Rushing to judgement

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No-one yet knows exactly what drove Tyler Robinson, allegedly, to shoot Charlie Kirk last week, although that hasn’t stopped various people declaring the reason with absolute certainty. Trump, along with Musk and sundry other unhinged Americans, have claimed that it was the ‘radical left lunatics’ (which seems to be code for everyone from ‘only moderately right-wing Democrats’  to actual socialists). Some even went so far as to demand the designation of the Democrats as a terrorist organisation and the immediate incarceration of all party members, on the basis that the action of one man who probably wasn’t a Democrat anyway was enough to make them all guilty. Others have suggested that the shooter was a Groyper (no, I’d never heard of them either) and that Kirk was shot for not being right wing enough. A third theory is that the killing was much more personal and less political than that, because the shooter may have been in a relationship with a transgender person, something which was anathema to Kirk. Time will tell.

If only half of what I’ve read since the shooting is true, Kirk seems to have held what many of us would consider to be some deeply unpleasant and hateful views. They don’t justify shooting him, of course – we shouldn’t even need to say that – but he was highly polarising, and made plenty of enemies. There are, though, some double standards at work here. It’s only a matter of days ago that Trump openly celebrated the extra-judicial killing of 11 people aboard a boat which he claimed was trafficking drugs to the US. Even if he was right about their intentions (and the only thing stopping me giving him the benefit of any doubt about that is his usual inability to tell the truth about anything), the crime which they were committing was not one which would be punishable by death in the US itself. Arbitrary application of capital punishment by presidential whim without any process at all does not sit well alongside a condemnation of an assassination on US soil; it implies that the objection is not to killings per se, but is based on drawing a distinction between victims based on the president’s opinions.

The argument for the warning-free attack on the alleged drug smugglers is that killing 11 of them will prevent many more deaths from drugs amongst US citizens (of whom, apparently, around 300 million out of a total population of 340 million were killed by drug overdoses last year – according to Trump). Balancing good and evil is a thing which governments do, but the problem is around certainty. There’s a parallel with the old historical dilemma: if someone had assassinated Hitler in 1936, or Stalin in 1924 – before either of them had presided over mass murder – would history see the assassin as a hero or a villain? We can never know whether, or to what extent, history would have been changed, because we can only ‘know’ about the history that actually happened. Killing people as a precautionary measure against the drugs they are smuggling, or the hate they are spreading, in an attempt to prevent harm which might or might not be caused in the future, is a dangerous approach which ultimately leaves all of us open to an arbitrary application of ‘justice’. That’s as true for actions taken by governments as it is for those taken by lynch mobs or lone individuals – trying to draw distinctions merely blurs a clear moral line.

Free speech and values

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There seems to be a general consensus amongst politicians that banks should not be allowed to refuse to serve customers on the basis of their views, but I wonder how robust that consensus is, and how general its application. We know, for instance, that Nigel Farage certainly believes that businesses should be allowed to refuse to provide services to those who offend his own particular sense of morality, since this was actual UKIP policy when he was its leader. Can we really draw such a clear distinction between views on homosexuality and views on politics as supporters of Farage would suggest (the former being, in their eyes, purely a ‘moral’ rather than political standpoint)? If staff or owners of some companies providing services to the public were to have the legal right, as he suggested, to refuse to provide some of those services on the basis of their interpretation of their religion, should staff in other companies really be obliged to deal with racists and misogynists? At what point do political views diverge so far from socially accepted norms that it becomes reasonable for staff to refuse to serve those who hold them? At the risk of finding myself in breach of Godwin’s Law, would Coutts (in an admittedly completely hypothetical situation) be justified in refusing an account to a Hitler, or a Stalin?

It suits Farage and his supporters, of course, to paint this as a simple issue of freedom of speech, in which Farage, rather incredibly, emerges as the victim. In truth, it’s rather more nuanced than that. If a company is allowed to subscribe to a set of values (and most of them claim to do so these days, apparently) rather than simply being compelled to serve anyone and everyone who meets a set of strictly commercial criteria, then expecting that company to facilitate those who seek to undermine or negate those values defeats the objective. There is a case for compelling any organisation providing services to the public to use only commercial criteria and forget about ‘values’ – but that isn’t the case that Farage and his ilk are making. And nor, I suspect, is it what many would want. He has – not for the first time – succeeded in dominating the news agenda on a completely false prospectus.

