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ANALYSIS
THE TRUST GAME
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED
DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: David Walker
Producer: Zareer Masani
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
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Broadcast Date: 20.11.03 2030-2100

Repeat Date:
23.11.03 2130-2200
CD Number: PLN 344/03VT1046
Duration: 2736
Taking part in order of appearance:
Bernard Jenkin
Conservative MP
Tessa Jowell
Secretary of State for Culture
Baroness Onora ONeill
Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University
Dr. David Eastwood
Vice-Chancellor, University of East Anglia
Sir Nigel Wicks
Chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life
Pippa Norris
Lecturer in Comparative Politics, JF Kennedy School,
Harvard University

David Halpern
Cambridge sociologist, on secondment to Strategy Unit in
Cabinet Office

WALKER: When people tell pollsters, I dont

trust that Tony Blair, are they damning a system of government or just
expressing their unhappiness about the war or his other decisions? Iraq
and the Hutton inquiry do seem to have been feeding deeper
discontents, making 2003s principal political theme trust thats to say
lack of it.
JENKIN: Voters tend to distrust politicians,
are right to distrust politicians. Politicians making promises are like
Greeks bearing gifts: theres a motive behind it. What is so depressing
at the moment is the promises have clearly been broken and no one
seems to mind very much.
JOWELL: Im all for informed scepticism; it
keeps us under pressure. There should always be that creative tension.
Do we really want to be ministers presiding over a government where
people declare themselves to be satisfied? I hope we never get to that
point. What is important is that that scepticism doesnt tip over into
cynicism where they feel that the people they have elected are not being
truthful and dont see the world as they do.
WALKER: Culture secretary Tessa Jowell,
and before her Tory MP Bernard Jenkin. Theyre leading members of
the British political class and, as you heard, theyre anxious. Are we
witnessing some fundamental shift in allegiance or legitimacy,
endangering parliamentary democracy? No, say some: measured trust
is still not as low as it was in the early 90s. Besides, the phenomenons
visible in other countries its part of the condition of commercial
societies: if its caveat emptor in the high street, why not also in public
affairs.
Perhaps we should look askance at the very concept of trust, grand
sounding but actually a ragbag of specific discontents. Beware loose
talk, says Cambridge philosopher and former Reith lecturer Onora
ONeill
ONEILL: Weve been preoccupied with a
fairly trivial notion of trust where trust is identified with attitudes.
Thats, for example, what the MORI polls look for, and they ask you
questions that you would never dream of answering in real life like do

you trust greengrocers, do you trust undertakers? Trust taken seriously

and intelligently is not a matter of do I have some feeling about
something, but what judgement have I made about whether I will place
or refuse to place my trust in somebody for some purpose. Were much
more specific and discriminating and intelligent in the way we place
trust than the discourse of trust has suggested. And indeed where we do
claim to have a lack of trust, its very often that we are baffled that
were not getting the sort of evidence we need to place and refuse trust
intelligently. If I say do you trust other motorists, youd quite likely
answer you cant trust them with your life. In fact you cross the road
every day.
WALKER:
Theres a lot of basic trust still and
its trust in system we cross the road when the green man lights up.
Lord Huttons a kind of green man. People smother pollsters with their
tales of discontent, but dont they mean the war, the weapons and the
way the Blair government has behaved, not parliamentary democracy or
its in-built correctives, such as independent-minded judges. They cant
complain about not knowing how were governed, especially after this
summers orgy of inquiry. Historian David Eastwood is vicechancellor of the University of East Anglia.
EASTWOOD:
There is a paradox in that the
grounds on which the case is made that there is a crisis of trust arises
from greater transparency on the part of government. So if you take,
for example, the war with Iraq, you have intelligence documentation
published, you have a vote in the Commons, and then you very swiftly
afterwards have an inquiry I mean albeit with a rather specific remit
to which the Prime Minister gives evidence. Now it seems to me there
isnt an easy or obvious historical parallel to that, and quite a lot of the
data which are now in the public domain and the information which is
in the public domain and the basis for speculation is historically the sort
of information which would come out after the thirty or fifty year rule
rather than within six months of the ending of the war. And therefore
what we see laid bare and I think Hutton would be a good example of
this is we see laid bare political processes which, those of us who
understand political processes, arent altogether surprised by. But it
reveals a texture of politics, a way of doing political business which
many voters are surprised by.
WALKER: Knowing what ministers and civil
servants are up to doesnt, self-evidently, make us love them more.
Were hearing here the puncturing of what was once a great white hope
of liberalism, that openness in political life would lead to public assent
and deeper confidence. Seeing isnt believing, says Baroness ONeill.
ONEILL: Unfortunately, we have substituted
for communication something which is only tangentially related to
communication, which is transparency. Now transparency, as you
know, came into the public debate with the thought that it would reduce
secrecy. And thats perfectly true: if you disclose more documents, you
reduce secrecy. But the way in which transparency is now
implemented, where institutions flood the websites with documents, is
of course overwhelming for the ordinary citizen who cant begin to
follow, read, comprehend, let alone respond to it. Its one of the things
that makes a mockery of so-called public consultation.
WALKER: Does that make you rather dubious
about those who claim that some great excess of freedom of
information would in and of itself engender more trust?

