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CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 884-vi House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE public administration SELECT committee
Thursday 18 May 2006 BARONESS O'NEILL OF BENGARVE CBE FBA, MR PETER KELLNER and PROFESSOR JOHN CURTICE Evidence heard in Public Questions 333 - 376
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Public Administration Select Committee on Thursday 18 May 2006 Members present Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair Mr David Burrowes Kelvin Hopkins Julie Morgan Mr Gordon Prentice ________________ Witnesses: Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve CBE FBA, a Member of the House of Lords; Mr Peter Kellner, Chairman, YouGov; and Professor John Curtice, Department of Government, University of Strathclyde; gave evidence. Q333 Chairman: Good morning. It is really good of you to come in. Thank you very much indeed. We see this as a kind of seminar for the Committee, as a background to our inquiry that we are doing into ethical regulators, ethics and standards in government. We thought that you all had something to say about that and have had things to say about it in a variety of ways, so we want to draw upon you this morning, if we can. We are delighted to welcome Lady Onora O'Neill, Peter Kellner, who chairs YouGov, and Professor John Curtice, from the Department of Government at Strathclyde. I usually ask if any of you want to say something by way of introduction, but actually I know that John wants quickly to take us through some of the data that he has got. That does not preclude others of you saying something at the beginning too, and by all means do, but, John, do you want just to take us through your sheets and tell us what is going on? Professor Curtice: Thank you very much, Chairman, and thank you for the chance to talk you through this data. What I have done for you, in the slides,[1] is three things. The first is to provide some evidence on the trends in the degree to which the public trust politicians/governments/the political system, using primarily data from the British Social Attitudes series, conducted by the National Centre for Social Research, but to some degree supplemented from other sources. The second thing I am going to do is look very briefly at some of the possible explanations as to the trends that have existed, largely to dismiss most of them, and I am going to do so in each case by just providing you with one piece of evidence that gives you an indication of why I would dismiss them. Thirdly, and much less adequately, I will raise the question of why we worry about trust in politicians in the first place; does a lack of trust in politicians necessarily have deleterious consequences? I am going to look at one aspect of that, and you may want to pick up other things in discussion. If you look at the second page of the slides, headed 'Trust Ebbs Away', what I am showing you here are the trends over a 30-year period to a question which has been asked consistently, which asks people, "How much do you trust British governments, of any party, to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their own political party?" The first thing to say, in this discussion, is that the answers to this question, and indeed to any other question that has been asked about trust in politicians or government, show that we have never ever been particularly trusting of politicians and governments. For example, as you can see in the case of this slide, even back in 1974 only 39 per cent of people said that they trusted governments, either always or mostly, to put the interests of the nation above those of a political party. Lack of trust is nothing new, it has always been there, as measured by surveys and pollsters. Q334 Chairman: What happened in 1987? Professor Curtice: Hang on; point two. It will come though, Chairman. The second thing to say is that if you look at this particular item over time, not for the moment the variations, which I will explain later, you can see that, in fact, even though we started off in the 1970s, which was the first time this question was asked, without a particularly high regard for governments as measured by this indicator, trust has declined. In particular, it looks as though the point at which the decline in trust really kicked in was in 1994, which you will remember was roughly around the time when Back to Basics and 'questions for cash', etc., and the word 'sleaze' began to be coined in British politics, and, if anything, thereafter things have got worse. What about the variations? One of the interesting things about this item, and some of the other items I have looked at, is that the one thing that is good for enhancing the public's trust in governments and in politicians is to hold a general election. If you wish to have a high level of trust, it would appear you should simply have a general election every year and you will maintain high levels of trust. For example, in 1997, we actually asked this question both immediately before and immediately after the general election and there was a very clear increase. That is the explanation for 1987. Having said that, what then I invite you to note is that if you compare 1987 with 1997 with 2001 with 2005, all of which are post-election measures, in each case, although there is in each case a spike back up, we never managed to reach the level that was reached at the previous general election. This is the particular indicator I am going to focus on primarily, because this is the one with the clearest trend, the longest time series, but let me just quickly walk you through some of the other pieces of evidence. There is a second item that we have asked fairly regularly, alas only since 1994, i.e. at the point by which it appears trust had already declined, which asks, "How much do you trust politicians of any party in Britain to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner?" Again, the answer to that question, for most people, has rarely been positive. Even in the best of times around a half of people have said "I almost never trust politicians in that respect;" but again there has been some variation. You can see here on the slide. This is the percentage of people who trust politicians at least sometimes, so most of them are simply saying, "We trust them only some of the time," very few are saying, "Always," or, "Most of the time." Even on this measure, as you can see, the measures of the last Parliament, 2002, 2003, 2005, were somewhat lower than they were in the 1990s. There is another set of items that we have been measuring, which do not directly measure trust, or they do not directly use the word 'trust', but are items which were first invented by American academics back in the 1950s. They are known as political efficacy and they are designed to get at the degree to which people feel the political system is able and willing to respond to their demands. If there is a low level of efficacy, again it can be regarded certainly as an indicator of a broader sense of cynicism. Again, on this measure, faced with the proposition, "Generally speaking, those elected as MPs lose touch with people pretty quickly," most people have always said "I agree with you." To get much differentiation in the next two slides, I am focusing on the percentage who say they strongly agree and I have denoted it simply as a minus, so you can see that a minus figure is supposedly bad news. What I would invite you to note, on the first slide, headed 'Efficacy Recovers? - 1', which is about whether MPs lose touch, is that this indicator basically also showed similar behaviour to the two previous ones, i.e., in particular, a sharp drop in 1994, that is an increase in the proportion who said they strongly agreed. Interestingly, and I have to admit I do not know the answer as to why this is the case, in 2005 this indicator, and indeed the one on the next page, which is about whether or not parties are interested only in people's votes not in their opinions, show the level of cynicism has actually reduced, and it no longer tracks the low levels of trust evinced by the other indicator. There may be some good news here, but why this is happening, I admit, I do not know as yet. So the long-term trends appear basically to be, "We have never trusted politicians but we trust them even less now. It looks as though the era of sleaze was crucial and subsequent attempts to reconnect with government make us more trusting through constitutional reform, or through ethical regulation have not had an impact, at least in terms of the aggregate levels of trust." Why might this be the case? It might be that there have been various, long-run social trends occurring which mean basically that we are just simply going to be less trusting as a society. One argument, for example, is that simply expectations of what we expect MPs to achieve have increased. We expect more of our MPs, partly perhaps because we are a more educated society, we are less deferential. What I am showing you here is a set of items that we can track through from 1983 to 2000, headed 'Expect more of MPs?', and it shows the people who say it is important for MPs to have various qualities. I simply invite you to note that there is not any clear, consistent trend amongst these items, of more people saying it is important for MPs to have these various qualities. It is not obviously clear that what we are expecting of MPs is any greater than in the past. Secondly, according to some academics at least, the group that you would particularly expect to be demanding of politicians, to be more critical, to be more cynical, are those people who are university educated. As you can see from the slide headed 'The Critical Educated', there is not any evidence to back that theory. People who have a degree are slightly more likely to say they trust governments to put the interests of the country first than those who do not have any qualifications. Another possibility, and particularly a thesis that has been widely popularised by Bob Puttnam in the United States, is that society in general is less trusting; his argument is that we interact less with each other socially, partly at least as a result of television, and, as a result of this, in general, we are less willing to trust each other. Here, on the slide headed 'Don't trust anyone anymore?', is the standard measure that has been used in order to measure social trust across the world. I simply invite you to note that, while it might have been true that we were more trusting in the 1950s, there certainly is not any evidence over the last 20 years that we have become any less trusting of each other, in general. Around 45 per cent of us say consistently that we think most people can be trusted, rather than saying "You can't be too careful in dealing with people," so it is not clear there is any general societal change. Another possibility, which often seems to be uttered in the media, but not necessarily backed with evidence, is that these social changes are reflected particularly in the attitudes of young people, that young people in particular are particularly alienated and cynical. I have to tell you, every single time you look at the relationship between age and these items, what you discover is the opposite, and you can see this in the slide headed 'The Young Ones?'