Assessing the straws

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The trouble with the last straw is that you can never be certain that it is truly the last one until the camel’s back has already been broken. And that, in a sense, is Sunak’s conundrum. For a man who proclaimed integrity as one of the guiding principles of his government, even appointing Suella Braverman into a job from which she’d been sacked just days previously for a breach of the ministerial code was a high-risk decision. Allowing her to continue embarrassing him on a more-or-less daily basis is like adding more and more straw to the camel’s load. It's not the weight or importance of each individual straw that matters, merely its marginal impact on the existing load. It's a particular problem when he himself is engaged, as Peter Oborne has pointed out, in following the Johnsonian path of daily lies, untruths and distortions. Which particular scandal will be the one which forces the camel to its knees, breaking its back in the process?

Many of Braverman’s allies have been quick to point out that in the scale of things, exceeding the speed limit isn’t the biggest of scandals (although cabinet ministers and Tory MPs giving the impression that it isn’t really a ‘proper’ crime at all isn’t going to be conducive to the government’s own messaging on road safety). The seriousness of asking publicly-paid staff to assist in getting her special treatment depends on details which have yet to emerge – a polite request, greeted by a ‘no’ followed by immediate acceptance of the answer and the reasons would be a different matter to a repeated instruction and a refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer. And the apparent encouragement / instruction of an assistant to lie looks rather more serious, although it could still turn out that said assistant was acting on his or her own initiative, rather than following ministerial direction. Lack of honesty merely adds to the suspicions. And every straw adds to the load.

Sunak’s indecisive initial reaction looks like a combination of waiting to see if it will blow over and the politicians’ tendency to outsource their sense of morality to someone else. It sometimes seems that many of them really believe that morality is about whether they are explicitly found to have breached a particular rule rather than taking responsibility themselves to behave in a manner which leaves them beyond reproach. Just for once, I almost agree with Jake: It doesn’t need the PM to initiate a formal ethics investigation into the incident, and the PM is perfectly capable of looking at the facts and deciding whether what has happened is acceptable or not. And doing so more or less instantly. (Although I disagree with Jake’s apparent belief that the incident should be judged on a stand-alone basis rather than judging the perpetrator on her overall approach). The fact that he hasn’t done so – and seems incapable of doing so without a period of dither and delay – underlines the extent to which he is a prisoner of factions within his own party. It’s not clear that he still knows or even cares whether the camel is dead or not yet.

Not being unlawful isn't the same as being acceptable

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Most people will have some sympathy, initially at least, with the protests from Sunak and his supporters that attacking his wife is an unfair political tactic. He, after all, is the politician and therefore fair game, not her. Their protests might have a bit more credibility, however, if they didn’t come just days after the UK government decided to sanction the alleged (they don’t even seem entirely sure of that) step-daughter of the Russian foreign minister on the grounds that “those benefiting from association of those responsible for Russian aggression are in scope of our sanctions”. It's a simple fact that any close association between individuals can mean that someone benefits from the wealth or activity of another, and there are few associations closer than marriage. Sunak might not need his wife’s money, but any income she receives is part of his household’s income and must therefore be open to a degree of scrutiny. A Chancellor who claims to oppose tax avoidance yet whose household benefits from it ought to realise that he has questions to answer; the fact that he doesn’t tells us a lot about his sensitivity (or lack of) to what others might think.

By the same token, his marital arrangements are, in principle, solely a matter between the two of them, but when the spouse of someone who thinks he should be PM is openly declaring her intention to return to India where she claims to be domiciled, he really shouldn’t be surprised if people start wondering about the extent of his own commitment to the country which he seeks to govern. With that ambition in mind, his protests about opposition politicians would sound a great deal more sincere if it wasn’t almost certain that the information had been leaked by someone on his own side determined to stop him achieving said ambition.

