?

Yes. MPs are in a very vulnerable position now but they’ve only been doing what lots of other people get up to. For example, I have met a large number of senior medical consultants who habitually travel second class on the train and then claim for a first class ticket in order that they can pocket the difference. They see this as a perk of the job derived from their legitimate status and expertise. Of course, from another perspective it amounts to fraud. But don’t be surprised if those same medical people are castigating their MPs for fiddling their expenses!

One final point: in the last few days the spotlight has focused on the claims made by personnel in the upper echelons of the BBC -- anything from private Cessna jet flights for the Director-General to a bottle of Krug Grande Cuvee champagne for Bruce Forsyth’s 80th birthday—all paid for at the license payers’ expense. No doubt this kind of scrutiny will extend to the NHS and other public bodies in the not too distant future. Should we welcome the ever-growing remit of the audit culture, or should we have reservations about it?

But nothing that I’ve read about perks enjoyed by senior BBC personnel strikes me as being outrageous. It’s not unreasonable in our culture for a grateful employer to give a posh bottle of champagne to mark someone’s 80th. And the more accurate comparison with the BBC is with other media empires because what goes on in these organisations often remains largely hidden from view. Just look at the excesses that Conrad Black got away with for years when he controlled Hollinger International which was a public company! It seems to me that the real danger is that there are some groups which want to use the expenses story as a way of attacking the BBC. And the reason why this furore has surfaced now is very interesting. It seems pretty clear that anyone who has a grudge against any state or quasi-state institution – that is the right-wing or a commercial rival – will use these sorts of media stories to chip away at their legitimacy. That could be very dangerous for British society.

Dr Sean Carey is Research Fellow at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (CRONEM) at Roehampton University.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website