ONEILL: Freedom of information is highly

ambiguous. If you imagine freedom to obtain true information, then it
might be helpful for trust. Unfortunately thats not what freedom of
information means. The way its used nowadays, it is more or less
equated to freedom of self-expression regardless of truth or falsity,
evidence or lack of evidence.
WALKER: So, freer information wont in and
of itself do much for trust, though Professor ONeill may be a bit soft
on the public, who are often lazy and passive. To save them the effort,
there now exists a number of bodies, whose purpose is to gather and sift
the evidence for political performance that Onora ONeill was
demanding. Weve a menagerie of commissioners and regulators to
corral the politicians and, you might think, assure the public. With a sea
of allegations of sleaze lapping at his feet in the mid-1990s, former
Tory prime minister John Major created the committee on standards in
public life, now chaired by former civil servant Sir Nigel Wicks.
WICKS: One of the essential elements is
independent surveillance. For virtually every public body there needs
to be an agency for some outside scrutiny of that body, and I think you
can give confidence to people about the working of public office
holders if there is an element of outside scrutiny.
WALKER: Can scrutiny go too far and begin
to interfere with the normal processes not just of politics but, again
harking back to your own experience, of public administration which on
occasion deserves some protection from, dare I say it, prying eyes?
WICKS: This raises the issue of
proportionality. For example if youre a member of a public board,
how much of your private interest do you have to disclose? I think you
have to look at those virtually on a case by case basis, but the burden of
action has to be on disclose; the burden is not on not disclose. There is
the other point again is efficient administration going to be inhibited
by too great a degree of transparency? Let me go back to my old job as
a civil servant. I am sure the journalistic community would have loved
to have seen interchanges of memorandum, minutes within the Treasury
when we were trying to make a policy, giving advice to the Chancellor.
Now if we had to publish all those things as we did it in real time, I
think policy-making would not be as good because we wouldnt be as
frank.
WALKER: So those Treasury mandarins
should be allowed to operate behind their closed doors because they
possess expertise. Trust should follow from the asymmetry of
knowledge between us and professionals, giving them space and letting
them get on with it. But all the recent trends have been in the opposite
direction. Public service professionals are nowadays skewered by
performance appraisals, league tables and the paraphernalia of
accountability, a visible sign of mistrust. Onora ONeill.
ONEILL: One of the things that trust enables
one to do is, so to speak, to economise on the labour of doing a sort of
investigation and security check on everybody and everything we deal
with. The fact is that we will never each of us be in a position to follow
everything and we always have to rely enormously on other persons
telling us a simplified version of what is the case. Every time you go to
the doctor, every time you have a builder in your house, you have to
rely on his or her expertise. Theres no way round it. An assumption
that one can avoid that has been one of the most excessive costs of
taking what I regard as rather stupid conceptions of accountability too