He and his supporters are claiming that neither he nor his wife have done anything wrong, and in legal terms they are correct. But is merely being ‘legal’ enough? It isn’t just Sunak; time after time politicians caught out doing something which others might feel is perhaps a little dodgy respond by denying any wrongdoing and stating that ‘no rules were broken’. Confusing what is right or moral with what is legal has become increasingly common as politicians outsource any sense of morality to whoever makes the rules. Being legal, however, isn’t the same as being ‘right’; the fact that something hasn’t yet been legislated against doesn’t make it acceptable. It is not at all unreasonable to expect those who govern us, or seek to govern us, to give at least a little bit of thought to whether what they are doing is not only ‘not currently banned’ but also stands up to scrutiny in terms of what the governed might see as reasonable. They do, after all, keep telling us that a sense of fair play is one of the great British values which allegedly unites us. It does not, however, seem to be one of the values which they think is important in terms of their own actions.

The moral compasses are still as broken as ever

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What makes the Bullingdon Club so infamous is the members’ habit of smashing up the restaurants in which they hold their ‘events’ and then paying up on the spot for the damage caused. The act of paying for the damage, in their eyes, somehow makes it all right to go around damaging other people’s property as and when the urge takes them. In the process, it draws a clear line between the wealthy who can afford to destroy first and pay later and the rest who can only stand back and watch as years of work and investment is destroyed in front of their eyes. And it reduces everything to its monetary value. But, when the club leaves the premises, the owner is not out of pocket, and that, apparently, makes it OK.

It’s an attitude which has direct parallels in the case of the Downing Street refurbishment undertaken by a member of that infamous club. In this case, it’s not so much physical property which has been damaged (although we can’t, yet, discount the possibility that the nearly-new furniture removed from the flat has been skipped) as the rules, conventions and laws under which things are supposed to happen. But, at the end of the day, the PM has repaid the costs out of his own pocket (allegedly – it’s still not clear how the money found its way into his pocket in the first place), and that, apparently, makes it OK. It is, in his eyes, the end result which matters, not the process of getting there. I’m sure that he’d be equally forgiving of a bank robber who, when caught, repaid all the money. At that point, the bank has lost nothing, so why make a fuss?

There is another parallel as well – when they smashed up those restaurants, the money for reparations may well have come from their own pockets at the time, but it was almost invariably put into those pockets by someone else, usually the parents. And the expectation that that he can and should be absolved of all blame by using someone else’s money to pay for the consequences of his actions is another aspect of the Downing Street saga. But what is there, in his background and life experience, which would lead him to think otherwise? This is a man who has gone through his entire life without ever having had to face up to the consequences of his own actions, a man who has repeatedly found that lying brings rewards, not punishments (literally in the case of many of his made-up and paid-for articles over the years), a man who has always got away with ignoring the rules which apply to others, a man who has demonstrated to his own satisfaction that the world takes him at his own estimation of himself.

It isn’t just him, though. A whole generation of politicians, and not all of them in the Conservative Party, have outsourced any sense of morality and judgement to the people who make the rules. They don’t need a moral compass, just a rule book, and if the rule book doesn’t explicitly ban something then it’s permitted. Johnson has, admittedly, taken that a step further in arguing, effectively, that as long as the outcome meets the letter of the rules, then following the rules to get there is an unnecessary hindrance on his freedom of action. But the people who put him there and defend him daily, the members of his party, are equally culpable. Their moral compasses seem to be incapable of telling them whether something is right or wrong, merely whether the public care or not. If a sufficient proportion of the public don’t care (as measured by opinion polls and elections) whether their leaders are honest or not, if they don’t care about the integrity of their leaders, then honesty and integrity don’t matter.

Perhaps the palpable anger of the PM yesterday at the temerity of anyone daring to question what he does will mark a turning point. Even some of his most loyal supporters in the media seem to be turning against him. It would be nice to be able to say that they’ve all discovered a sense of morality and outrage, but I can’t help but feel that it has more to do with deciding that he looks like a loser after all. It’s not as if any aspect of his character was ever unclear in advance.

Morality in trade

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There’s nothing particularly new about the idea that morality, standards, and values have a role to play in deciding whether, and with whom, to negotiate international trade deals. Whilst trade usually promotes greater prosperity, the impact of that on the way a country is governed is a lot less obvious. On the one hand, increasing prosperity may help to legitimise a regime and encourage people to be less critical of their own government; on the other, people who aren’t spending their whole lives scratching a bare living can find they have more time for involvement in debate and politics, and greater international links can help them to understand better the freedoms which they don’t have. So, whether increasing trade helps to suppress or encourage opposition to unpleasant regimes is far from being clear-cut – both sides in the argument can draw on some evidence for their point of view.

