Have you seen anyone dodge a fare recently? You don’t have to make many bus trips in London before someone sidles on through the rear or middle doors without tapping their bank card, phone or oyster card. In the absence of tapping there’s usually tutting from the commuters and passengers who queued and tapped properly, orderly, as they should.
In the grip of a continued cost of living crisis it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the average person skipping a £1.75 charge for a bus journey. It’s harder to be sympathetic to those that exploit loopholes consistently, like the former Blackrock MD who played the same card trick every day for years, not tapping in at the start of his journey (a rural station in East Sussex with no ticket barriers), only when he arrived at Cannon Street in London. It saved him about £14 a day on the cost of a single fare. He was caught and then settled out of it, paying £43,000 to Southeastern railways.
Are you sympathetic to him? If you are, you’re in a minority. For 40 years, people in the UK have been consistently unsympathetic to fare-dodging. Here’s the boring chart for this edition of Slow Futures.
The data is from a suite of values orientated questions asked by the World Values Survey and European Values Survey. The questions ask respondents how justifiable something is, from a scale of one to ten. A score of one means the respondent believes that thing is never justifiable. A score of ten means it’s always justifiable, in other words, it’s hard to think of a situation in which it wouldn’t be ok. When we analyse this data, we tend to group the responses into bands. Scores of between one and four go into a group of people who have a dim view of that particular activity.
Interestingly, in all sorts of ways, we’re just as unforgiving of perceived misdeeds as we were decades ago. The chart below shows how attitudes to cheating on benefits, cheating on tax and accepting bribes have changed over time. I’ve added fare-dodging back in as well, just for fun.
We are not, it seems, relaxing when it comes to forgiving others’ misdeeds. We’re just as likely to see fare dodging, someone accepting a bribe or people claiming benefits they’re not entitled to as condemnable behaviour as we were in the past. In the case of cheating on tax, we are now substantially more likely to condemn this than we were. In the 1980s, around one in four people were reasonably relaxed about people not paying what they should in tax. Today, less than one in ten would be sympathetic.
There is very little prospect of these attitudes softening in the future. Continued economic hardship will mean limited sympathy for those who’ve in some way cheated to get ahead. Increased scrutiny of individuals and organisations will uncover more misdeeds, fuelling a cycle of scandal. We’re not a forgiving bunch. We’re likely to stay this way.
What does this mean?
We’re sticklers for the rules, even more so than we were in the past. Behaviours that break the rules are less likely to have a grey area then they did – less sympathy, less acceptance, more condemnation
Individuals in the public eye will continue to receive intense scrutiny and zero sympathy for any perceived misdeeds. In the last month, a former Prime Minister has stood down as an MP after an investigation by his peers found he mislead parliament over rule breaking during the pandemic. Although supporters of Boris Johnson (absolutely no relation) might feel that these are small reasons to end a political career, they are entirely in keeping with the public mood.
Businesses have just as much to lose as individuals, particularly as attitudes around tax evasion harden. That risk might be even greater as accusations of profiteering and greedflation grow.