. These are the data for 2005, but it is equally true of previous years. Younger people are, if anything, more willing to evince trust in governments and in politicians; perhaps simply they have not been around long enough to know any better. Another thesis widely argued, and I know Lady O'Neill is going to pick this up to some degree, is that it is basically the fault of the media, the fault of the press, and particularly the fault of the red-top press, who are after every sleazy story they can find, however justified or not justified. I am happy to discuss later on the difficulties of unpacking this thesis, but one obvious, direct measure of this thesis is, "Hey, well, it should be true, should it not, that those people who are actually reading the tabloid press should be less trusting of governments than those who do not?". The answer is that they are not particularly less trusting. Equally, the now very large body of people, around 50 per cent of the public, who do not read a newspaper regularly are no less cynical than those who are reading newspapers. So, as I suggested earlier, it is not clear that there is some long-run social change, social theory, or even simply the activity of the media, to explain the trend that I have identified. I will just bring you back again, to remind you that the decline in trust seems to have kicked in in the mid 1990s, at the time that sleaze became a byword, and the next two slides give you just a bit more evidence to suggest that an important thing may well be perceptions of sleaze. I should say in the slide headed 'Do Favours for Donors?', the data comes from 2002. It is not recent; it was crafted in the wake of the Ecclestone affair, but not in the wake of the large loans for peerages affair. The question asked was "How often would you say Labour does favours for people or companies who give the Party large sums of money?" and we asked the same question of the Conservatives. And you can see here, even in 2002, before recent allegations, a clear majority of the public thought that both the two major political parties engaged in this activity either very or fairly often, and, to a fair degree, they did not discriminate between the parties in that respect, at that time. Then what I invite you to note, on the next slide, is that indeed it is particularly true of the perception of the Labour Party, which of course was the party of government at the time, that if indeed you think that political parties are likely to do these kinds of favours you are much less likely to be trusting governments to put the interests of the nation first. Finally, I said I would look very briefly at the question do low levels of trust matter? There are many issues here, many of which have nothing to do with public opinion data, but there is one which does, which is that it has often been argued that one of the reasons why we have experienced low turnouts in a number of recent elections is because the public do not trust politicians any more, they are too cynical. If that were true, we should find that turnout is lower amongst those people who evince low levels of trust. That is true to some degree; you can see this in the slide 'Turnout by Trust', where I am showing you for each of the last three general elections the reported level of turnout, broken down by people's answers to that question about whether they trust governments. It is true, that that group of people who say they never trust governments does have a lower level of turnout, but this is a relatively small group, it is around only a quarter of the public. The differences in the level of turnout between those who say they trust governments just about always, most of the time, or only some of the time, are relatively small and certainly are not sufficient to suggest that low trust has been a principal driver of what was quite a substantial drop in turnout, in particular, between 1997 and 2001. It is not entirely clear that low levels of trust necessarily corrode public participation; indeed, it has been argued by some academics that if you do not like what your politicians are doing you may actually be more likely to turn out and vote. To summarise my key points: we have never ever trusted politicians very much, and there is nothing very new about this, but we seem to trust them even less now, though I did come up with some evidence to suggest there may have been some change so far as efficacy is concerned. I would suggest to you that the explanation for the continued decline in trust is obvious; it was indeed allegations of sleaze and that since 1997 sleaze has still been the subject of political currency and political debate, it has been a criterion by which politicians have been judged, partly because they themselves have invited themselves to be judged by that criterion. Therefore, as a result, we have not seen any improvement, but perhaps we should not exaggerate necessarily the consequences of low levels of trust, not least because it has always been with us. Q335 Chairman: Thank you very much indeed for that. Thank you for doing it so efficiently. Because Peter also specialises in understanding public opinion, I am going to ask him to comment on what John has said. Then because Onora understands everything I am going to ask her to tell us what is going on. Peter? Mr Kellner: First, and this I do not think comes as a surprise or new information, just for the record, my wife is a Minister in the Department for Constitutional Affairs, with which I think some of your work has dealings, so just to make sure that connection is on record. Chairman: Thank you for that. Mr Kellner: Needless to say, I am not responsible for anything she says or does and she is not responsible for anything I say or do. Chairman: That we understand. Mr Kellner: We have produced some data at YouGov which reinforces what John says. A couple of months ago, when the 'cash for peerages' dispute arose, we asked, in a survey for the Sunday Times, did they think the Prime Minister had given peerages in return for party donations and loans, and did the public think some people were able to buy peerages from the last Conservative Government, and the figures for both were very similar. Fifty-six per cent thought that the current Prime Minister had given peerages in return for party donations and loans, 57 per cent thought that some people were able to buy peerages from the last Conservative Government. Though the question is very different and the timing is different, the figures are actually very, very similar to John's, 58, 60 per cent figures for both parties. The other point I would like to make in my introductory remark is just to unbundle a sheet which I think has been distributed. Because I was asked to come here today, we repeated a battery of questions we asked first three years ago about the extent to which people trust different groups in society, political and non-political, to tell the truth, and if you look down the lists I will draw out just two or three general points. The first is that, then as now, we trust people who are close to us in our communities significantly more than we trust the equivalent people nationally, so we trust local police more than police chiefs, we trust family doctors more than hospital managers, we trust our local MP more than the leading members of any of the three main parties. The second point to make is that, in most cases, the figures are lower now than they were three years ago; it is pretty well across the board. I was particularly struck by the contrast between the group that has suffered most, which is senior police officers, 72 per cent of us trusted them a great deal or a fair amount three years ago, that is down to 52 per cent, a 20-point drop, but then judges are up from 68 to 77 per cent. I am happy to speculate on the reasons for both but perhaps my speculations are of no greater interest than anybody else's. Thirdly, amongst politicians, there was, three years ago, a quite clear hierarchy. Liberal Democrat politicians were trusted significantly more than Labour or Conservative politicians. The Liberal Democrats have lost most of their advantage, they have fallen the most, with the result that leading politicians of all three parties are regarded now pretty well as much of a muchness, in the range of 19 to 25 per cent. I am happy, now or later, to take more detailed questions, but those are the three things I draw. Let me say finally, to minimise the impacts of what Onora is about to say, because we have appeared together, indeed I think under your chairmanship, Chairman, though not in front of a select committee, that poll figures like these, or indeed like John's, do not tell us everything, but in my view they do not tell us nothing, they tell us something. I would be the first to concede that there are dimensions to the issue of trust which it is very hard to capture by these kinds of question; but, that said, I concur entirely with what John said about what has happened to trust over the last few years, and I think our evidence rather reinforces that. The very final point I would make is that, from quite a lot of research we have done over the years, asking these questions in all sorts of ways, while I accept that sleaze has been a big driver over the last few years, I think it is part of a wider issue which I would call the issue of authenticity in politics. We have done quite a lot of research which shows that what turns people off is hypocrisy, it is evasion, it is being governed by spin doctors, and that what people want more than anything else is real, authentic politics. When I say this, one thing which surprised me is that you find people are not actually turned off, as I thought they would be, by politicians shouting at each other in radio or television studios. Providing that is the result of genuine passion, people respect that. It is when it is done for the sake of show that it is not liked, and some of the things which occasionally have been issues, such as MPs employing their partners, we do not find that people care much about this. They care much more about politicians perceived not to be giving straight answers to straight questions when they appear in front of John Humphrys or Jeremy Paxman. Q336 Chairman: Thank you for that. We shall explore all of this, and of course we want you here not just because of what you know about your data but because of views that you have about how we understand all of this, and we shall come back to that shortly. Now, Onora, tell us what is going on? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: These trends, attitudes, and so on, are something that has been reliably measured and observed over a long time. I think we have to take them for granted, but at the same time it is all pretty depressing, if one looks only at trends and attitudes, because presumably we want to be able to say something practical at the end. Either we want to say "It's pretty important to get into a situation where people are better able to place and refuse trust," or we want to say "It's a jolly good thing that people aren't placing trust very much because that is an accurate judgment of the way things are;" as between those two, either might be good. It seems to me that to ask the practical question you have to address not merely the attitudes generalised across types of people but the basis on which people judge things and place or refuse trust, and this picks up some of what Peter was pointing to. If you think about that, of course you have to have some evidence, not proof, nothing like that, but some evidence, and there are some, I think, very disturbing questions about people's access to evidence, and some of the work this Committee has done has been highly pertinent to that. The first is the question of cynicism, people thinking it is all show, "They don't really mean it," seeing grounds for cynicism even where there may not be grounds for cynicism. Another is just the sheer complexity that people find hard to judge. I think an important thing, if we have a practical take on this, is to ask on what basis do people place and refuse trust. If you ask people questions like, "Do you trust greengrocers?" or "Do you trust undertakers?" and generalise, of course you will get a graph, but the only sensible answer to a question like that would be, "Well, I trust some greengrocers but not others and I trust them to do some things, not others; ditto undertakers," ditto, as a matter of fact, all of us. So that, in practical matters, when we place and refuse trust we are much more discriminating, so the broad trends are the broad trends; but if we want to change things I suggest it is important to look at what we do actually when we place and refuse trust, do we make evidence available to people in ways that are useful for them to make that judgment? Politics is not a consumer good, it is not a private good, you cannot, as it were, model trust in politicians or trust in the media on the sorts of things that go into trust in a brand name, where you have a complaints procedure and you return the goods and you get your money back and you get someone soft-soaping you on the telephone, or whatever it may be; so it needs a rather different approach. I do think that people sense that the evidence is not being supplied by the people whose performance or competence or honesty they are trying to judge is extraordinarily important. That is why I emphasise the role of the media, because many of us are in the position often, and I suggest even those of us who are well-informed and spend a good deal of our life thinking about these things, of having to judge things very second-hand, often we are groping around to see how good was that evidence, we have to restrain ourselves not to believe in knowledge by rumour, and all the rest of it. That is tough. I think that, in the end, it is very important to provide better forms of evidence, which are not provided by politicians themselves or by professionals themselves, and so on, how to do that. Here, I would say, the answer is not transparency. We have made a fetish of transparency in the last 15 years. Transparency is an antidote to secrecy but it is not a mode of communication; too often it is honoured by dissemination, disclosure, putting things on websites. Yes, it is public, but is it communication? No. If actually we want to offer people some basis for placing and refusing trust with discrimination then I think the difference between the GPs and the consultants is quite significant; you talk with your GP rather more, you have a certain sense, you use your cunning, you judge him, or her. It is not so easy with people who are remote; but there are ways, indirect ways, of doing it and I think we should cultivate them. Q337 Chairman: Thank you for that. The issue which really I want to explore with you all, and it draws directly on what you have just said, is that we are doing this inquiry into these things, we are calling the ethical regulators, all these bodies which have been set up in the last ten years to deal with this issue of trust which you have identified in the data you have supplied, in particular, as John has said, the collapse that went on in the early to mid 1990s. We have had now quite an armoury of ethical regulators - Committee on Standards in Public Life, people regulating, public appointments, people looking at business appointments, people doing all kinds of things - yet, from the data, this has done nothing to improve levels of trust. Does this mean this is all a complete waste of time, or does it mean that we have got the wrong models? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: I think I would want to distinguish between management, accountability and regulation. There is, by some bodies, like the Better Regulation Task Force, who have got such a capaciously sloppy definition of regulation that it covers all three and a good deal else besides, roughly speaking, management, downwards and prospective, accountability, upwards and retrospective, regulators, somewhat sideways, with quite constrained remits over certain bodies. On the whole, I am rather impressed by the work of the two things you mentioned, the Committee on Standards in Public Life and corporate governance procedures. I think they have done some good things. I am very unimpressed by what I take to be a very widespread confusion between accountability and management in the way the public sector is doing things. Also, I am sorry to say, I believe that in Parliament we are passing too much sloppy, ill-drafted legislation, which is an extraordinarily dangerous thing when those most affected can no longer read the legislation for themselves. As someone running a small institution 15 years ago, we never had to take legal advice unless we were selling a bit of property, and now we have to do it constantly because sensible, professional people cannot read the legislation adequately for themselves. These are things which may have been the counterbalance to Nolan. Q338 Chairman: You have talked about what you call the culture of suspicion which infects public life, institutions, in a whole variety of ways. Is the argument that the culture of suspicion is so entrenched now in our general culture that it does not matter what institutions we set up to do anything about it, that culture will still, as it were, infect everything? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: I would look at the difference between what we say and what we do. The culture of suspicion is what we say. If you ask the quite different question, whether we still engage with, for example, the types of professionals we say we do not trust, we find a very different picture. When I gave the Reith Lectures on trust, a lady in a wheelchair got the floor at the discussion and she said "I don't trust surgeons; and what's even worse is that my operation has been postponed for three weeks." I did not know quite what to say, and, of course, in those contexts you cannot say anything, but I think that is a very typical view; you say you do not trust but, nevertheless, she was not going to refuse to have the operation. There may have been good reasons, but she trusted enough to put her life in the surgeon's hands. Q339 Chairman: I sense though that what you are kind of admitting is that what we have done in the areas that we are particularly interested in now, these regulatory bodies concerned with standards in public life, they are useful, despite what you say in general about the way in which overregulation, overaccountability, can erode trust rather than strengthen it. The point I am putting is, if you imagine, in terms of recent events, if we did not have a House of Lords Appointments Commission getting to grips with this issue of donors, because we have had the issue for a hundred years and it is only now that we have got something being done about it, if we did not have the Electoral Commission pouring over accounts and donations and loans, it seems to me, the evidence is that these regulators actually are having an objectively good effect, even though subjectively they are seeming to have no effect on people's perception of these things? