Ideas@TheCentre
Legitimation crisis
What happens when the citizens of a country lose trust in those in key positions of authority and responsibility?
When I was growing up in England in the 1950s, there was a widespread (and perhaps slightly naive) faith in the integrity of people in authority. The local bank manager was a man (always a man) of the highest standing. Nurses (always women) were angels of mercy committed to altruistic ideals of public service. The virtue of priests and vicars was unquestioned; ditto the honesty of political leaders. The BBC was the ultimate voice of truth. And if you needed to know the time, you asked a policeman.
Not anymore.
The rot began with the revelations of sexual abuse perpetrated (and then covered up) over many years by priests in the Catholic Church.
Shortly after that, the bankers were exposed as greedy and dishonest, trading in debts which they knew to be toxic, and conspiring to distort market lending rates so they could squeeze out bigger profits and bonuses for themselves at the expense of their customers.
Hot on the heels of the banking crisis came the revelations about Westminster MPs fiddling their expenses. British voters discovered their elected representatives had been embezzling thousands of pounds from taxpayers by claiming to live in houses they rarely frequented, or by submitting expenses for dredging their moat, building a duck house, or even paying for their husband’s porn. Several of them ended up in jail; many more probably should have.
Next came the exposure of serious neglect and abuse in the nation’s hospitals and elderly care homes. One investigation last year reported that hospital patients were being left in their own excrement and denied access to drinking water. Another suggested that nurses with impressive paper qualifications often lacked compassion, a sense of vocation, or even basic caring skills.
Then the BBC came under the spotlight - first, when allegations surfaced of sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile and others on BBC premises, and then when the Corporation responded to criticisms by falsely and recklessly accusing a senior Conservative politician from the Thatcher years of involvement in a child sex abuse scandal without bothering to check the veracity of its ‘evidence’. Meanwhile, the nation’s press has been put through the wringer by the Leveson inquiry which has exposed the grubby practices by which the popular newspapers feed their readers’ appetites for scandal and titillation.
Most recently, it has been the turn of the police. First we learned that, following the Hillsborough disaster in 1989 (when 96 football supporters were crushed to death on overcrowded terraces), officers systematically falsified their accounts to exempt the police from any responsibility or blame. Then it came to light that a cabinet minister forced to resign for allegedly insulting police officers in Downing Street had done no such thing. They’d ‘fitted him up.’ Many of us have assumed for a long time that the cops might ‘massage the evidence’ to ensure that a villain gets convicted, but when even cabinet ministers get ‘stitched up like a kipper’, nobody can feel safe.
Now it may be that those in authority were always flawed. Perhaps the nurses 50 years ago weren’t angels, the local bank manager had his fingers in the till, and the priests were never as innocent as we supposed. But the important point is that we didn’t think this was the case. We respected authority figures back then. We believed the country was in the hands of decent, honest, virtuous people, people we could trust.
That trust has now collapsed as, one after another, the pillars supporting our civic culture have crumbled. It has been displaced by a weary cynicism. Whether a liberal, democratic nation can survive mass disillusion and distrust (what the Marxist theorist, Jürgen Habermas, once aptly called a ‘legitimation crisis’) nobody knows. But I think we’re about to find out.
Peter Saunders is a Senior Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
