Trust in Britain
Speech to launch the Edelman UK Trust Barometer 2023, addressing the challenges in improving public trust in politics.
Good morning, everyone and thank you all for turning up today to listen to me - although it is a mystery why.
They could’ve asked a doctor, an engineer, a headteacher or a judge, to speak to you today.
But no, the folks at Edelman have asked a politician to talk about trust.
I’m not here as an endorser of my host’s research,
nor its commercial organisation.
I am not being paid to attend
I’m here because they were kind enough to invite me and I believe trust matter, and trust-decay has real harm for our society and how it functions.
Lose trust in democracy and democracy dies.
Lose trust in capitalism and it fails too.
The progress of humanity depends upon trust.
Edelman have shown you the what, I want to talk about what we can do about it - not just in my profession, but all of us.
Everywhere, national governments, parliaments and other authorities with their bureaucratised and traditional structures, are struggling to be effective and relevant in the modern world. And they have been steeped in scandal.
Politicians share this timeline of trust decay with a cast of leaders from every walk of life. I will give you a quick recap.
Since the turn of the century, we’ve learned that our leaders, rigged interests rates, laundered drug money, presided over an offshore banking system bigger than anyone thought possible,
forced good companies into closure and destroyed pension funds as they themselves grew wealthier.
Collectively, they oversaw an unprecedented destruction of wealth and the collapse of the financial system.
They watched as life savings placed into investment funds set up by leaders of previously unimpeachable integrity turned out to be Ponzi schemes.
They sold off reserves of gold to compensate for these exercises in corporate greed, while never once convicting a banker.
Our spiritual leaders covered up sex abuse in the Church.
Our charity leaders sexually abused the vulnerable.
Our child welfare leaders have permitted child abuse.
Our Police leaders have allowed predators to wear a uniform.
Leaders of the automotive industry lied about emissions, were imprisoned, fled the country while out on bail and remain fugitives.
The leaders of our water utilities polluted rivers then tried to cover it up.
Global entertainment leaders have faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment and abuse.
Britain’s leading broadcaster falsely accused political figures of being child abusers, while allowing actual abusers to commit crimes on their premises.
Meanwhile, sporting leaders have been caught cheating and doping.
Human rights lawyers have been struck off for misconduct and dishonesty.
And the offshore tax operation thought to be a fraction of the UK economy, turned out to be a multiple of it.
These failings - personal and organisational - are nothing new.
But today it seems it’s not just that things don’t work or that some people are wrong’uns.
There are new layers to trust decay.
The system feels rigged against you.
Some are feeling economic shocks for the first time as has been pointed out.
Consumers feel they have less power.
Some pay a premium for being poor.
Life has gotten more complex.
It is harder to help,
Harder to communicate - to share platforms, to cut through the noise. To understand the world around us, to feel invested and invested in.
Harder not to feel overwhelmed in the face of existential and greyer threats.
Or the dizzying pace of technological change.
We have generational voids - young people are fixated on rewriting or tearing down the past because they don’t believe they have a future.
Older generations want to stop the noise. Stop the constant change. The bull***t (as they see it). Stop their world being turned upside down. Stop their values and institutions being belittled and patronised. These changes, in their eyes, are a type of catastrophe. They have lost the stars to steer by as slowly, the constants and comforts of their youth have disappeared. The high street has been hollowed out. Their childhood heroes have been debunked and their past rewritten. Local has been replaced with national and international. They feel overwhelmed; their world has been Amazonked.
So why this complexity and division?
The spread of a consumer society partially explains this–providing ever more efficiently to our own personal preference. We now have very specific requirements about our food, our work, holiday destinations, cars, clothes, just about everything.
In fact we express our economic franchise far more frequently than we do our political franchise. In politics, we get a chance to vote every five years but in economics we do so every hour of every day.
The rise of the internet means we can join groups that appeal directly to our own beliefs. Extremism can find extremists all over the world. We’re far more connected internationally than ever before. We can find anything to believe in there and people frequently do.
Then there is the growth in media, especially social media that commercially is dependent on conflict – we may have many shared values, but when did consensus ever sell popcorn? Now we have a media which is deliberately controversial and confrontational. We have commercialised conflict. We have specific commentators whose job is to stir things up and the simple truth is that harmony and contentment is not valued by the media.
And nor is it universally popular amongst politicians too.
These forces are all conspiring to make us feel more atomised.
Previously, we were split by gender, sexual preference, profession, location, marital status, education, football club, religion or politics. We are now split further by whether we are vegan, FBPE, BLM, Brexiteer or Remainer, nationalist or unionist, woke or non-woke. Zoomer or boomer.
This complete atomisation means that people do not feel that their values are shared. At best, those with different opinions are abused. At worst, they are cancelled and demonised.
‘We’ have become a million types of ‘they’.
When this happens, trust between groups breaks down.
Some are genuinely afraid.
Afraid of saying the wrong thing or of worse.