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: That is why what one calls a regulator seems to me to be very important. I believe passionately in intelligent forms of accountability and governance and I would pigeon-hole, as it were, the bodies that you point to as doing that. Regulators in the more usual sense - Ofcom, Ofwat, Ofsted - it seems to me have had a much more questionable relationship to public trust, in some ways they have generated quite a lot of cynicism, and I think that public service management at a distance has generated quite a lot of cynicism, for good reasons. I do not wish in any way to weaken standards of corporate governance. I believe strongly in declarations of interest, in proper appointments procedures, and so on. There are some silly things going on and the categories used in monitoring ethnic diversity are an intellectual nightmare and quite incoherent, we could do that much better, but there are very good things going on under the heading of governance and holding to account. Holding to account is what I believe we should care about most, but it is not the standard form of regulation, it is something, I think, rather on one side. Mr Kellner: I agree with the premise of your questions, Chairman, indeed I would go further. Plainly, transparency has been a significant component part of a decline in trust. Take the Freedom of Information Act, a very good thing, but how is it used and how are some of the things discovered under the Freedom of Information Act used by the media? It is used to discover who has done things wrong, what has gone wrong, it is about detecting mistakes which might not have been detected in the past. I would go on to say that one of the reasons why transparency has this baleful effect is because it is accompanied by two other things. The first is the nature of news, which is about things that go wrong in specific areas rather than the generality of things going well, so, for example, we have the well-documented finding, over many years, consistently, that when you ask people about their own local school or GP surgery or hospital they are usually pretty satisfied it; when you ask them what is happening to schools or the Health Service nationally they say it is dreadful, because that is what they get from the media. That is the first outrider of transparency, the nature of news. The second outrider is the nature of political discourse, and, in order to minimise offence, perhaps I could make this point by suggesting a parallel. Supposing that the great supermarket chains - Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda, Morrison, and so on - operated in an equally transparent way, with the most minute things about everything they did being available for dissection, and at the same time they spent most of their time slagging each other off, the combination of negative discourse amongst the supermarkets, plus transparency, plus the nature of news, I think, would lead, pretty inevitably, to a decline in public trust in supermarkets in general, even if objectively nothing had changed or even had improved slightly. You can see where I am taking my argument. I am trying to avoid being taken to the Tower of London, or whatever happens to people who insult interrogators. The problem with transparency flows from the context of news and the nature of so much of our political discourse. Professor Curtice: Yes, I would largely agree with most of what Peter has said. Part of the answer to your question. "Has ethical regulation failed?", depends on what you think the objectives of ethical regulation were in the first place. You may want to argue that, irrespective of its impacts on people's subjective perceptions, government is more efficient if it is less corrupt, and if you think transparency in regulation reduces the incidence of corruption, and thereby makes government more efficient, you may want to regard that as being a good thing. You have to ask yourself constantly what is the purpose you are trying to achieve. On the other hand, I would certainly agree that if your purpose is to improve subjective levels of trust in politicians and in governments, albeit I think that is frankly an impossible task, then it is not a good idea. Indeed, I think I would disagree slightly with Lady O'Neill in that I think the truth is that if you have a high level of trust in a person or an institution then you do not feel the need for evidence that they are behaving in a proper manner or they are saying what they will do. You want that evidence when you are no longer sure that the person or the organisation can be trusted and, in a sense, in creating these organisations there has been an admission that the public has lost trust. I think the other thing to say perhaps about ethical regulation, which one needs to bear in mind of course, is that much has been said also about targets in the public sector that also can result in perverse behaviour, which may make things worse. Clearly, the decisions of both the Conservative and Labour Parties to go for loans rather than for actual grants was partly a result of a perverse reaction to the regulatory structure with which they saw themselves being faced under the 2000 Act. The problem will always be that, insofar as you try to engage in more regulation, you always run the risk of perverse behaviour, behaviour that is contrary to what many people might regard as being the kind of ethical behaviour the regulation was trying to achieve in the first place. Q340 Chairman: That is like criminals breaking laws though, is it not; you put a law in place and criminals try to avoid it? It is not the argument for not making the law, is it? Professor Curtice: No, but simply be aware that one of the consequences of tightening regulation is that it is another example of the law of unintended consequences, and in the case of the most recent 'scandal' I think it is primarily the result of a perverse reaction to a regulatory framework. Mr Kellner: To take your example, if you decide that a particular criminal problem needs greater attention and you throw greater police resources at it then the certain consequence is that the amount of recorded crime will go up, even if actually what is happening is that on the ground successful measures are being taken to tackle it. Q341 Kelvin Hopkins: Just on that last point, good law does actually change behaviour - seat-belts, crash-helmets, drinking and driving - and, in a sense, governments have a role in leading opinion sometimes. My questions are about, to John, first of all, the paper that you presented to a parliamentary seminar two years ago, written with Catherine Bromley and Ben Seyd, which we have had circulated to us. That seminar was chaired by our own Committee Chairman. All the statistics presented in that are interesting but they do not really hit you between the eyes as being really very significant, putting one's finger on what the problem is. But one group of statistics did. It is on page 19 of your paper before us. This is the perception of party difference and the change between 1987 and 2001 which correlated precisely with the collapse in voting participation. I can quote them, just for the record. In 1987, five per cent thought there was no difference between the parties, in 1997, 22 per cent thought there was no difference, in 2001, 43 per cent thought there was no difference. Now that strikes me as being very significant; would you not agree? Professor Curtice: Yes, but it is significant, I think, with respect to a different issue. I have long been on record as arguing that if you want to understand the decline in turnout in a number of recent elections, "Don't blame the punters, blame the horses,". There is not enough difference between the political parties, and until recently, at least, it looked as though the elections were over bar the shouting, and that perception, at least so far as the closeness of parties is concerned, had not changed in 2005. That is relevant to understanding the decline in turnout, and I think much more relevant to understanding the decline in turnout than the decline in trust. I am not clear that the lack of difference between political parties can be regarded as being an explanation for the decline in trust; certainly I have never been able to demonstrate that and I am not sure that anybody else has done so. Q342 Kelvin Hopkins: The decline in trust has been steady over a period in all sorts of ways, if you look at the list that Peter has given us just this morning, in almost all spheres. There is only one statistic where there has been any improvement in trust, that is judges. All the others are negative. There has been a general decline in trust, but it was not very high to start with. It is lower now, but it is not a dramatic difference, it is steady. Professor Curtice: There is not even a clear, consistent trend on turnout. Excuse me for engaging headlines, but it is the headline everybody forgets. "There was a record turnout in the 2004 European elections"; Okay, you will tell me it was because of all-postal ballots, but it was not entirely. Turnout in local elections in 2004 and in 2006, outside areas of postal ballots, was basically in line with the norm for English local elections. The turnout in parliamentary by-elections in the last Parliament was in tune for the kinds of by-elections held in Labour seats, and if you look at the turnout in the two by-elections that have been held recently in Scotland this year, again it is not clear that turnout is particularly low for those kinds of elections. If you look at the turnout in those areas where the BNP are fighting you get very high turnouts often. In other words, I would suggest to you that if you are trying to suggest that indeed there is some relationship between trust and turnout, on the basis of historical correlation, it does not really work because it is no longer true that all elections in this country necessarily produce particularly low turnouts for that kind of election. Turnout has recovered in some elections despite the fact that it appears that trust has not. Q343 Kelvin Hopkins: In a sense, are you not making the point again that where there are higher turnouts it is when there are very significant differences between parties? Professor Curtice: I do not disagree with you. It is simply a different subject. Put it like this, if you thought an ethical regulation was going to increase turnout amongst the electorate, I think probably you were a little mistaken. Q344 Chairman: It is not a question of whether it was designed, and it was designed, in great part, to increase trust amongst the electorate; that is why we are asking you about that. Kelvin introduced interesting evidence, to which I thought your answer was going to be "Northern Ireland;" that is, if you want to get big turnouts you have the kind of visceral differences that you find in Northern Ireland? Professor Curtice: Sure, and then when the differences start to disappear the turnout declines in Northern Ireland; or if the institutions that are being elected no longer appear to have any relevance then the turnout falls away again. Q345 Kelvin Hopkins: From my studies of politics, if turnout is extremely high, about 98 per cent, as it was in the Soviet Union, or if it is very, very low, ten per cent, there is something very wrong in both cases. Eighty per cent is healthy, 50 per cent is not very. But, as to trust one of the differences, is it not, is that in the past people had a sense that their party represented a set of beliefs they had themselves? There were three broad themes. There was what I would call patriotic, one-nation conservatism, social democracy on democratic socialism, and the newcomer, which is really taking over now, neo-liberalism free market globalisation philosophy which has sort of infected each of the major parties. Is it not that which has corroded people's belief in politics? They may not have trusted their