seriously. Managerial accountability, as I said, is fine in its place, but

its just stupid to think that you can quantify everything and produce a
simple league table and a ranking so that no complex judgement is
needed.
WALKER: Whats at stake is whether that
kind of trust in expertise can ever or ever again be offered to
politicians. Whether its a skill set or a disposition or merely a linguistic
facility, there is something special about the business of politics and
hence its practitioners. If you knew what was wrong with you, in Onora
ONeills example, you might go straight to a chemist rather than a GP.
If we governed ourselves, rather than entrusted the business to MPs or
councillors, thered be no need for elections. She makes a good point
about economising on our time and attention. But heres a paradox. In
consumer societies, you might think wed relish a division of labour in
which political representatives got on with it, just as in the ads, this or
that company will save you the effort of having to do it yourself.
But we dont. The barometer of trust, says Sir Nigel Wicks, moves and
has lately been heading south.
WICKS: I dont think there is a selfequilibrating dynamic in this. Those in public office have to work all
the time to establish trust and to renew trust. One generation of public
office holders cant rely on the credit in the bank put there by previous
generations of public office holders. One of the brand elements of our
country is good standards in government. But that is not a complacent
statement, we constantly have to work to maintain it. I believe public
expectations have increased. Were no longer a deferential society, the
club doesnt rule, the powers that be no longer are respected and we are
in some I think fundamental way, in some ways more democratic as a
result of that. Accountability very difficult word nowadays is more
important than it was say twenty, thirty years ago.
WALKER: To bridge this gap, the political
class will need to talk to people in language they understand.
WICKS: Sometimes the political discourse
nowadays is almost an alien language to what ordinary people think or
want and there is in some sense a disjunct between the people and the
political class. And I think when that happens, you do get a suspension
of trust because people say what is all this about.
WALKER: So this more demanding he
could have said petulant and sometimes childish - democracy needs to
be talked to differently, more concretely perhaps. Long gone are the
days when Gladstone could elevate his listeners by engaging them in
his high political talk. Give the people what they want but that was
George Barnum not a political leader. Besides, the Wicks model
implies we know or can easily find out just what it is people do want.
All that cabinet ministers such as Tessa Jowell have to do is get out
more and listen.
JOWELL: If you have the discussion about
trust inside the Westminster village, the focus is very much on the
players in the Hutton inquiry, on what their culpability may or may not
be. So the Hutton inquiry is in a sense a metaphor for a much wider
debate about trust. When I talk to my constituents about this issue of
trust, they have a completely different take on it. The Hutton inquiry is
never mentioned. What people talk about is whether or not they can
rely on government to do what they say theyre going to do, and the

examples are much more specific and much closer to their homes and to
their lives.
WALKER: Do you feel the government does
bear some criticism, however, on that front for perhaps making too
many and maybe too concrete promises about public services that
couldnt be delivered within the timetables that people think of in their
daily lives? That the government has been maybe its own worst enemy
in making too many promises?
JOWELL: When we came into government yes I think we over promised, and what we did was to rack up public
expectation. But that wasnt malevolent or mendacious. It was borne
of the genuine sense of enthusiasm and passion that we felt about
transforming this country. I think in retrospect and of course in this
hindsight is a fantastic friend and ally I mean you could have said
alright, maybe we should have been much more low key, much more
prosaic and played down peoples expectations.
EASTWOOD:
I suspect there may be a Faustian
dimension to this. The claims of politics seem to me to grow through
the 20th century - what politics can deliver and what government can
deliver and you could argue in the long run of course thats setting up
politics and politicians to fail.
WALKER: Historian David Eastwood
EASTWOOD:
There are very grand claims now
made about the ability to manage the economy, the ability to run a
welfare state, and to some extent of course the electorate buys into that
because that becomes as it were the characteristic discourse of
elections. But what politics is claiming it can achieve and therefore
what leading politicians are claiming they can achieve at the beginning
of the 21st century is vastly greater than it was at the beginning of the
20th century. Its in that context of a more ambitious politics that trust
can be more spectacularly lost.
WALKER: This sounds a bit like a re-run of a
late seventies theme overstretch, government doing too much then
disappointing people. Since then, of course, the contours of the state
have shifted. With globalisation, the power of international finance and
trade flows appear to have diminished the importance of the nation
state. At home, too, some say states have retreated, in favour of markets
and civil society. It would be natural, if you thought your government
was becoming impotent, to cut your emotional investment in party
politics and trust it less.
NORRIS: What weve had is the growth of
critical citizens; in other words, people in particular have lost their
support for parties. Parliaments are also an area where people are much
less trusting than they were, for example, in the 1950s.
WALKER: Pippa Norris views trends from the
J F Kennedy School at Harvard University
NORRIS: People have become more
demanding of representative democracy and they feel that the old
institutions arent necessarily where theyre going to put their energies
and theyre transferring their participation to other new social
movements, ways in which people can protest directly and other forms

