Most of us experience Broken Britain regularly. We also suffer the current government’s failure to grasp the extent of the damage or what it’s like to live in this dystopia. On learning that the only childhood deprivation our exceptionally wealthy prime minister can recall is not having Sky TV, we can only shake our heads with unsurprised resignation.
But alongside the debris of Broken Britain, something else is also wrecked and this is trust in politics. Our willingness to trust politicians and mainstream politics, has plummeted. The latest British Attitudes Survey shows political distrust at, or exceeding, previous record highs. 45% of Brits now say “we almost never trust governments to put the interests of country above their own party”. 58% say “they don’t trust MPs to tell the truth”.
In the fog
The government would have us believe that tax cuts are the key to winning voters. Three tax reduction budgets having singularly failed to shift the dial. Yet they continue doggedly with this mantra, blind to where voter priorities really lie: repairing our healthcare and other essential services.
The government’s tax focus also ignores the chronic trust malaise that has settled over the nation like a dense fog. Visit any street corner in any town and the bleak, snarling mantra you will encounter most commonly is not about taxation but that ‘they are all the same’. Weary tales of endless broken promises, lies and corruption trip off the tongue. The regular lament is ‘what’s the point? They are all liars, just filling their pockets, in it for themselves’.
Obviously, every precious penny counts for ordinary people in Dystopialand. But what is the point of supporting a party which promises tax reductions when they have betrayed us time and again and proved themselves to be utterly untrustworthy? Why should we have faith in a party who placed us in solitary confinement whilst they partied, who gave our incomes to their cronies, and who posed as harbingers of better times whilst landing us with crippling mortgages and no GP appointments?
They lied.
Politicians are often deemed untrustworthy. But, for example, in the immediate post-war period, during the nation’s massive recovery operation, left and right leaning governments put country before party. And this provided a basis of trust. But since we have moved beyond this post-war moral focus, our predominantly right-wing governments have become decadent, self-preoccupied and corrupted.
The causes of the current trust deficit are clear. Conservative rule over the past 14 years has been an object lesson in the consequences of governments who put party first. Cynicism is a response, not directly to the unfolding economic damage triggered by their policies, but to their endlessly broken promises about rectifying it – on levelling up, transport infrastructure, improved care and NHS services, and the smoking ruins of all the rest.
Of course, it’s the business of politics to promise better times, but when promises are broken over a long period, to such an extent, with such bravura, self-interest, cavalier U-turns, disdain and casual cruelty, distrust becomes something stronger. People feel cheated, exploited and duped. That’s what you see on street corners.
Brexit betrayal
Brexit generated one of our biggest trust deficits. Pied Piper Johnson made huge Brexit promises, conjuring sunny upland futures of extraordinary wealth, independence and control in a land of new beginnings with a revolutionised economy. These promises led us to a dizzily high point of expectation meaning that trust had even further to fall when reality began to hit.
So strong was the Brexit fantasy that, despite its disastrous consequences unfolding before the nation’s eyes, political acknowledgement has been effectively banned. Brexit remains the ‘elephant in the room’ since to speak of it would flag up defeat, humiliation, and the vertiginous collapse of trust it caused. Leave voter distrust has nearly doubled since 2020 to 48%. Scandals such as Partygate, PPE cronyism, and the carousel of third-rate replacement PMs seeking to recover the party’s fortunes, merely hastened the descent of public disillusionment.
The ripple effect
But the most destructive feature of this Conservative legacy of distrust is its poisonous outward spread from perceptions of the party itself to politics in general, encompassing the two main parties along the way. We’ve now reached a state of ennui where both parties are commonly regarded with equal incredulity.
The mainstream media have contributed to this legacy with a clickbait industry of cultivated cynicism in which ‘errors’ across all parties are sensationalised (e.g. the spurious Angela Raynor tax saga). Media ‘scrutiny’ becomes an armchair sport of continually insinuating that the parties are ‘all the same’.
Keir Starmer’s ‘defects’, in particular, have been relentlessly paraded, flogged to death even, by mainstream media of all political persuasions. Time and again we hear commentators floating the idea that he isn’t trustworthy, isn’t inspirational, isn’t cutting through.
