Trust

No lasting institutions can be built without trust. When I worked in Russia, I saw that a low trust society could be very creative when it came to entrepreneurship, but that it was impossible to build banks, insurance companies, pension funds etc. That was an opportunity for my City of London and other Western clients because they could truly offer services no locals could.

Russian friends found it hard to grasp that I worked cheerfully without giving much thought to my pension provision, for example, having delegated that to strangers in institutions to whom I regularly remitted my savings.

Trust across borders doesn’t work for government though. Historically you could argue that the British Empire provided cross-border governmental services that allowed some low-trust societies to be better governed than ever before or since, but however true that might be it’s terminally unfashionable. Certainly, it’s not a service likely to be offered or accepted again! 

The only meaningful promise Keir Starmer’s government has made is that it will rebuild trust in government.  One of the most worrying things I’ve noticed since returning home from the post-communist world is the extent to which UK voters have lost faith in government and its institutions. Not that I think they’re wrong. Their analysis is entirely justified by the facts, but my experience — particularly in Russia — has taught me just how dangerous it is when trust dies. 

So the PM was quite right to set himself this goal, but he’s actually made things worse. You don’t win hearts and minds by demonstrating contempt. You will never win trust from people you do not trust yourself. 

It seems our government, police and media (acting in concert in a way that itself undermines trust) lied systematically to the British people in the wake of the Southport outrage. The BBC “fact checked” a rumour that the attack was inspired by Islam, for example, and declared it to be untrue. It still may be, of course. Maybe the attacker was just Islamo-curious, but that definitive declaration was a lie.  

Perhaps our state lied to try to keep the peace. A mob had attacked a mosque on the not entirely rash assumption that a terroristic attack against small children indulging in haram activities was probably inspired by Islam, as most terrorism now is. By covering up the suspect’s Al-Qaeda terror manual, perhaps the government hoped to calm things down. 

There are two problems with that. Their lies were always going to be detected and it would then become harder for them ever to calm an angry mob again. In the unlikely event of a Buddhist terror attack, their declarations on the subject will never now be believed.

The second and more important problem is that they’ve worsened the trust issue the PM correctly identified. Perhaps the only thing he’s been right about since he took office! We now trust government less than we did a year ago. Less than a government we hated so much we devoted an entire election to destroying it — even at the cost of giving a minority of economically-illiterate, authoritarian voters an enormous majority.

They are all scoundrels and liars. They are all on the make. They can’t be trusted. But once trust has died to such an extent it’s a long hard job to rebuild it. These amoral rascals — with their Machiavellian calculations about releasing the news just before a hugely controversial Budget in the hope of swamping it — are clearly not the people to do it. So we’re on a dangerous slippery slope towards the kind of low trust society where nothing good can be achieved. That’s very worrying indeed. 

The key question is this. How are we going to get decent human beings to run for parliament or work in the civil service ever again? Because if we can’t, we’re done for.