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Britain's leaders have lost their way – we need people who put country before self-interest

Britain goes to the polls on June 8 – but will a different type of leadership be on offer to voters? - LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images
Britain goes to the polls on June 8 – but will a different type of leadership be on offer to voters? - LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images

Wanted desperately:Men and women who put country above self and party.

Position details: Run for Parliament on June 8.

Now, more than at any time since World War II, Britain needs strong leaders. Regardless of whether you supported Brexit, or now question whether it is a good idea, the next two years will be pivotal for the United Kingdom.

The country’s shape and size – both physically (given the plausible secession of Scotland) and metaphorically – will be determined by the kind of deals that Britain’s leaders are able to extract from bargaining tables in Brussels, Berlin, Beijing, and Mar-a-Lago. The country needs its best and brightest standing up for the commons.

Given the high stakes, the prime minister’s surprise decision to hold a general elections in June is a potential blessing. It is an opportunity for the nation’s finest to commit themselves to public service in this national hour of need. But instead of witnessing a rush of candidates putting themselves up for the battle, we are faced with an exodus from Westminster. Candidates like George Osborne, who should be staying to fight this most important of fights (not least because people like him helped get Britain here!) are pulling away for more comfortable lives in the private sector. As the going has gotten tough, the “tough” it seems are a lot more content being cheerleaders than real leaders.  

We once exported leaders across the world to build and sustain an empire on which the sun never set – where have all the leaders gone now?

Our schools of leadership are partly to blame for this void. For at least the past 30 years, elite universities in Britain, America, and other parts of the Anglophone world have embraced a peculiar model of leadership – one focused on promoting the service of self over the service of others.

Grappling with an increasingly diverse student body and with the decline of religiosity amongst elites, these universities abandoned their traditional emphasis on moral leadership through Christian values. Perhaps this would not have been such a bad idea if it weren’t for the fact that moral-leadership education was replaced by self-glorification and self-idealisation.

The period of the secularization of great universities was also one of the ascendancy of economics-based thinking – particularly the construct that one’s “social responsibility” within a capitalist system (to paraphrase Milton Friedman) was the pursuit of self-interest. “Greed is good,” as Gordon Gekko famously declared in the 1987 cinematic classic Wall Street.

This dangerously simplistic view of capitalism was premised on a very limited case of utilitarian thinking – one that made economic efficiency the prime objective of a good society. But in that pre-2008 era of unfettered market logic, and as their graduates amassed eye-popping fortunes particularly in finance and banking, simplistic thinking was convenient.

Elite universities saw little reason to temper the enthusiasm with hoary ethical complexity, particularly as they sometimes reaped handsome donations from their wealthier alumni.

Today’s would-be leaders were schooled in this curious conception of duty: self above all else, and the “invisible hand” of markets will lift us all to prosperity.

And so, in this moment of national urgency, we shouldn’t be surprised to see them pursuing “other opportunities” rather than parliamentary service. Osborne, for instance, will serve as editor of the London Evening Standard and as an advisor to fund manager BlackRock, jobs that will together pay him several times more than a Commons salary.  

Leaders are those who mobilise resources to help improve the condition of others. Good leaders are both pragmatic and ethical – they deploy cunning in the service of community. And while leadership is required in all facets of life – at home, in business, and in government – being a public leader is perhaps most challenging, because the collective stakes are so high and the interests so varied.  

Public leadership requires identifying what is foremost in the interest of society. Without a moral education, public leaders are at best rudderless dinghies buffeted by the winds and waves in an ocean of special interests.  

To be a public leader in a democratic society does not mean simply to channel the popular or majority consensus, like some automaton. Rather, it means winning the support of the public based on the quality of one’s judgment and then acting on that judgment in the long-term interests of the country. And sometimes this means discounting the interests of the current cohort of voters for those of future generations.

Invariably, public leaders of this ilk will fail from time-to-time – and, in functioning democracies, they will also risk losing elections. But even so, the obligation of leadership requires that they endure; that they persevere and fight their way from the backbenches or beyond with the quality of their ideas and the courage of their convictions.

In Britain, we are seeing an absurd, almost Soviet-like tradition of vanquishing the losers. Losing front-bench status in the Commons has become an excuse and reason to step away from public service altogether and chase hefty private-sector engagements.

Even through the darkest of his “wilderness years,” Winston Churchill continued to sit in the Commons. And when he lost an election in 1922, which was blamed on an appendectomy, he chased at every opportunity to return to Westminster. And he seemed perfectly willing to abandon political parties if he found they didn’t square with his moral view of the world.

For George Osborne – or, for that matter, Tony Blair, David Cameron, or any of the rest – the June election should be an unparalleled opportunity at a second chance. Articulate a moral worldview (even if from scratch) and make the case with the British public. At the risk of losing again. That is leadership.

Karthik Ramanna is Professor of Business and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, the University of Oxford

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