But this perception isn’t entirely Starmer’s doing. In the context of a nation which has experienced 14 years of political betrayal, it’s virtually impossible for any mainstream party offering a centre-ground remedial programme for fixing Broken Britain to sound convincing, believable or inspirational. The Conservative-driven miasma of disillusionment that has settled over voters has shrouded Labour too. And the media’s relentless airing of selected negatives enhances, rather than controls this process. So, if people aren’t listening to Starmer this is because they have stopped listening to politicians in general – and he is one.
The Conservative scorched earth approach is a double whammy. They have managed to trash both our economic health and our ability to trust our leaders. But there is also cynical opportunism here. They hoped that when the distrust they had spawned engulfed Labour they could claw back some favour for themselves or, at the very least, ‘take the rest down with them’. But few who don’t trust Labour are planning to switch to the Conservatives. Instead, it’s the Conservatives themselves who are going down fast.
Filling the void
The distrust gripping the nation can be viewed constructively as a crossroad or turning point where we strike out in a new direction. It’s taken 14 years for reality to hit home but the scales have finally fallen from our eyes. Our cynicism is a recognition that this period has been a chimera, a pantomime directed by a posse of excessively privileged elites, versed in the art of gloss, who have systematically patronised and gaslit the nation with nonsense, in the arrogant belief that we will fall for it.
Behind cynicism and disillusionment are always the seeds of a desire to have faith in something, with good or bad consequences. Distrust of mainstream politics expresses itself in a pull towards non-establishment and non-mainstream individuals or parties.
Disillusioned voters cast around for a ‘truth-sayer’, a maverick who can ‘tell it like it is’. And poised, in this moment of extreme UK apathy, is the voice that fills the void – Nigel Farage. Like Johnson in his campaign guise, Farage is the ‘honest, straight talker’, not one of Michael Gove’s debunked ‘experts’, nor the slithering elite who duck and dive, wooing us with their glossy excuses, but a ‘solid man of the people you’d join down the pub’. The current exodus of voters to Reform UK is one example of the bad places where the psychological need to trust can lead us.
Seeds of hope?
But this bad path isn’t inevitable. We can choose a different direction. And the Labour win expected on 4 July is just such an opportunity. Starmer’s Labour party has many issues and a cohort of attackable politicians. But it makes little sense to distrust a new government before it has had a chance to prove itself. We can’t know in advance whether it will succeed.
Nor does it make sense to dismiss the party’s politicians as ‘all the same’. Labour has hallmarks which distinguish it from the current incumbents – it isn’t dominated by privileged elites or by a ‘party before country’ mindset. It’s a different animal with different characteristics and motives that should enable us to shelve our legacy of cynicism. We may, for example, have to take on trust that their plan to reduce NHS waiting lists by using the private healthcare system is genuinely a temporary measure and not a backdoor invitation to US-style privatisation.
On our own now?
There are also pragmatic reasons to put trust in the new incarnation of Labour. We should, of course, evaluate their progress constructively. But if we refuse to trust them on policy, and instead fall back on our legacy habit of corrosive carping and tribal readiness to damn them as ‘all the same’, then we will undermine their chances of success in the huge remedial task ahead.
And if Labour fails, then the message will be that centre-ground politics has failed. At this critical point, extreme solutions become attractive. Traditional centre-ground Conservatism is in a death spiral and the party as we knew it is up for replacement by a new far-right iteration that’s closer to Donald Trump’s US and European populism. Farageism is ready to invade its host, the Conservative Party corpse, and animate it with the new choreography of far-right populism.
So, we need to get up to speed and dump the complacent, comfortable assumption that a Labour failure will merely take us back to the old centre-right. We are entering a very different political landscape and, by Labour’s second term, this position may no longer exist.
If we look across to the uncomfortable right-wing shifts in Europe, the UK is beginning to stand out as an almost lone outpost of progressive, centre-ground democracy.
Labour politicians will wake on 5 July with horrendous responsibilities: the monumental triple task of fixing Broken Britain, and simultaneously fending off the encircling far-right populist hyenas, whilst overcoming chronic voter cynicism. We will need wartime levels of trust in all its aspects – hope, goodwill and confidence – to support these huge repair missions. To preserve our future democracy, it’s vital that we trust Labour’s new centre-left initiative and not be lured off course by the Conservative sirens of disillusionment, cynicism and apathy.
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