Honestly, not a lot has changed (From York Press)

Honestly, not a lot has changed

12:21pm Monday 30th January 2012 in Columnists By Sue Nelson

WOULD you pocket a fiver you find lying in the street? Or would you hand it in to your local neighbourhood policing team?

Do you think it’s acceptable to have an affair if you’re married? Maybe you do as long as you don’t get found out.

Do you always buy a bus or rail ticket? Or do you carry a “floating” £20 note in your top pocket to pay your on-the-spot fine if you’re caught banged to rights by a ticket inspector, like many apparently law-abiding citizens do on Tyne & Wear Metro because a monthly ticket is £40 and you’d be pretty unlucky to be caught out twice?

How often do you throw a sickie at work and then spend the day shopping with your mate? Several miles away from the office, of course, just in case you bump into a workmate who, there again, might be doing exactly the same thing as you.

Have you ever bumped into someone’s car in a car park and driven off without leaving your details, hoping that no-one else saw or heard what you’d done?

Well, according to research by the University of Essex, more of us are tolerant of this dishonest culture than we were ten years ago. And young people are apparently more likely to be accepting of this and similar behaviour than their elders because they no longer have role models to look up to.

Given that the red-topped so-called “news” papers are awash with stories about “celebrities” nefarious goings-on it's hardly surprising is it?

Apparently, 50 per cent of respondents to the university’s online survey said an extra-marital affair was never justified, compared with 70 per cent a decade ago. Which pre-supposes that the other half think getting up to naughties with other than your wife or husband can be vindicated.

Only one in five of us think it’s wrong to pocket a fiver found in the street with the rest of us seemingly advocating a “finders keepers” mentality. Yet a whopping 85 per cent condemned benefit fraud compared with 70 per cent in 2000. Talk about double standards. But is any of this that much of a surprise?

Some of us talk about the rose-tinted good old days when the sun always shone, everyone was happy, men tipped their hats politely at women while holding doors open for them, neighbours were running in and out of each other’s houses borrowing cups of sugar, and the local bobby would hand out a clip on the ear instead of an ASBO.

It wasn’t all skipping through sun-kissed meadows though was it? Forget the Dunkirk spirit – crime rocketed in the Second World War with the blackout providing perfect cover for criminals.

Picking up fivers in the street? According to social historians, some people thought nothing of picking up a wireless or jewellery found lying about on the pavement after an air raid because if they didn’t someone else would.

Burglars would kit themselves with an air raid precautions (ARP) warden’s helmet and armband and break into shops when no one was looking.

And because the ARP warden was seen as godlike in the exercising of civic duty, law-abiding citizens would dutifully help load up the getaway van, assuming the goods were being taken into safekeeping.

So if we’re more dishonest now than we were ten years ago what did that make us Brits 60 years before that? Not that different to what we are now, perhaps. For there will always be good people and bad.

And that fiver will still get picked up off the street and pocketed. Not that many of us lowly souls have money to chuck away these days, unless you’re a banker with a massive bonus, but that’s another story...

TALKING of dishonesty, how many of us used to yell “liar, liar pants on fire!” in the school playground?

Well, you can’t any more. For last week was the annual No Name Calling Week, which aims to eradicate harassing and bullying in schools. And calling people names.

It’s an American innovation, of course, and seeks to use educational activities involving kids, parents, teachers and school staff to be nice to each other in schools across the country.

Will it catch on here? I doubt it. Because I’ve got a message for the person who scraped into our parked new car and then had the cunning audacity to wipe mud over the damage to hide it before disappearing without a word – you’re a miserable good-for-nothing scumbag. Oh, and dishonest too.