Article

Character

Comment

Leading

18 February 2025

4 min read

Carney’s call for character still resonates now more than ever

In both business and politics, the vocation of public service is at risk.

Emerson Csorba

Emerson writes on geopolitics. He is also a business executive and holds a doctorate in theology.

Mark Carney sits between two other speakers, holding a mic.

Mark Carney on the campaign trail.

On May 27 2014, a group of business, political and faith leaders gathered in London for the inaugural Conference on Inclusive Capitalism.

As a 23-year-old Masters student at Cambridge University at the time, it was a defining moment, this in the final months of my first stint in the UK. One of three young people invited, I had prepared carefully and waited impatiently in line in central London on a boiling summer evening.

The most poignant moment of the conference, in hindsight, was less the attendees or the historic venue, but rather a particular speech that I continue to reflect on a decade later.

The speech in question was one given by the then Bank of England Governor, the Canadian Mark Carney, and it was called ‘Capitalism: Creating a Sense of the Systemic’.

It was, and remains, one of the most impressive speeches I have heard, and whose message is as important as ever.

It is a message that Canadians today, as well as others living in Western democracies, need to hear as much as at any time in recent history.

In the wake of the financial crisis, Carney raised a point that is seldom asked in business or political circles - that of responsibility, and more specifically, of vocation. It is as follows:

"To build this sense of the systemic, business ultimately needs to be seen as a vocation, an activity with high ethical standards, which in turn conveys certain responsibilities."

And soon after: "It can begin by asking the right questions. Who does finance serve? Itself? The real economy? Society? And to whom is the financier responsible? Herself? His business? Their system?"

He references Michael Sandel, the philosopher who in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets takes aim at the "skyboxification" of American life.

The example used by Sandel is taken from the sport of baseball. In the not-too-distant past, people from across all walks of life sat together in the stands, the low ticket prices allowing baseball to be the great unifier across divides.

Today? Expensive box seats see the rich and poor seated in different areas, the rich even physically above - looking down on - others. The same goes for ice hockey, soccer, or other sports which no longer see diverse families, across income levels, sitting together.

In short, if you impose a price on a good or increase the price of a good significantly (baseball tickets), the nature of value of that good changes, often irreparably so. Lost is a sense of fairness, and a reduction in the potential to repair divides.

In short, the idea of public service - that to be first, you must come last - seems increasingly bizarre to people.

We live in a world where immediate gratification and personal enrichment are particular cultural values. If there is any tell on the character of President Trump and his new White House, it is the launch of the Trump and Melania meme coins before the Presidential Inauguration: politics used for the advancement of personal interest.

In short, the idea of public service - that to be first, you must come last - seems increasingly bizarre to people. (A conversation with a young person several weeks ago struck me especially on this front, in which I had to explain that the purpose of politics is to serve others, not yourself.)

Carney's 'Creating a Sense of the Systemic' speech is therefore a reminder of what we need from political leaders: people who, outside of compelling rhetoric focusing on putting their nations first, actually consider their responsibilities toward others and who take these responsibilities seriously.

These responsibilities are vocations to which we are called. The responsibilities are not about us but rather are part of the system (made up of people and institutions) of which we are a part, and beyond.

In Canada, the potential election of Mark Carney as Leader of the Federal Liberals, and in turn as Prime Minister, is a step in the direction of a public service focused on responsibility and vocation. It is a step toward a more vocationally oriented public service, which our world needs.

If Carney is to channel the same energy, poise and focus of this May 2014 speech, then there is considerable potential in seeing the Canadian Federal Liberals win a future term, seeing off his ascending populist foe. This is because our world is, deep down, yearning for political leadership based on real character, sense of purpose and responsibility beyond the self.

For Canada, it is a focus on responsibility, a sense of the broader system and our calling as Canadians in the world that can serve as a foil to the leadership in the United States.

What we lack in resources can be made up for in character, with Prime Minister Carney as the catalyst for success the world will be watching closely.