Mental health suffered, for some this exhibits itself in a new vice of choice: the paranoia of conspiracy.
Here a few recent gems that have appears on mainstream broadcast this past weekend:
The air-raids in Ukraine are fake, and the sirens are sound effects applied by the Ukrainian government.
Controversial traffic calming measures are not the product of an overbearing lib dem council but a global conspiracy to get us to eat insects.
I am all in favour of livening up local authority transport committees, but there are limits!
The Government is shortly going to start rationing food, and a food rationing app is in development. This is a conspiracy between the government and large food corporations.
Presumably there will be unlimited access to turnips.
And this exploitative monologue:
“Are we simply to be fed on a diet of propaganda right down to the lies about health and food and the climate and war and biology and race until we are so unwell, confused, exhausted and anxious that we don’t notice when they pick the last penny out of our pockets and lock us down in a digital ghetto watched round the clock by cameras and listening devices we pay through the nose to carry in our own pockets. And the rationing of tomatoes.”
And now it’s time for the weather.
Such alarmist nonsense gains credibility from being sandwiched between credible broadcast anchors. People whose loyalties have historically been to their profession and craft.
Falsehood and deep fakes sit alongside information and legitimate debate in your social media timelines.
We can tell the difference though, right?
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An opinion poll a few years ago by Hope Not Hate showed:
- 30% of 25-30 year olds believed antisemitic tropes they saw online.
- 31 % of that age group thought that Covid had been intentionally released as a deliberate depopulation plan by the UN or the New World Order’.
- 29 % thought that the vaccine programme was an attempt to insert microchips into people.
- 50% of people aged 25-34 believed that regardless of who is in government, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together. 50%.
Being a government Minister, having attended Davos, I am clearly part of this group - and I am braced for a post speech social media pile on as to why I am an apologist for a global illuminati hell bent on ending humanity as we know it.
As a former defence secretary and the UK Government’s former defensive cyber lead - I can testify there are enough organisations in the world trying to do us genuine harm, thank you very much, without us having to invent some.
So how can we build trust?
We need to recognise what is driving this.
Conflict and division sells. It is a vice.
Nothing new about that. It is why we all say we hate PMQs but thousands will be tuning in later today.
But so much of the content I take issue with is not about debate. It is about profit. Attracting an audience which is addicted to such theories.
Raise concerns about the harm being done and you are “one of them”, or a ‘free speech denier’.
You’ll be told? ‘What is your problem? I was just asking the question, I just want to know what is your connection to the Rothchilds?
Work in broadcasting and care about compliance and ethics? and you are and I quote, “Ofcom’s b**ch”.
Division and disagreement is not bad.
In fact I’d argue it is good. Its present does not make societies and communities weak. It makes them strong.
We’ve just seen China does well on the lack of a trust gap. Nope not much division there.
I don’t want to live in China.
The UK is quite good at taking on and adopting new ideas partly because it listens to minority voices. The future always arrives as a minority. That’s sometimes where you can hear tomorrow.
Because alongside different views and ideas there is a recognition of shared values.
An understanding of what Freedom really means
It is about rights but also responsibilities.
Free societies need responsible adults.
The value of free speech is not just in your freedom to say something, but also in our ability to listen and learn something. It is also the freedom to change your mind and the freedom to be uncertain.
The absence of that freedom damages our ability to be effective, our wellbeing and we should never take that freedom for granted and we should recognise when it is under attack.
We need new ways of helping people be digitally literate, and think critically.
Government is acting on this:
We are improving the effectiveness of the House of Commons.
We have the Online Safety Bill and workstreams and the defending democracy task force.
The Prime Minister is on a mission to restore trust, starting with clear priorities and accountability.
He understands that trust is earned.
But we recognise something else is required too.
It is about the relationship between trust and values.
You see, politicians spend a lot of their careers seeking the parenthesis.
Searching for values that we share, that we care about.
These might be the love of our families.
The desire for health and prosperity.
It might be the concern for our environment or our children’s future.
A shared venture, a common project.
What we all have in common.
The future of Britain isn’t decided by politicians, it’s decided by the character of the British people. Their character is the national destiny.
This fills me full of hope because I believe in the character of the British people. They’re sceptical. They don’t like bullies. They’re fair-minded. They’re thrifty. They don’t like greed. They like to help. They have a sense of humour. They are tolerant. They love freedom.
My late friend Jo Cox said: “We have more in common than that which divides us.” Her words are freighted by the manner of her death. If the Commons had a motto it should be that.
Politicians have an important role to play. We have convening power and we can, when we choose to, bring people together and we should.
Before we find answers, we must find shared challenges.
Common ground.
Truths we know to be self-evident.
Where you find common ground, you will find trust.
Establishing shared values starts with being prepared to defend them.
That is what we can do as politicians.
It is what we must do as citizens.
You see you need not trust the former but we all have to trust the latter.
Thank you.