of civic engagement.
WALKER: Thats rational behaviour given
whats been happening in societies, economies and polities?
NORRIS: Thats right. In the past, it was
what you might term the politics of loyalties. You joined things, you
belonged to things - to trade unions, to churches, to parties - and that
was because you were trying to influence your national government and
your national parliament to change public policy. Nowadays power has
diffused and its moved upwards to multilateral organisations the
European Union, the World Trade Organisation and its moved
outwards to the non-profit sector, to the private sector. So, for example,
if you want to protest about say sweat shops and the way that Nike has
employed certain groups internationally, theres no point trying to
influence parliament, thats not where the action is; and so young
people in particular, the younger generation have moved and theyre
now participating directly through demonstrations, through protest
movements.
WALKER: That partly sounds to me as if
youre telling us if there are these changes in the volume of trust, its
not necessarily something we should be worried about.
NORRIS: Not in terms of participation. For
example, just because you lack trust does not mean to say that you
wont vote or that you wont participate, for example, in protest.
Indeed sometimes the opposite. People who are quite angry might well
be not trusting of the current establishment, political institutions,
mainstream parties, but they might well be very active in all sorts of
other ways in society. So trust and participation, we often think they
should go together in a logical way the more you trust, the more you
participate. It aint necessarily so.
WALKER: Could it even be that lack of trust
is positively healthy, prompting more rather than less involvement?
Thats the trouble with trust, it slips and slides. Why should Pippa
Norriss activists, mistrusting parliamentary leaders, trust those who
head their NGOs? Maybe, too, she underplays the corrosive effects of
this anti-politics trend. If we dont trust the warnings issued by the
Department of Health, we might expose our children and our
neighbours children to a measles outbreak. Lets get an assessment of
how much declining trust matters for governments effectiveness.
HALPERN:
Well, the governments response
is likely to be it cant act effectively if people dont trust it. If we dont
trust government to spend our money well, then we arent going to be
happy about paying higher taxes and so on.
WALKER: Cambridge sociologist David
Halpern, on secondment to the Strategy Unit in the Cabinet Office.
HALPERN:
For example theres specific
evidence in the US context that the decline in progressive policies is
driven heavily by a decline in confidence in government to actually do
its job properly, so that matters greatly. But it also matters, I think, on a
deeper level that the collective mechanisms weve got in society rest
also and tap this issue of do we trust each other in society, do we have
some sense of a common purpose.

WALKER: One might argue, therefore, that

fermenting lack of trust would be a key right of centre enterprise? If
lack of trust in government is an impediment to the prosecution of
governments activities, then it would suit people who dont
particularly like big government?
HALPERN:
In a fairly straightforward way,
both theoretically and empirically, you can see that if people dont have
confidence in government to act effectively then they dont support
redistribution specifically. Any kind of policy which is at all
redistributive rests on quite specific confidence in government to be
proficient and able.
WALKER: Which makes the decline and fall
of trust sound bad news for social democrats but, on the contrary, good
news for Tories. Is that right, Bernard Jenkin?
JENKIN: One of the reasons Im a
Conservative is that I dont think politicians should be trying to control
every aspect of peoples lives, and politicians would be more trusted if
we attempted to regulate less and interfere less in peoples lives and if
also we could really demonstrate that we meant what we said. And I
think that whats happened in recent years is a very serious corruption
of the principle medium of politics, which is language. You cant trust
a word that many politicians say. I think that is a very serious
development because if we cant conduct debates in the House of
Commons on the basis that what ministers are telling the House of
Commons is true, then the whole basis of politics actually breaks down.
And what you see is, of course, politicians trying to reach over the
heads of the elected representatives for this sort of direct democracy
which doesnt depend upon detailed scrutiny of issues through a written
or verbal discourse.
WALKER: Do you not feel though that there
are generic problems of government in a society where the media is
quite as querulous and strong as it is, where you have a public which
doesnt always follow consistent lines of thought or behaviour; that
were you to be in power, you might face some of these general
problems of governing this perhaps increasingly fissiparous society?
JENKIN: I think society is more difficult to
engage in politics when society is basically contented. For all the
terrible failures of this government, for example - on public services, on
breaking its promises on tax these are not things that have yet
depressed the value of your house, put your job at risk or seriously
impaired your living standards. I think people take more notice of
politicians when the nation or our living standards are seriously
threatened. During the 1970s the general view of the public was that
politicians have a very difficult job and theyre doing their best and
now were just an irritation.
WALKER: Which defines the challenge
facing the Tories new leader, Michael Howard. If people do see
politics as instrumental, and most things in the garden are lovely, theyll
switch off. Without a crisis they wont feel much like re-engaging and
seeking political alternatives.
But in the mean time, politicians cant just twiddle their thumbs.
Bernard Jenkin might not like the idea of attempting to speak much
more directly to people over the heads of Parliament, but his new boss