politicians. They may have thought they drank too much or had themselves illicit affairs, or whatever, but actually, in the end, they were going to fight for what they themselves believed in, and that was important? Professor Curtice: There is no doubt that the proportion of people who feel a strong emotional attachment to a political party has declined and has been declining regularly ever since the 1960s. To go back to our previous conversation, other things being equal, probably that does make it more difficult actually to go out and vote; i.e. probably you do need a rather stronger stimulus to achieve any given level of turnout, but the problem we find is that we just do not have the stimulus recently. So far as using this to explain the decline in trust is concerned, the problem is that the decline in party identification long predates the decline in trust; it is the fact that decline in trust occurs so markedly in the mid 1990s which points to that so strongly. So far as the recent decline is concerned, as opposed to the overall level, which again was always low even when we did have strong emotional attachments to political parties, it is that historical conjunction which makes one suspect that, so far as the recent problems are concerned, the source of exaggeration of the problem, if it is a problem, is sleaze. Thereafter, going back to some of the points the Chairman was making, the problem we have had is, and it fits with what Peter was saying, is that politicians have been putting forward statements saying they are going to be open and honest, and that invites them to be judged by that standard, both by their opponents and by the media. Equally, by setting up an ethical framework, again you are giving people standards by which they can be judged, and if they fail to meet them, failures of process, such as failure to manage to be able to submit your accounts on time, start to become regarded as being allegations of sleaze, when the truth is they may be no more than failures of process and human frailty, rather than anything actually necessarily to do with attempts to corrupt, or in anyway go astray. Q346 Kelvin Hopkins: I think that is a bit hard; but, Peter? Mr Kellner: If I may say one thing, to support and enhance what John said. Remember that, this decline in turnout, it is not a long-term, secular trend, it started in the mid nineties. From 1950 to 1992 there was no secular trend; changes which appeared to be long-term could be explained by the lowering of the voting age in the 1960s and the decline in the quality of the register. We need to take into account these things. Turnout in the 1992 election was arguably the highest in any post-war election, it was two or three points below 1950, but when you take into account voting age and register quality it was probably as high as or higher than it was 42 years earlier: so the symptoms first appeared after 1992. There are two possible explanations and both may be true. The first is that things have happened since 1992 around trust, around sleaze, or whatever, that had caused it. The second is that something was building up behind the dam to do with party identification, and so on, but the dam did not break until the 1990s. Both things may have some truth. The historical point is that something quite clearly happened after 1992 and it did not happen and showed no real signs of happening before 1992. Q347 Kelvin Hopkins: The point I am trying to make is that it is about politics rather than about other things. The big event in 1992 was the collapse of the ERM strategy - which was supported by both major parties in fact - but it was the Conservatives who were in power. The opinion polling at that time - I am sure, Peter, you will remember, the Tory vote collapsed and Labour took off and it never really changed very much until 1997. People had been led to believe that the ERM strategy would be alright in the end and it was not. When their house prices collapsed and they were repossessed, and unemployment went up by a million, they thought, "We've been misled; we've been misled politically." They were misled to an extent by both parties because they both supported the strategy which proved to be a disaster. Subsequent to that both parties coalesced around a neo-liberal consensus. To some extent, some voters have always thought government is a conspiracy against the people, but that surely has increased in recent years. I will give examples. There is massive support for free long-term care for the elderly, there is massive opposition to privatisation, but both parties are refusing even to contemplate changing that policy. There is a sense in which, in the past, one party would have supported one side and another party would have supported the other. There would have been a choice. There is now no longer a choice. Mr Kellner: I agree, and one could throw into the mix what was implicit indeed in what you said that the fall of the Berlin wall and the end of the argument between socialism and capitalism, which is the flip side of your coin about neo-liberalism, may well have played a part. I do believe that there is, in large measure, a straightforward political/ideological explanation, so what has happened to participation in politics, in all sorts of ways, including turnout, I do not believe is a complete explanation. Q348 Chairman: Is not the blossom of what Kelvin is saying, although it is not his argument, that also in this period we are talking about a huge feeling of a loss of control, that somehow there are forces now in the world which at one time politicians could reliably say they could control and people could reliably think that they could control? The fact that we live in times where there is a pervasive sense, whether it is "hordes of people coming from other countries; we cannot control who comes into our country anymore," recent events showing we have got a large number of people who are on the streets who should be in prison, or should be deported, the fact that there are manufacturing plants closing down that are to do with global economic decisions. A generation ago it would have been thought governments should do something about this; nobody any longer thinks this. The fact that there is a pervasive feeling that governments do not have a purchase on this world any more. Surely that leads to - I have got one person nodding in agreement and one person nodding in dissent; so what is it? Professor Curtice: I am just looking at the data, Chairman, which I gather you have had a chance to look at.[2] I refer you to page ten, people's expectations of government, percentage who think it definitely should be the Government's responsibility to achieve, for example, keep prices under control; half of the public still think it should be the Government's responsibility. It is not clear, despite the apparent impact of globalisation, that people have lost their faith in the importance of government in order to ameliorate the effects of markets. It is a good theory; it is very difficult to fit with the evidence. Q349 Chairman: Yes, but you look at the closures we are getting in the car industry at the moment and the massive run-downs; a generation ago ministers would have been in there, promising to stop it, do something about it. Professor Curtice: And it would close a few years later down the track. Q350 Chairman: Now we go along and say, "We're very sorry; the world is a difficult place, and we'll help to retrain you." It is a different world and surely therefore people are making different judgments about the role of government? Professor Curtice: Why should you think that should result in a reduction of trust? You could argue, the opposite way round, that here is an example of politicians being honest with people and saying, "Sorry guys; we might have pretended in the 1970s we could do something about it, but we learned our lesson and we can't do anything about it." There is a long, long decline in manufacturing; our manufacturing is shifting to South-East Asia. Just simply, we have to change what we are doing in this country if we are going to survive. Q351 Chairman: You will invest less in the political process if you think it can do less for you, will you not? Professor Curtice: You might do, yes. I hear everything that Kelvin says, but we are still not sure necessarily that there aren't political issues in our society that can get people interested, of which most clearly and most obviously Iraq is a major example. There are still issues out there, which seriously divide society, on which we have strong emotional arguments on both sides and which people will accept as being important to the future of the country. It may be those issues are not necessarily always about economic regulation, but there are issues about foreign policy and also sometimes about social matters which people still care passionately about and on which we are seriously divided. Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: It is interesting that the parties have backed off from saying that they can control whether the power plants stay open, and so on, but in some ways I think they have also advanced and made themselves supposedly responsible for more things in the eye of the public. I think it is very interesting to reflect on the spread of managerial vocabulary across Government in past years and Government talking, in all solemnity, about meeting their targets, and very nice too, if you can do it. Even where they tried central planning, this proved a tad difficult and I think it is proving extremely difficult in other contexts. This is not an excuse for incompetence or failing to keep the statistics right, or anything like that, it is just an observation that the rhetoric of delivery has grown enormously, although not when it comes to being able to bail out the private sector. Mr Kellner: If I have understood what John said about controlling prices, I would draw exactly the opposite conclusion. It seems to me that there has not been much of a decline in what the public think the Government ought to do, what it should bear responsibility for; the decline has come in the sense to which governments fulfil that responsibility. My belief is that, the growth in support for minority parties, BNP, UKIP, Greens, admittedly in part due to the arrival of proportional elections, where it is less of a wasted vote, I think there is something more than that going on. Certainly our YouGov evidence suggests, in the case of the BNP, that only a very small proportion of the public, and indeed not that high a proportion of BNP voters, are in the conventional sense racist, i.e. for