The question has come to the fore over recent weeks as the UK attempts the hopeless task of replacing what were, until this year, extremely close trading links with near neighbours with necessarily looser links with countries much further away. And there are some pretty unsavoury regimes involved. Some MPs in all parties have been questioning whether the UK should continue to seek trade deals with countries run by authoritarian regimes, countries which outlaw dissent, and countries which don’t respect human rights or international law. The concerns are valid; not all countries can be depended upon to uphold the same standards, and the issue, at its simplest, is to what extent any country should be signing deals with countries which adopt lower standards than itself.

The UK has, though, come up with a novel approach which could eliminate the question, and which is entirely in line with the Brexit way of thinking. It is that the UK should lower its own standards to match more closely those of the regimes with which it wishes to do trade deals. More authoritarianism, less democracy, clamping down on protest and dissent, opting out of human rights legislation, and breaching international treaties and laws – these are the core elements of the current government’s programme. Whilst this might remove any need for moral considerations when the UK is negotiating trade deals with similarly unsavoury regimes, that English sense of exceptionalism which characterises the current government’s approach may be preventing them from seeing the slight little problemette which may arise as a consequence, which is that other countries may simply add the UK to their own lists of countries with which signing trade deals raises some serious moral issues. Believing that morality in trade is a uniquely British value, and that morality can therefore be defined as being whatever the UK does, might just turn out to be as silly in practice as it sounds in theory.

Tory morality stops at the border

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According to reports, the Foreign Secretary is today urging the UN Security Council to seek temporary ceasefires in war zones across the world in order to allow the citizens to be vaccinated against Covid-19. In principle, calling for ceasefires is always a worthy thing to do, and it’s impossible to be critical of the call itself. However, it’s hard to interpret a call for ‘temporary’ ceasefires as not suggesting a rather relaxed attitude to death by bomb or bullet once the population have all been properly vaccinated against one specific disease. Perhaps he has it in mind that any temporary ceasefire creates a basis for extension and a longer-term solution, although if that is what he is thinking, he hasn’t said it.

What he has said is “Global vaccination coverage is essential to beating coronavirus … We have a moral duty to act, and a strategic necessity to come together to defeat this virus”. That to many will sound more like pursuit of the interests of the UK than those of the war-torn countries themselves. Indeed, the report suggested that he would warn that 'allowing Covid-19 to spread in areas without a vaccination roll-out will increase the risk of new variants taking hold', confirming the impression that he’s more worried about uncontained outbreaks generating new variants which will spread back to the UK than he is about protecting the people in the war zones themselves. His words about moral duty might sound very idealistic, but his idea of a moral duty to protect people seems to stop at the UK’s border. It shouldn’t really surprise us; it has always been evident that the UK’s current governing cult was going to be a selfish rather than altruistic actor on the world stage. The only surprising thing is that they’re being so blatant about it.

Legality and morality

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The Panama Papers have highlighted for me an increasing trend amongst politicians, bankers etc. to transfer all responsibility for deciding on the morality of a given action to the legislators in parliament.  Anything which isn’t specifically illegal is thus automatically deemed acceptable.  The phrase “no wrongdoing” is glibly equated with “no criminal activity”. 

The law company at the centre of the scandal has gone one step further in defending itself by drawing attention to the fact that it’s never been charged with any offences in 40 years of activity.  True, but the parallel which came to mind was with a very successful bank robber who’s never been caught.  Never having been caught isn’t at all the same thing as never having committed any criminal acts, yet that seems to be the essence of their defence.

Cameron in particular is squirming under the pressure, and rightly so given his previous condemnation of others for similar activities.  His latest line – that the infamous trust wasn’t set up to avoid tax, merely to allow trading in dollar-denominated securities – is an attempt to tell us that the tax-avoiding consequences of the decision to set up the trust in that way are merely some sort of ‘incidental’ result of an action taken for an otherwise entirely proper reason.  Perhaps from his perspective that sounds credible, but I doubt that many will be convinced. 

It’s bad enough when the bankers fall back on the simplistic equation of morality and law, but for ministers and legislators, it’s a much bigger problem – because, after all, they’re the ones who make the law.  For them to defend an action on the basis that they themselves haven’t actually legislated to outlaw it simply doesn’t wash; rather, it makes the offence worse.