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Article

Comment

Justice

Trauma

10 February 2025

4 min read

Can life go on after wicked acts of violence?

We can fulfill the law in more ways that just the legal sense.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A montage shows three people, an older man, a young man and young woman.

Ian Coates, Barnaby Webber and Grace O'Malley-Kumar.

Family handout.

It’s an all too human instinct to seek vengeance against psychopathic killers, especially those murderers of children and youngsters. If we’re honest, we can all feel a primal urge to “get our hands on them”, to inflict, in retribution, the pain, death and suffering that they delivered on their victims and their families.

That must be why, shortly after his sentencing, the murderer of the three little girls at a dance class in Southport - Elsie Dot Stancombe, Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King – was reported to have been beaten to a pulp by fellow prisoners. It went momentarily viral with the help of the likes of former support-actor Laurence Fox, who writes in short sentences because he thinks in them, claiming he’d heard it “on the grapevine”.

The story was only slightly undermined by such giants of investigative reporting getting the jail where the convicted prisoner is incarcerated entirely wrong.

It’s a kind of wishful thinking, if a herd can be said to think. It’s also why we have a rule of law in what we aspire to call a civilised country. It’s there to bring such perpetrators to justice, while ensuring that justice isn’t impaired by the wholly understandable desire of victims’ families to tear their killers to pieces and the knuckle-dragging, social-media lynch mob who think they know what justice looks like.

Hard for anyone to know how to respond to this. It’s perhaps particularly challenging, for fear of being intrusive and trite, to see how a religious faith can respond. But I want to have a go. And to avoid those charges of hand-wringing solipsism, I won’t speak of hope and love and life in this context, which so often feels like throwing a handful of seeds into a raging storm.

Rather, I think I want to ask what fulfilment of the law might look like. The full 240-page report into the killing In Nottingham in June 2023 by a paranoid schizophrenic of two 19-year-old students, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and separately a 65-year-old man, Ian Coates, has been published. Not unnaturally, the headline theme has been that the killer “got away with murder” through a series of chaotic failings by the NHS, in its discharges of its patient into the community, in its absent risk management and failures to medicate him adequately.

Culpability for these crimes is a powerful driving force. But there’s something else going on here. After the report’s publication, the two young victims’ mothers, Sinead O’Malley-Kumar and Emma Webber, went on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour for an extended interview. And, yes, of course they share a campaigning spirit to change the health system so that this kind of tragedy is less likely to happen again. But Emma said that they’re “not witch-hunting with pitchforks” and Sinead observed with crystal clarity that “systems are made up of people”. This was about human as well as systemic change.

The go-to journalistic word here is “dignity” and, yes, these two mothers have it in bucket-loads. But, as I say, there’s something else. Struggling to identify it, I come up with the phrase that life goes on – and not in its platitudinous sense of bucking up and getting on with what’s left to us. There’s a feeling of continuation, not just of ending, dreadful as those endings are for families.

Asked by interviewer Anita Rani (who, in passing, was first class) what sustained them, where their strength came from, Emma answered in a heartbeat “Barnaby”, adding quickly in a heartbreaking throwaway: “It’s that invisible umbilical cord.” Similarly, Sinead said she was strengthened on a “bad day” by the knowledge that she was “doing it for Grace.”

They know, absolutely, that they can’t change what happened, but they’re there for each other. And not just these two mothers. Bereaved parents from Southport have been in touch, as they said, in “awful solidarity.”

A solidarity unconfined to this dreadful cadre of the violently bereaved. When these two mothers visited Nottingham for a vigil for their lost children, they expected “maybe 50” to turn up. In the event, there were “thousands and thousands” in Market Square. One of the two said simply: “There’s more good than bad out there.” Life goes on. Again, not in the sense of pulling your boots up and making the best of it, but in the sense of acknowledging that this is not all there is, that we’re working towards something infinitely better.