It’s hard to remember the decent people doing jobs in an often rotten world
A few years ago, I came up with a catchphrase that I would type underneath articles on the website of The Times newspaper: ‘Does anything in this country work?’ It appears thousands of others think the same way and voted accordingly at last year’s General Election to change things (results still pending). Let us consider institutions which have lost the trust of the people, and which form a numbing series of case studies.
Parliament relies on probity, as outlined by the seven Nolan principles of people in public life which include integrity, accountability and openness. The scandal over MP expense accounts, which precipitated reform that was much needed, is remembered for claims for duck ponds and moat cleaning, only because they made the most outrageous headlines. Far more prosaically, it was really about abusing the privilege of owning two homes – one in London, one in the MP’s constituency – and giving the appearance that elected officials were gaming the system and taking the electorate for fools.
They still are: contracts for PPE going to friends; peerages for favourable editors and businessmen; and questions in parliament on behalf of lobby and special interest groups. Independent news sites and campaigners attempt to hold them to account, funded by interested readers, while other magazines become mouthpieces and organs that do political parties’ dirty work or help them run ideas up the proverbial flagpole. Nothing can be done except to shine sunlight upon them, although the reputation of print media is still lower than it ought to be after years of hacking phones to find stories.
Every few weeks, someone writes a piece about how the Royal Family benefit from tax exemptions or gifts, but one of the definitive images of the fall of the House of Windsor comes from the BBC’s interview with Prince Andrew. He had to pay a large amount of money to a victim of his friend Jeffrey Epstein, a man whose connections to the great and good helped him operate a global sex trafficking enterprise. For all the philanthropy among the rich and powerful, the bad tales dominate.
The BBC themselves have an annual bout of handwringing about their most visible talent, whether it involves Jimmy Savile, Martin Bashir or Huw Edwards. It is clear that allowing Edwards to keep the money he earned while on leave from his job, that of commentator of royal events and most famous utterer of ‘good evening’ before the day’s headlines, is unfair, especially on the thousands of unseen, unheard employees who must defend the actions of a famous few.
Stuart Maconie’s book The Nanny State Made Me, which I read over the Bank Holiday weekend, ends with a defence of the Corporation, which nonetheless has a problem with class even if it has done well to focus on closing the gender and ethnicity gaps. In advance of another charter renewal, they have asked their audience to fill out a Your BBC survey, which will likely conclude that they should focus on what they do best: impartial news coverage and universally beloved entertainment franchises which attract family audiences in a fractured media market.
Each sector of British society has its ups and downs, with the focus mainly on the latter when it comes to judging its reputation. The church feeds the poor but covered up child abuse which made the Archbishop a martyr. The banking sector brings global finance to Canary Wharf but also overreached itself in the late 2000s, which led to the billion-pound bailout because it was too big to fail. The charity sector helps those in need around the world but also, as Oxfam did in Haiti, commits crimes of a sexual nature that preys on the victim.
Town centres sparkle with shopping emporia but fill their shops with clothes made in sweatshops by workers who are unfairly remunerated; shamefully, some factories are in Britain too, pumping out cheap fashion as the market permits. Ethical fashion, like ethical food shopping, is an admirable lifestyle choice. The esteem in which Harrods is held plummeted with the recent news of Mohammed Fayed’s treatment of staff, and even though it was sold on a long time ago the brand has lost some of its lustre.
Fayed used to own Fulham FC, and the football industry is a weathervane for social issues, be it racial or pertaining to ownership. The national pastime has an outsized influence on the news, and each week brings stories about abuse towards players or referees, or fans enduring terrible owners who are taking out of a club far more than they are putting in, although there are plenty of pleasing stories concerning their social impact; to name just one club, Port Vale.
This June, Glastonbury will once again demonstrate the life-affirming power of live music, but the industry’s biggest figures, from Michael Jackson to R Kelly to the man formerly known as Puff Daddy, have abused their power and, significantly, have been allowed to do so by willing enablers who looked the other way while the money was rolling in. As with Jimmy Savile, it may be that Diddy’s crimes outweigh the man’s achievements, but we are constantly reviewing the past and ignoring the present.
How can songwriters make a living in an era of streaming, or how can a new band come up in an environment where so many music venues have been forced to close through gentrification or high running costs? Record labels have so much catalogue to market that it makes launching a new act harder than ever, but Bruce Springsteen won’t be around to play stadiums forever. Thank goodness for Sam Fender, set to play them this summer, whose writing touches on social issues even if he will never write about the Saudi Arabian ownership of his beloved Newcastle United.
There’s more. The construction company Carillion went bust in 2018, months after the Grenfell Tower went up in flames thanks to its shoddy cladding. South West Trains has just been taken back into public ownership as part of a Great British Railways. It may be that water companies follow them, given the extraordinary debts some of them have been allowed to accrue to pay shareholders their dividends while sewage is dumped into rivers and sites of natural beauty. Stuart Maconie’s book comes back to the year 1979, when the Conservative government allowed the free market to dictate how the economy ran, as opposed to the postwar state-centric enthusiasms of 1945.
And I have yet to touch upon the now completed inquiries into the Horizon and the Contaminated Blood affairs, as victims wait for the justice they were promised. Or how the Metropolitan Police and the NHS, like the BBC, deal with so many bad apples that one may think the entire orchard is spoiled.
This procession of bad news, like a Generation Game conveyor belt, might be depressing, or it might serve as a reminder to make the world as good a place as it can possibly be. It is so easy to collapse into a slough of despond, a pit of despair, especially when everything costs more and TV pictures from faraway conflicts seem impossible to resolve. It starts, however, with your own doorstep, and to remember community and belonging can counter the wickedness of individuals, corporations or politics.