It’s probably unreasonable to expect that legislators and ministers, drawn as they are on an almost random basis from the population, will be on average any more honest or less venal than those outside parliament.  And given the electoral processes, there is no easy way for the electors to keep them honest, not least because there can never be any guarantee that any replacements will be any better than those they replace.  But we can and should challenge the simplistic assumption that morality and legality are one and the same thing.  And especially so in the case of those making the laws.

Cleaning the money

Tweet It seems that not a week goes past without the exposure of another scandal by one or other of the banks.  Over the last week, it was HSBC’s turn to come under the spotlight.  I suppose it was inevitable that Labour politicians in London would go for the personal angle and start attacking Tory minister Lord Green.  He certainly has some questions to answer, and they need to be asked; but Labour’s tactics also succeed in diverting attention from the substance.  It’s become more about who did it than about what was done.

But the what deserves more attention.  The accusations are twofold, in essence.

Firstly, it is suggested that the bank went out of its way to find ways around trade embargos and sanctions in order to continue to make profit from certain regimes, notably Iran.  And secondly, that the bank engaged in money-laundering on a massive scale, assisting various drug barons and gangsters to turn dirty money into clean and untraceable money, even if only by turning a blind eye or having weak systems rather than through active collusion.

In reality, how different, in moral terms, are the bankers from the gangsters and drug barons whose money they have been laundering?  They’re all trying to make money for themselves at the expense of others.  What’s the moral difference between simply ignoring the rules and laws on the one hand and trying to find ways of subverting them on the other?

What some of the various e-mails and statements seem to be suggesting is that the bank wanted to be seen to be abiding by the letter of the rules, without allowing the rules to actually achieve their purpose – and that it was doing that in pursuit of profit.  The pursuit of profit, in short, outweighed any moral responsibility to assist the relevant authorities in achieving their clearly-stated aims.

That subjugation of morality to the pursuit of profit is something of a common factor in a number of the recent scandals, and equally common is the defence that what was done was ‘within the rules’.  From duck houses to money-laundering, the defence is the same one.  It raises the question as to whether, and to what extent, we can or should expect companies or individuals to follow any moral imperatives at all.  Or is life really just about following the rules, and not expecting anyone to make any wider judgements?

There’s a problem either way.  The problem with leaving the rules lax and expecting people to exercise a degree of morality is that there isn’t an agreed definition of what is or is not moral.  What, precisely, is the standard of morality to which we wish them to adhere?  And how do we set it?

On the other hand, ever tighter rules merely encourage people to believe that moral behaviour is anything which is permitted within the rules, and that if something isn’t specifically prohibited, then it’s OK.

On top of that, there is of course the knowledge that ‘if we don’t do it someone else will’, and competition of that sort drives people to push the rules to the limit.  In that sense, the whole of our banking system is a bit like a gigantic game of ‘Prisoners’ Dilemma’, with everyone trying to second-guess what everyone else is going to do.

Expecting those whose primary goal is to make money for themselves or their employers at the expense of others to do any more than abide by whatever rules we set for them is probably unrealistic.  If we want to change the way people behave, we need first to change their perception of what it is that they are trying to achieve.  Pursuit of personal advantage simply doesn’t do it.

More than beheading required

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It’s not so very long ago that we were being told that the UK’s top bankers had such ‘scarce and sought-after’ talents that they had to be paid huge salaries and bonuses for fear they might take those talents and abilities somewhere else.  It turns out that the immense talents being rewarded amounted, in some cases, to an ability to win when gambling with dice that they themselves were able to load.  It’s the sort of talent which, in any other walk of life, would be rewarded by a spell as a guest of Her Majesty rather than by a large bonus.

The spectacle of the big cheeses at the top of Barclays trying to hang on to their positions when everyone outside the banking sector can see they have become untenable is unedifying.  Their behaviour is not unusual, however – we’ve seen often enough in the past that people can have difficulty taking a sufficiently objective view of what they’ve done.  And that hasn’t been restricted to bankers - it's not dissimilar to some of the noises that we heard from MPs when the expenses scandal was at its height.

I’m sure that heads will be rolling before too long, and no doubt some will take pleasure in seeing them roll.  It’s not enough though – and there’s a danger that seeing off a few miscreants will be enough to remove the matter from the front pages.  Part of the problem is that the heads that roll will be replaced by other heads, and the probability is that the new heads will be drawn from the same small pool.  (After all, all those involved believe that the necessary talents are ‘scarce and sought-after’, don’t they?)

