How does an activity promote itself into professional status? The three classic professions were divinity, medicine and law, with soldiering also accorded some ambiguous recognition. These professions combined two elements. The first was their recognised command of some branch of skill that could benefit others and the second was professing a moral commitment to abstain from exploiting this skill for the practitioners' own benefit. In order to make this clear, the professional was rewarded with a "salary" so that he (and later she) could concentrate on the skill in hand rather than being concerned with inducements to work. Non-professionals were rewarded with wages, not salaries. They needed to be given incentives, while professionals were thought — ideally — to have no need of such motivation.

This economy of work might well be thought unrealistic, outmoded, class divided and hierarchical, and I think it is. Do plumbers and bricklayers not have integrity? Do they merely practise their craft in response to the pay they get? In fact, there is a good deal of casual "professionalism" in every kind of work, even at the lowest pay grades. If, as I am suggesting, integrity constitutes much of the essence of professionalism, then clearly all of those who are committed to decent conduct, and/or to professing one religion or another, are, in an extended sense, "professionals". They exhibit the essential feature of commitment. The old idea that integrity is to be found only in the respectable professions thus distorts the reality of most lives. We are all, or nearly all, professionals at least in the management of our individual moral agency. We all recognise, even if somewhat fitfully, integrity as a limit on what we shall allow ourselves to do.

The old class-defined distinctions between those who earn salaries and those who earn wages is thus breaking down. So we encounter the paradox that while everyone today is in some degree professional, that very specialisation combining skill and integrity is breaking down in another sense, especially among the managerial classes. It appears that among many of the richer and more powerful figures, only a kind of special wage, or inducement or incentive, called a bonus, can draw the best out of them. Bankers used to be one of the respectable professions, noted for their integrity, but certain species of banker have recently set out in hot pursuit of such "bonuses", often to the detriment of their integrity. And the MPs who have created and often notably exploited a system of allowances exhibit another form of this collapse of integrity.

In these terms, we may well today ask whether Members of Parliament constitute a "profession" in the old sense of profession. I think they do, and so, to judge by the clamorous public response to the problem of misused allowances, does the British electorate. MPs are professionals in the basic sense that the money they are paid (which they apparently think insufficient) is the condition that allows them in principle to exercise their judgment entirely in the service of the good of the country. Seeking what one might call "backdoor benefits" contradicts both the oath of government and the prayers recited before sessions. Many MPs have, of course, recognised this and behaved with propriety.

Events are clues to the deeper currents of our lives. The big question is: what do current scandals involving bankers and politicians reveal about the moral world in our generation? There are plenty of candidates for an explanation of what has happened. Some will be found muttering "greed" while others attack "excessive individualism". The wooden spoon explanation must be awarded to those who think that all our troubles result from the long corrupting shadow of Margaret Thatcher.