by Rushworth M. Kidder

According to chaos theory, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can influence a tornado’s track in Texas. But can a $600 bill for horse manure convulse the Mother of Parliaments, threaten a government, and help extend a global recession? Apparently so, given the moral outrage now seething through the United Kingdom.

The manure tab — along with invoices for mouse poison and sunflower seeds, worth another $6.30 at today’s exchange rates — was submitted as a parliamentary expense by David Heathcoat-Amory, a backbench Conservative in the House of Commons, to maintain the gardens at his second home near Glastonbury.

By itself, the Glastonbury grift would be inconsequential. But as part of a pastiche of revelations published in recent weeks by one of London’s most respected newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, it has become part of a scandal that has gripped the British conscience with unrelenting force. The newspaper’s stories have detailed the expenses claimed by members of Parliament (MPs) under rules that allow them to recover costs for maintaining second homes in London. According to the newspaper, scores of MPs have claimed reimbursement for items ranging from cleaning a country-house moat and purchasing a trouser press to completing major renovations and covering excessive mortgage payments. Some members, by switching their second-home designation between various properties, effectively have used taxpayer funds to upgrade and sell homes — and, in at least one case, to avoid paying capital gains on the sale.

Outrageous? Evidently. The picture of high-living public servants fiddling their expense reports couldn’t have come at a worse moment, as their constituents struggle through a severe economic downturn.

Historic? Profoundly. Last week’s resignation of Michael Martin over this issue marks the first forcible removal of a sitting speaker of the House of Commons in more than 300 years.

Economically troubling? Apparently. Standard & Poor’s, the credit rating agency, lowered its outlook on Britain to negative for the first time last week, noting not only a growing national debt but swelling public uncertainty in the run-up to the next election, due by mid-2010.

Politically transformative? Quite possibly. Polls suggest that the scandal, which is tainting the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal parties alike, is ginning up new interest in the country’s far-right British National Party and the more moderate U.K. Independence Party.

But illegal? Here things get tougher. Under Westminster’s rules, many of these expenses were completely legal. Others were apparently so commonplace that they easily slipped by under the everyone-else-is-doing-it test. In any case, the fiscal impact is minute: Rolled together, these payments are merely a rounding error in the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s accounts.

But that’s not the point. The dazzling significance of this development is precisely its butterfly-wing smallness. Students of chaos theory, noting that tiny changes in initial conditions can have enormous long-term impacts, like to explain that a boulder balanced on a mountain peak could roll into any one of several different valleys depending on a half-inch adjustment to its starting position. At Westminster, similarly, even a small deviation of Parliament’s attentiveness — given the international leverage of London’s financial markets — could theoretically spell the difference between a short and a long recession.

If Parliament had been able to focus its energy for the last two weeks on global economic progress rather than local constituency outrage, would London still have its triple-A outlook from Standard & Poor’s? Absent this scandal, would a majority of voters have remained loyal to one of the nation’s two major parties, rather than invoking Shakespeare’s towering curse — “a plague o’ both your houses!” — and perhaps edged the nation closer to the multiparty chaos plaguing so many parliamentary democracies? Would British subjects have retained a greater modicum of trust in the ethical standards of their public officials?

By its very nature, public trust is ultimately reflected in public sentiment. And in the end, it is public sentiment that will determine the course of this recession. How and when consumers decide to spend — how they execute billions of choices as they perch like boulders on the peaks of millions of family budgets around the world — will shape the course of our collective future. But consumers only spend when they believe the economy is healthy enough to let them replenish their personal coffers. And that belief grows directly out of their trust that politicians will do the right thing — a trust that, over the last two weeks in Great Britain, has been shattered.

Maybe flaps over corruption, even about things as slight as Glastonbury manure, really can change the global economy. Maybe a small moral deviation in the initial conditions of a dynamic economic and political system really can make a long-term difference. Maybe, in other words, these British butterflies are proving something we’ve long suspected: that in ethics, as in chaos theory, it really is the little things that matter most.

©2009 Institute for Global Ethics

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