Does anyone really believe that the practices exposed last week were confined to one bank?  I, for one, don’t - and the news today that RBS had sacked some staff involved in similar activities confirms that it's more widespread than a single bank.  Staff in the banking sector move effortlessly between employers – at its worst, this means that those who screw up for one institution simply get appointed by another.  And the language in which some of the published e-mails were couched makes it clear that those involved thought that what they were doing was perfectly normal, and could see nothing wrong with it.

The Governor of the Bank of England has called for a culture change in banking.  That’s a bit better than merely removing a few heads, but I doubt it will be enough either.  Chris Dillow suggested last week that banking, by the nature of the beast, attracts precisely the sort of people who are likely to chase the money, regardless of morality.  Even were there to be an influx of new people coming in, it's more likely that they'll be swept up by the existing culture than that the culture will change.

In an editorial on the subject last week, the Western Mail suggested that it is ‘human nature’ to exploit weaknesses in the system for personal benefit.  I’m not convinced about it being the nature of all of us; but certainly for those driven first and foremost by personal greed, it’s a fair comment.

In any event, neither chopping off a few heads nor standing on the sidelines demanding culture change is likely to have anything other than a very short term effect.  The sector needs tighter and stronger regulation to ensure that it behaves in the interests of the economy and society as a whole. After all, if 'we didn't break any rules' is part of the line of defence, then changing those rules has to be part of the response.

We’re unlikely to get that, though.  It was notable that Cameron claimed a huge victory last week when he kept the UK out of the proposed new EU banking regime; a regime which might actually have helped by setting some common standards across the EU.  He'd sooner keep the UK out of tighter regulation in order for the bankers to make money at the expense of those who impose tighter regulation.  He, and his friends and donors, have more to gain by a bit of moral condemnation now followed by a swift return to business as usual.

Is it right?

Tweet At Nuremburg, the defence offered by some of the accused was that they 'were only following orders'. It's on nothing like the same scale – and I certainly wouldn't want anyone to think that I'm really comparing either the individuals or the situations - but the recent penchant for saying that 'I was following the rules' does seem to suggest a broadly similar mindset.

The mindset that I'm referring to is one that allows us to abrogate all responsibility for deciding for ourselves whether something is wrong or right. Whoever wrote 'the rule book' has already decided that for us. But at what point did our own personal or collective sense of what is right and wrong get replaced by a set of rigid rules? How and when did the idea take hold that anything goes as long as it isn't specifically banned?

The most recent example, perhaps, is the furore over the massive early pension given to a man who presided over the collapse of one of our biggest banks. It's a 'contractual obligation', it seems. But 'Is it right?' is the question that everyone seems to be asking.

The government, from the prime minister down, seems to be asking the same question – but there is an element of double standards here. It seems to be OK for the politicians – Labour and Tory alike – to say that there is a moral dimension as well as a legal dimension when it comes to the claimed misdemeanours of someone else (such as the rich banker, for instance). But when it comes to their own actions, they're just as quick to hide behind 'the rules'.

The Home Secretary's absurd claim that the back room of her sister's house is her main residence, whilst the family home in Redditch is a second home was 'checked with the officials' and 'within the rules of what's allowed'. Yes – but is it right?

Nick Bourne's purchase of an i-Pod was 'cleared by the officials', and 'within the rules'. Yes – but is it right?

The Tories have accepted vast sums of money from the speculators and gamblers who have done so much to wreck the economy. They've 'done nothing illegal'. Agreed – but is it right?

The gamblers and speculators themselves, the people who've been betting against the interests of ordinary people, have 'done nothing wrong'. They claim that 'the regulators didn't tell them that they couldn't'. Agreed - but is it right?

Certainly, there's a moral dimension to the huge pension being paid to Sir Fred. But that same moral dimension applies in a whole host of other areas as well. Politicians can't really expect to get away with saying that what they've done is alright because it's within the rules and then expect a higher standard of morality from others.

I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that we all have a responsibility to satisfy ourselves that what we are doing is right and proper, as well as simply being legal. Hiding behind a set of rules simply can't absolve people from the responsibility to use a little bit of judgement as well. No more than following orders.