example, offended by the thought of Asian newsagents or black footballers. There is something far more cultural going on about control, about the sense that Britain is becoming a foreign country, they feel uncomfortable, they feel unsafe, they feel insecure and they feel that politicians are not solving the problems which affect their daily life. Then it becomes almost a semantic argument about where does trust fit in that, and it depends whether you define trust narrowly or broadly, but I think it is an important part of the mix. Professor Curtice: Again, Peter, the rise in immigration post-dates the decline in trust. The rise in immigration is essentially post-1997, the decline in trust predates that, so it is not obvious that is a key driver. I say to you also, I do not have all the data here but if you ask people whether or not they think governments have actually achieved some of these things, like providing decent healthcare for all, etc., it is around only one in three actually who think they have been unsuccessful on their last reading. It is not necessarily the case that people think there is a big gap because the Government should be able to do this and they are not able to do it; the gap is not as big as you might imagine. Mr Kellner: From our own evidence, in terms of asking, in the context of this Government, about the last few years, the only thing which more than 50 per cent consistently say the Government has achieved is a stable economy. When you ask about cutting waiting times in hospitals, or better exam results for children, or lower crime, or indeed more prosperous pensioners, all the things where the statistics show improvement, quite unambiguously, very few members of the public believe it. Q352 Chairman: Do you accept Onora's argument though, which I thought was fascinating, which was the more that the Government becomes pseudo-managerialist, sets all these targets, rather like the transparency argument, the more you invite the corrosion of trust, because you are never going to meet them, in a micro-management sense. Does it not actually feed the problem, even though you think you are doing something about the problem? Mr Kellner: The point I was making is that even where they do meet targets, at least in some broad sense, cutting waiting times, improving exam results, and so on, people do not believe it. Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: I think this is one of the reasons why it is important to think a bit about what evidence the public have, and I understand entirely why, if you are looking at polling data on the levels of trust, you do not think trust is connected to evidence. Those questions are designed to work, regardless of the evidence that people have; they ask this generalised question across "Do you trust nurses?" However, whether the evidence is consulted or not, that the evidence is available, I think, in the end, is quite important. Every time there is a crunch, a scandal, an allegation, if there is no evidence to be found, it goes very badly for those who are taken to have evidence. Trust is, of course, an economical way of proceeding with the minimal take on the evidence. When you take your car to a new garage you do a very minimal poll of the neighbourhood to find someone who trusts that mechanic, but if the evidence were not there, if it was discovered that the garage was a spare parts, second-hand dealer, who was selling bits of your car on the side, for example, then things would go very wrong. Q353 Mr Burrowes: Specifically to Lady O'Neill. You referred earlier to communication as being the key issue, and that seems to imply that if we, as politicians, spin better we are going to be able to solve the issue? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: Spin, I take it, is one more of these one-sided forms of quasi-communication, like self-expression, like disclosure, like dissemination, like transparency. I take the ethics of communication very seriously but communication does not work unless it is audience-sensitive, and if the audience is some particular section of the public it has to be conveyed in a way they reach. I believe there are ways in which this can be done. They tend to be a bit boring, whether it is a politician spinning or whether it is a newspaper spinning, it is the sort of thing where sensible people draw back a bit and do not say, "Oh, you know, they're all the same," at the things that perhaps we do not like to hear. Genuine communication does work, I think. I think it is very interesting to consider the 'frequently asked questions' leaflets that are used in the Health Service. The best ones, and, I grant you, some of them are not good ones, are extremely good exercises, enabling people to find out more and when they think they have found out enough, to stop there. Professor Curtice: Just to reinforce that, trust breaks down when the evidence contradicts your presumptions and your assumptions of what the person said they were going to do. The problem with spin is that usually it consists of a partial take on the evidence, a take which is designed to put the speaker in the best possible light. The problem is, of course, that then you discover, because it is a partial take, that you cannot necessarily trust the speaker any more because the speaker does not necessarily give you the full picture. That is the problem with spin, that it does mean that people find actually there is a gap between what the speaker says and what eventually turns out to be the apparent reality. It comes back to Peter's point about authenticity. Q354 Mr Burrowes: Just taking up authenticity, in relation to standards and trust, is there any link that you see between the individual politicians and their character and trust? Professor Curtice: In what ways? Q355 Mr Burrowes: You referred to the issue that it is about what people do, in terms of proving what they do, communicating what they do; is there anything about the relationship in terms of trust and the character of individual politicians? Professor Curtice: I am not sure there is much evidence on this. The only thing I can say to you is that there is now a fair amount of evidence that those politicians who take steps to communicate effectively and loudly with their electorate, whether they say it truthfully necessarily is another matter, will end up being usually somewhat more successful electorally within their constituency. Local political activity matters. Q356 Mr Burrowes: I will take character just a bit further, in terms of standards. I just wonder whether we have, some may say, higher expectations of our politicians, others may not, but have we just dumbed down, in terms of expectations of, for example, the character of individual politicians? Years ago, would it have been the case that there would have been expectation individually of politicians not to get involved in affairs with their employees and the like, but now, frankly, people push it into touch as not an expectation that matters so much for politicians, it is a private affair? Professor Curtice: I think actually there are two contradictory trends in that area. There is no doubt that, as a society, there is a distinction here; social trends indicate that so far as sex outside marriage is concerned nobody worries any more, that is fine. But if you actually, are married and have sex with somebody who is not your husband, or wife, that is still not regarded necessarily as particularly good though it is no longer regarded as a serious offence, so long as you are open about it. Q357 Mr Burrowes: In terms of politicians, the expectation of what we want to see of our politicians and the character of politicians, the fact that has now been dumbed down, the expectations, has that led to a trend of mistrust as well? Professor Curtice: I think my immediate reaction to that is, again, the crucial thing has always tended to be, when the storm breaks over you, is whether you are thought to have told the truth or not. Back in the 1960s, John Profumo got into trouble essentially because he denied what eventually turned out to be the truth, and I think that has always been the case. If a politician has got into trouble over personal morality, basically if you lie about it and you are found out, or if then people no longer can trust you, you are in trouble. I am not sure the fact that we are more liberal in our attitudes towards sexuality means necessarily that, as a result, we trust our politicians less. Arguably, our standards are lower and therefore it is easier to get away with it. Q358 Mr Burrowes: We are not going into just the issue of sexuality, I suppose I led on that, but the issue of character generally with politicians, whether we are dumbing down generally in our assessment of what we want to see from politicians? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: I think this is an extraordinarily hard question to answer because our evidence about what was going on in the flavour of the 1950s, when everything was so trustworthy and so trusting, may be extremely poor evidence. Some historians are asking themselves the interesting question now, "Should we do more work on the history of the increase in trust in certain periods?" We have a great deal of work on historical periods in which clearly there was tremendous diminution of trust. We subject our unfortunate teenagers, instead of to a fairly rich diet of history they get a little snippet of Nazi studies, as a sort of warning about what can go wrong. I am all for the warning, but why do we not study the periods in which trust increases? One reason is that there is a sort of view, and you can see it a bit in the work of Bob Puttnam, the sociologist who has written on the decline of trust, that it is always only decline; in the past there was this golden age and now it is declining. I just am sceptical about that and I suspect, for example, that all those post-war fortunes were not made by conduct of the very, very highest standard. I may be wrong, but we need more evidence. Q359 Mr Burrowes: Who is the best guarantor of good governance; who can we rely upon to keep us up to speed? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: Horses for courses, but I would suggest three criteria. One is that if you want a good system of accountability or of governance, the people who do the task had better be adequately informed, they had better be adequately independent of those whom they hold to account and they had better be competent at communicating in intelligible ways to the relevant audiences. I think that is why I am quite pro the Nolan standards because I think those are implementable, whereas I am very sceptical about many aspects of the new public sector management, which I think possibly is not implementable. Mr Kellner: An institution which I do not think we have mentioned this session is the political party, as distinct from the MP. My own judgment, though if you ask me for the direct part of the evidence I am not sure I could provide it, is that historically one of the cases for parties is that they are a bulwark against dictatorship and the inspiring, mad leader, who goes off and, through charisma, gets elected and then does immeasurable harm; but they are also the conduits by which normal people connect, with politicians. I am pretty sure, if one did a poll today, one would find that parties, as a phenomenon, I am not talking about Labour or Conservative or Liberal Democrat but parties as a phenomenon, are held in pretty low esteem. I am not sure there is a solution to the problem; what was it that somebody said, the existence of a problem does not necessarily mean the existence of a solution, but I do think it is a real problem. Q360 Mr Prentice: Peter, I think you told us at the very beginning that 56 per cent of people believe that peerages were sold under the present Government and 57 per cent under the previous Conservative Government. What does it take for people to feel scandalised? Do people feel scandalised, or not, about these allegations which are current at the moment that peerages are up for sale? Mr Kellner: My short answer is that you need something which is not there at the moment, which is a sense that "These wrong-doings are harming my life," the citizen's life. In a sense, the protection the current Government has is the inflation figures, the mortgage rates, the jobs numbers, and so on; there is not the sense amongst most people that "My life is adversely affected by all this," and therefore these things are seen as the circuses part of politics. When they drift over to becoming the bread part of politics, that is when you have a problem. Q361 Mr Prentice: Things which happen here at Westminster, it is okay, as long as it does not touch on people's lives? Mr Kellner: Not that it is okay, and, in a sense, this echoes something which Onora was saying earlier on, what do you do about it? If your life is reasonably comfortable and you see this as part of the spectacle of politics, part of the diet of tabloid front pages, and I would cite the recent stories around the Deputy Prime Minister as a very good example of this, this is, I think, viewed much as Coronation Street or EastEnders is viewed, rather than "This is something which affects my life and my family's life." Professor Curtice: I have a slightly different take on it. In the end, if all we discover is, here, on the left-hand side, people give political parties money, and then, on the right-hand side, somebody, in thinking about who to put in the House of Lords, thinks, "Oh, well, so-and-so has been pretty good to us, so we'll..." i.e. there is no direct connection between the money and the peerage, then probably it is not going to be that important. On the other hand, if - this is if - somebody were able to demonstrate a clear link, i.e. somebody was told, in effect, "If you give us money we'll give you a peerage; guaranteed" and if those allegations were to involve senior politicians then I think that would affect people. In other words, you get to the point where essentially there is criminal impropriety. It is very difficult, I think, for somebody to survive that. Q362 Mr Prentice: You were talking earlier about sleaze, and I am not saying the Deputy Prime Minister is sleazy, and that will show on the record that I said that, but the fact that he has retained Admiralty House and Dorney Wood, do people think there is something improper about that? Professor Curtice: I am not sure that they think it is improper. Basically, the public are extremely reluctant to accept that politicians should be paid, should have expenses, or should have perks, as they regard them. As you know, every time MPs think about increasing their salaries there is a row about it. There is a general public pervasiveness that they do not want to fund political parties, they do not want to fund MPs, they do not want to fund political institutions; you know all of this, it is pervasive, it is long-standing. In the case of the Deputy Prime Minister, the argument goes a little bit further, because it says, "Hey, the guy's got the perks but it's not obvious he's got the responsibilities that are supposed to go with the perks." Therefore, you have got the story. Q363 Mr Prentice: People have low expectations of politicians in general but also they recognise that politics is not a vicar's tea party, I suppose. Can I bring in Lady O'Neill, because the Reith Lectures are absolutely fascinating and I want to come in on this point about deception: when is deception acceptable? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: That is a ginormous question. I think that it comes very close to the cases where people do worry about it, as opposed to saying "That's politicians for you," or, as they might say in another context, "That's businessmen for you," "That's sportsmen for you," and dismiss it. Deception, and particularly being the victim of deception, is something people take very, very hard. Q364 Mr Prentice: What about being economical with the truth? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: Being economical with the truth is a famous phrase, it was Lord Armstrong's phrase, was it not, and it got him into trouble, and it has been used before. Actually, being economical with the truth is something we all do, all the time. There is no such thing as telling the whole truth, and when one swears that oath in court one knows it is strictly impossible. I always think that the crucial thing is not being deliberately inaccurate; that is, I think, where the shoe pinches people. If they think someone has deliberately put across an inaccuracy, that will make them angry, but I do not suspect that they will be angry if they think there is some truth that they were not told, unless it is a specific responsibility to tell that truth. Q365 Mr Prentice: What if being economical with the truth misleads people? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: There can be innocent cases and there can be vile cases there. You can be economical with the truth in that you simply take it for granted somebody knows something already, therefore you simply leave that out; actually, they did not know it, it makes a huge difference, it is a disaster. Nobody is going to say that bit of being economical with the truth was... Q366 Mr Prentice: Let me give you a specific example. After the Iraq war, Clare Short said, publicly, that the Defence and Overseas Policy Committee of the Cabinet had not met in the run-up to the war. When the then Cabinet Secretary came before this Committee, I put that to Andrew Turnbull, now Lord Turnbull, and I said to him "Is it true, what Clare Short said?" and he paused, reflected and said, "Well, not really. The Cabinet discussed Iraq on 20 occasions," or something like that, and I did not pursue the line of questioning because I thought, if going to war was being discussed in Cabinet, that satisfied me. It was only subsequently, with the Butler Report, and so on, that we all learned that papers had not been distributed to the Cabinet, it was like PowerPoint presentations, in the run-up to war. I have reflected on that since and I have thought to myself the Cabinet Secretary had an obligation to tell Parliament what really happened and - I have got to watch my language here, I should not say 'dissemble' - not to craft his reply so as to mislead the Committee. Do you understand? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: I think I understand it and there is a difficult thing in there, which is that saying "The Cabinet discussed it" was true, I imagine, and if it was true, was that misleading you? I would have thought that the problem is that your assumption, as mine would have been, was that Cabinet meetings have a degree of preparation and provision of papers, and that turned out not to have been the case, or sometimes not the case, or not the case in some matters. It is difficult to know about the particular matter, but the absence of papers, in general, seems to me no way to run serious meetings. Q367 Mr Prentice: I mention that only because we are talking about the erosion of trust, and after that experience I am certainly much more sceptical about information that I hear from senior civil servants. Peter, do you want to comment? Mr Kellner: Just to add something into this, which is a new dimension but I think it is particularly relevant, which is the way these kinds of issues or controversies filter through to public perception. In my experience, it is very, very rare for any one particular set of facts or events to transform people's minds. It is a different kind of process. Now and for the last two or three years, the public have felt consistently they were lied to over Iraq. It was not just one thing but it was a whole series of things, around this, around David Kelly, around the Hutton and Butler inquiries, and so on, and at some point different people, because of the accumulation of things, said "I now no longer trust these people." To take a parallel thing and put it into context, running back to the Ecclestone affair, three or four months after Labour first came to power, it had no measurable impacts on the Prime Minister's rating, attitudes to the Labour Party or trust. I suspect had that not happened then, if it was lifted bodily and happened now, it would be very different, because the issue might not be any different but the context would be different. Then the public were not ready to absorb the information that the Prime Minister might have done something a bit off; now they are and therefore it would have a different dynamic. You should always look at the dynamic of public responses to these issues as well as the intrinsic issues themselves. Professor Curtice: There is an important distinction to make here. Governments of all parties make mistakes, get things wrong, mislead and eventually get turfed out of office. The issue of trust about which people have been exercised in the 1990s is one which is not particular to a particular Prime Minister, a particular party or a particular government; it is the feeling that the political community as a whole was less worthy of trust. Ethical regulation may well result in helping you to find out the mistakes that governments make, or when government ministers or civil servants dissemble about the truth, that may be true, but I take its principal purpose to be either to try to reduce corruption in the level of the community as a whole or increase the level of trust amongst the community as a whole, whatever is your objective. It is about the community as a whole, rather than necessarily particularly governments. In the end particular governments will make mistakes, they will become unpopular, and we have elections in order to act as a judgment on the failings of particular parties and politicians, as opposed to the community in general. Q368 Mr Prentice: This is slightly different; it is the role of the media in all this. I would like to ask Lady O'Neill, and again this is something which you covered in the last of your Reith Lectures, you talked about journalists, how they report things, and you say there is a case to be made for journalists declaring financial and other interests, including conflicts of interest, and so on, and cheque-book journalism, and I am thinking maybe about the Tracy Temple affair here. You say there should be perhaps a requirement to disclose within any story who paid whom how much and for which contribution. That would change the whole climate, would it not, if we had journalism organised on that basis? