| 7 mins read
There is no lack of competing post-mortems accounting for the striking failure of the Conservative Party in the election, but most are unconvincing. Some are trivial, some egregiously self-serving and others shallow or implausible. Trust is the most frequently mentioned single word, which does make sense. Successive polls over the past decades show that trust in British government and its leaders has fallen to rock-bottom levels. For example, the IPSOS Veracity Index for the UK in 2023 finds that 10 per cent of adults trusted government ministers to tell the truth and 9 per cent trusted politicians generally to do this. This places both groups at the very bottom of a list of 31 occupational groups in the country. Nurses are at the top of the table with a score of 88 per cent.
It is helpful to focus on trust, but most election commentary seems to assume that deep distrust is the prime cause of strong dissatisfaction with the government. It is not. Trust and distrust are useful short-hand ways of describing the mood of the public but they do not explain it. To say that people voted against the government because they did not trust is not very different from saying that they voted against the government because they did not like it. This would inevitably lead to the question ‘Yes, but why didn’t they like it?’ Trust and distrust are symptoms of political health and political malaise, and just as doctors use symptoms to diagnose illness, so we must use trust as a symptom to get at the underlying causes of the public mood.
Evidence from around the world shows that trust and distrust are primarily responses to two kinds of powerful political forces. The first, as one might expect, is government performance: is government competent; has it maintained the standard of living and the quality of life and safety that citizens expect; are public services and policies effective and reliable; is the tax burden fair and commensurable with these standards?
Most attention of government success and trust focuses on policy performance – services and taxes – but a second set of causes are even more important. They concern not the impact of public policies, but the political processes used to make political decisions, form public policies and implement public services. What matters most for high trust is not the policies made but the way they are made and whether they are seen as legitimate or not. To generate trust in a democracy it is essential to have processes that are seen to be accountable, legitimate, fair, transparent and, especially, free of corruption.
Corruption in government breaks almost every procedural principle of democracy – justice, fairness, rule of law, transparency, abuse of power – and almost every study that considers it finds that it goes hand-in-hand with distrust. Corruption, in turn, is closely linked to economic and social inequality and the rule of law. Politicians who act as if they are above the law are sure to generate widespread distrust. A fair and proportional election system is also associated with trust, so a government with a huge majority but only 34 per cent vote share has a problem. It needs to continue as it has started by hammering home its claim to represent the whole country while recognising that voters are not fools and know well enough when this is not true.
Countries with a growing national income and rising standards of living can tolerate a certain amount of corruption and inequality on the grounds, true or false, that they grease the wheels of industry and are necessary for wealth creation. But a combination economic decline, growing inequality, poor public services and corruption in high places will surely result in low and declining trust.
In recent decades Britain has suffered from a strong combination of exceptionally poor performance and seriously faulty processes. In fact, these two have marked both the public and the private sector in recent years as illustrated by, among many other things, partygate, cronyism, the mismanagement of Covid, Brexit, the NHS and schools, alongside polluted rivers, train services, the Grenfell tragedy, Windrush the post office scandal, and huge bonuses for CEOs, even the unsuccessful ones. The feeling that the government has put party before country has spread, even worse, the feeling that a few political leaders have put their own interests first. That they have acted as if they were above the law has fuelled public anger. Cover-ups and reluctance to apologies have compounded the problem. On more than a few occasions the government has acted to restore justice only when compelled to do so by public opinion.
The bottom line is the revival of trust is government is dependent upon a two-pronged attack on policies and processes. One without the other is not enough. Both are hard up-hill tasks, but it may be somewhat easier to deal with processes simply by avoiding the excesses of previous administrations and putting pressure on the private sector to avoid its worst transgressions of the past. A sense that the government is acting legitimately and in the interests of the country and that leaders are telling the truth will encourage the trust necessary to implement policies that result in a healthier economy and a more effective array of public services. People who believe the government is legitimate and trust it are more likely to accept policies, even if they do not agree with them. The problems are easier to analyse than solve, to be sure, but a plan to restore just and proper political processes will help to implement policies that improve trust.
