Would you trust them? (Dan Kitwood-WPA Pool/Getty Images)

What are the largest challenges for UK politics in 2023? Inflation? Climate change? Vladimir Putin? You’d be a fool to dismiss them. But if we are to get the country into a better place, then here’s another big one: the collapse of political trust.
Two major reports — from 2020 and 2021 — showed a major deterioration in how much the British people trust our leaders. Both analyses go back a long way — to 1986 and 1944 respectively. And, perhaps most alarmingly, both were published before Partygate and the chaos of 2022 — it seems inevitable that trust has nosedived since their release. One is reminded of the claim, by one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters, to have gone bankrupt twice: “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Cynicism about UK politics hovers above the fray — both more important and less urgent than the average passing crisis. But its role is entirely negative, reducing the public’s patience, goodwill, and readiness to “put into” the system — commodities which are vital if you want to change things in a long-term way. When disaffection reigns, the winners are the politicians who have the least integrity: those most willing to flatter the popular notion that bad people run the world.
This eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, with those who genuinely lack scruples attaining high office. Hence the Prime Ministership of Boris Johnson, an abnormally unprincipled figure, who clambered the greasy pole through “boosterism” and “cakeism”, and ended up confirming the electorate’s deepest-held suspicions about the political class. Increase political trust, then, and you reverse the cycle of poor leadership. In the process you become better able to tackle the root causes of the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the refugee crisis, and countless other issues.
Yet before this is possible, we need to ask why trust is low in the first place. And for this to be meaningful, we must address two of the pat-answers often put forward. The first is that suggested by political partisans. This argues simply that the failures of the other side are to blame. In the case of the Left, the story might start with Iraq, and run through to the mishandling of Covid — taking in the lack of financial regulation pre-2008 and the Tories’ austerity and hostile environment policies. In the case of the Right, it may begin with “unchecked” freedom-of-movement and overspending in the 2000s, compounded by failure to meet the “tens of thousands” immigration target, deliver a radical enough Brexit or expel “wokery” from our institutions.
The problem with these explanations is that each pretends the failures they cite were forced through against a groundswell of popular dissent. Or that there was a perfect alternative. Or both. In a democracy such arguments rarely stack up. Many of the blows to trust listed either reflected the public mood or made sense based on the information at the time.
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