may have to try. At the Cabinet Office, too, fresh thought is being
given to the question of how political communication can be
modernised to catch up with the culture. David Halpern.
HALPERN:
One of the devices worth
exploring is that you use things like deliberative polling mechanisms,
which means that you get as it were a random sample of the population
and you bring them into the heart of government and you say okay
these are all the facts on the issues, live in Buckingham Palace for a
week, well put you up, and this is the issue and what do you think
about it. So in some sense you can feel confident that people like me,
Joe Bloggs, are listened to in the heart of government and you can see
that becomes particularly important in an age where voting rates are
falling.
WALKER: Am I hearing from you an
empirical proposition which says more opportunities to participate and
more democracy in that crude sense will lead to greater faith in system?
HALPERN:
Well I think its one of a number
of things. I mean it is the case empirically the Swiss case is perhaps
the best known in those cantons where there are more referenda, more
direct democracy, people are significantly more satisfied with their
lives.
WALKER: Well up to a point those ultrademocratic Swiss have just voted in large numbers for a far right party.
There are plenty of twentieth century examples of how impatience with
representative government can flip into authoritarianism. There may be
times when Joe Bloggs views arent worth listening to. But its a
powerful idea, that bringing government home, closer to people must
endear it to them: its been expressed lately by the devolutionists, the
new localists and advocates of regional government in England. Does
it convince Pippa Norris?
NORRIS: In many cases people participate
far, far higher in general elections than they ever do in local elections,
so its not necessarily the case that simply bringing decisions down
necessarily engenders greater trust amongst all sectors, I dont think. If
the Scots for twenty years have been demanding a separate parliament,
then theyre entitled to having a greater voice in their own affairs. But
whether its actually going to change trust, especially if you understand
it as this long term pattern which is not just affecting any particular
country or any particular context but is all about the shifts in power,
then its not actually going to help. Its not going to transform things
overnight, thats for sure.
WALKER: We talked to a Labour cabinet
minister who said we should be listening more. If we could
demonstrate our respect for the concrete daily concerns of people by
showing that we listen to them, that would recover their trust.
NORRIS: Well, again, this is a panacea and
you always hear it and you have Labour listens and Conservative listens
and you have town hall meetings and so on. Theres very little
evidence that that in itself matters. Listening isnt what its about; its
actually having choices. And on certain issues, the choices arent
necessarily there, the parties themselves dont offer that much of a
choice or the public feels that certain issues are being swept under the
carpet. The classic case, just to give an example for that, would be the
questions of asylum, immigration, multiculturalism very difficult

issues for the parties to address and ones where, for example, the BNP
has had some sporadic local success because certain people feel that
theyre issues which affect their lives, which they feel passionately
about and which they dont think necessarily that the major parties are
addressing.
WALKER: But where does that argument
lead? The public can be illiberal, even reactionary but they should still
be given that choice Does listening to the public mean following the
public who may be neither consistent nor clear? The cry against Tony
Blair used to be that he listened too much and was therefore
unprincipled. You dont have to go all the way with Edmund Burke to
believe that representatives should sometimes talk backand
sometimes think for themselves.
Maybe one reason for this orgy of sometimes rather unclear trust talk is
decreasing self-confidence on the part of the political class. The
politicians we began the programme with, Im sure theyre typical,
were in self-abasing mode. Ought they not sometimes to extol their
office, plead its necessity, for how else are divergent interests to be
matched and collective action taken? The watchdog, Sir Nigel Wicks,
gives them a hint
WICKS: The business of government is
immensely complex and difficult. Its a difficult job and if people think
its easy and you can deliver things overnight, theyre going to get into
some problems. But I believe that it is a responsibility of politicians,
public office holders to explain, explain, explain that these things are
difficult, there are uncertainties, there are elements of risk. But that
goes back to my point about a new sort of political discourse and I do
believe sometimes a politician, I mean if he actually got up and said at a
public meeting you are wrong, I think that may not be the best way of
getting a point across. But there does need to be a two-way process
where public office holders are able to say look, it is a bit more
difficult, it is a bit more complicated, there is more to this than meets
the eye. But they can do that if they have the trust already. It is much
easier to do that if you are trusted.
WALKER: His prescription does of course
rely on the good faith of the message carriers we the media and the
publics tolerance of complicated explanations. But hes got a point.
Imagine political leaders saying to the public: were right; you are
mistaken. It is complicated, whether thats assessing threats from
weapons of mass destruction or calculating pension entitlements. And
we, politicians, deserve some space, and the right occasionally to shut
the door on prying eyes. Maybe a bit more professional self-confidence
is whats needed if the public is ever to be jolted into examining its own
trustworthiness.