Subject to rainstorms that have resulted in widespread flooding and much human distress, Britain is experiencing an ominous summer. The freakish weather seems a fitting backdrop to the mounting crisis of public confidence in the conduct of British affairs. Even their fickle but basically equable climate, many British people must feel, can no longer be trusted.
Britain’s new Prime Minister Gordon Brown has pledged to restore the trust of British people in their political culture. It is a bold, not to say brazen, promise considering that, as chancellor of the exchequer, Brown was a key member of the Blair government, with which this loss of trust is associated. What the British public is expected to believe is that Brown is fundamentally different from Blair, a genuine public servant whose own honorable intentions were stymied because he was obliged to work alongside a prime minister whose boasted commitment to “transparency” was mere window-dressing.
So closely linked in the public mind with a politician who has become an international byword for deceit, Brown might be thought to have embarked on mission impossible. However, the prime minister’s present good fortune is that his chief rival, the leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, is trusted even less. Following two humiliating by-election defeats, there is growing skepticism among Conservative ranks as to whether Cameron really is the politician to oust a Labour government that has been in power for over ten years.
Aside from the menacingly erratic weather, Brown’s incipient premiership has been marked by two much-publicized news stories which highlight the erosion, if not collapse, of British people’s trust in their institutions: The revelation that the British Broadcasting Corporation has, among other things, been faking the results of quiz shows; and the “cash for peerages” imbroglio, the investigation into claims that the Labour Party was selling honors, which finally came to an end last week when the Crown Prosecution Service announced that none of the suspects in the case would be charged. Both episodes cannot but have deepened the cynicism that already pervades British society, the feeling that deliberate deception has become a routine feature of the national life.
It is a measure of the inadequacy of the opposition it faces that the Labour government has succeeded in riding out the “cash for peerages” affair that dogged Tony Blair’s last months in office. This is not to say that it has not been extremely damaging to the government, or that the damage has been much limited by virtue of the fact that no charges followed the police inquiry into allegations that the Labour Party was illicitly offering honors to wealthy businessmen in exchange for cash. What will have done little to persuade the public that the investigation — which lasted sixteen months and cost nearly £1 million — was a mistake is the egregious behavior of one of the chief suspects, Lord Levy, Blair’s special envoy to the Middle East and principal Labour Party fund-raiser. On receiving the news that no charges were to be preferred, Levy reacted with the sort of gloating triumphalism that might have been appropriate if his name had been cleared in a court of law.
The sometime music business magnate has been portrayed by his friends as a victim of anti-Semitism. However, such prejudice as exists against Lord Levy may be said to have more to do with perception that this highly placed yet unelected member of the Blair government effectively bought his way into power. It was “Lord Cashpoint”, as Levy was jocularly known, who was believed to have arranged clandestine loans to the Labour Party from multimillionaires on the basis that — by contrast with the position regarding straightforward gifts — the party was under no legal obligation to identify those who made them. The decision of the Crown Prosecution Service that the police did not find evidence convincing enough to justify pressing charges is unlikely to assuage suspicions that the Labour Party was involved in corrupt practices. Levy has intimated that he is considering suing the police for wrongful arrest, but neither Levy nor the Labour Party will be anxious to remind people that the main reason he and his fellow suspect, the former Downing Street aide, Ruth Turner, were subjected to intensive interrogation by the police was the suspicion that they were obstructing the course of justice.
A candid explanation of why the Labour Party was soliciting undeclared loans and not donations may never be forthcoming, for that would entail an admission that a party that once portrayed itself as the champion of the British working class has become abjectly beholden to big business. What would make such an admission all the more shaming is the fact that the Labour Party’s cultivation of wealthy patrons has not even given it financial security. Currently, the Labour Party is burdened with a debt of £24.5 million, the consequence of having borrowed so much to fund the 2005 general election and a circumstance that means that it will be ill equipped to fight the next election.
It is the wholesale commercializing of Britain, the decay of old principles of public service and the triumph of what the Scottish sage Thomas Carlyle dubbed the “cash nexus” that also underlies the crisis at the BBC.
Bullied by successive governments into adopting a more market-orientated approach, the BBC has sought to compete with its commercial rivals in a manner that has inexorably led to the compromising of its standards. What is striking is that it is newspapers representing powerful vested interests, not least those of Rupert Murdoch, that have been most venomous in their attacks on the BBC’s recent peccadilloes; Murdoch has long encouraged the view that the license fee the British pay for the sake of having a public service broadcasting system is a waste of money, and it has often seemed as if this ardent free marketeer’s dearest wish is to destroy a broadcasting organization that constitutes the last remaining British bulwark against everything he stands for.
Perhaps it is remarkable that the BBC retains the prestige that it does. It is not what it was, but nor is it yet facing quite such a crisis of credibility as British politicians. It was after all the BBC that brought to light the duplicitous manner in which the government of Blair sold the war on Iraq — a revelation that could never have emerged from any of Murdoch’s media organs. It is plain that in important respects the BBC retains a claim on public trust. Gordon Brown will have to work hard to convince British people that the same can be said of his government.