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: Yes, and I think there is a larger context in which this is all playing. We enacted freedom of information; that was a very defensible piece of legislation against the background of the European Convention. We did not enact any protection for privacy, which is also part of the European Convention, and, in effect, I think we have greatly increased the power of the least accountable part of the political community, in the broader sense, at the expense of the power of government, legislature, Civil Service. Could we do anything about it? As I have stuck my neck out already I will stick it out again. It is commonly said, no, we could not, because if we reconfigured freedom of the press in any way we would be breaching human rights and cutting back on press freedom. I do not think so. The classical arguments for press freedom are not the same as freedom for expression. Freedom for expression, as it were, unconditional freedom, is a great thing for individuals who are powerless and you could argue for it perhaps with weak media in the 19th century, but I do not think News International should have freedom of expression. Press freedom needs very strong protection, but in my view part of that protection would be, though under present conditions it would have to come from the media, forms of accountability, internal to the way the media work, of the sort I suggested. I do not think that declaring conflicts of interest is any more undignified for a journalist, for an editor, than it is for us. Q369 Mr Prentice: Could the BBC take the lead? I am not entirely sure if the BBC can pay for them; they must be able to pay for stories? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: I think certainly they could and I think that, if we go back to the episode you were referring to, it would have been quite helpful for any citizen to know that Mr Gilligan was earning a great deal of money writing for other organs, and so on, for a number of BBC journalists and editors. To me, it is a surprising thing that the code, the producers' and editors' code, does not really deal with conflict of interest. I think they are generally very careful. Equally, I find it extraordinary that financial journalists, with the exception of some, writers, Financial Times, have not thought about how extraordinarily risky it is to have people out there who are commenting on the stock market without adequate systems of ensuring that they and their friends and relations do not stand to benefit. We know there have been scandals, and this is fully addressable but cannot be addressed by a Press Complaints Commission which operates on the assumption that good news is a consumer good, and a complaints procedure is what you want. Yes, you want a complaints procedure for some things, but it will never address these things. Professor Curtice: I should just say, parenthetically, as an occasional freelance contributor to the BBC, that the BBC has tightened up in this area and indeed now you are required, as a freelance contributor, to notify the BBC of any apparent or actual conflict of interest which might involve your engagement with the BBC. Q370 Chairman: I am glad Gordon has raised this, because I thought we had let the media off quite lightly in the conversation this morning, and you have not, in your work, but we have, I think, this morning. It cannot be irrelevant to this discussion that we have a media culture - and I am not talking now about just the red-tops either - which assumes that all politicians are either knaves or fools. The typical headline in the Mail or Express every day starts with "Now they are...", "Now they are releasing rapists on the streets." Each day it is a scandal in this competitive scramble for readers. Politicians, of course, are the people who are least able to say or do anything useful about this, but it is difficult to believe that this culture, which crosses the media, does not contribute decisively to this culture of erosion of belief in even the possibility of public life? Professor Curtice: If I may make just two points, in response to that. The first is, as I kind of indicated in my opening remarks, it is difficult to get at, but certainly, simply segmenting the public by the nature of their media consumption, it becomes very, very difficult to demonstrate that, for example, over a period of time, tabloid readers are particularly becoming more cynical. So if it has an impact it is a pervasive impact, i.e. it reaches beyond the original readers of this material to the general public; that is what you have to believe. The second thing I would say is that one of the news values that the media does operate on is, and it comes back to this question of differences between rhetoric and reality, if a politician says one thing and the media discover there is something else, that tends to have a news value to it. I think, in part, one of the reasons why the media have run particularly with these kinds of stories, frankly, does come back to the fact that politicians themselves said, "Hey, back to basics; we're going to be open and honest." The media also spend a lot of time saying, "Well, Government policy is going to improve the public services, so let's look to see whether the public services are improving or not," - if they are not improving it tends to get headlined. In exactly the same way, if politicians have campaigned, or have claimed, to say they are going to be more ethical, more open, more honest, that gives the media an excuse to delve into these stories in a way which otherwise would not be true. In other words, I think, in part, politicians and political parties have to stop setting themselves up on this issue. If they stop setting themselves up on this issue then the media will have less reason to pursue these kinds of stories. Mr Kellner: I was a journalist for about 30 years and I like to think I have moved to a more honest profession as a pollster, though not everybody would agree. I agree entirely with what you say, Chairman. I am appalled by the way much of the media has behaved, but, I have to say, I am almost as appalled by the way politicians, in practice, collaborate, conspire, with the media, in terms of the media's own agenda. When I was a journalist I had countless discussions, and I suspect almost any journalist in Westminster would be able to say the same thing, where the media has been deplored, often rightly, but, nevertheless, there has been the leak, the allegation, the anonymous bit of back-stabbing. Politicians assist the media in the way they operate, and if there are criticisms of the media, to some extent, those criticisms wash back to the political community itself. Q371 Kelvin Hopkins: I want to agree very strongly with what Peter was saying about that. Is it not vital - in a world where governments have the power to take us to war and do terrible things - that the media gives politicians a constant hard time and makes sure that truths do emerge from beneath all the spin and the propaganda and the manipulation of opinion that goes on? Professor Curtice: That was why I said, right at the beginning, you have to ask yourself how trusting do you want the public to be of politicians; they do have extraordinary power and, arguably, a degree of scepticism is healthy. The original American research of the 1950s in this whole area said, "Well, okay, a degree of trust is useful to good governance but too much trust is bad because then you do not have enough checks and balances." It is a question of balance. Mr Kellner: What I would say is, yes, it is an important part of proper journalism to discover the truth; you could argue it is the sole function of journalism to get at the truth. Journalism as a business is about creating a commodity called 'news' and the issue is what is the connection between news and truth; and to pose the question is to give the answer, which is that it is closer in some journalists and in some media organisations than in others. Q372 Chairman: Very quickly, just so we can tie up some loose ends, if we can. Onora, your argument about transparency was interesting and I want just to ask you this: is your argument that transparency is dangerous, or that it is not enough? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: It is mainly that it is not enough, and in settling for transparency as the chief good of public communication I think we have settled for too low a standard. We are on to the proper standard now, truth, not talking about the whole truth but at least not peddling inaccuracies to the public more than one needs to, and the question whether that requires journalists to give politicians a hard time is pretty variable. Some of the best interviewers any of us have known have not done it by giving people a hard time, and some of those who regularly give politicians a hard time do not get the best out of their interviewees. I think, that sort of macho culture of journalism, there is a bit of pretence that only that will get the truth; probably it does not, in many cases. Getting the truth, insofar as it is possible, still seems to me above all what a press is for in a democracy, so that citizens can judge rather more things for themselves. If we cannot rely on tabloids or broadsheets - they are not so broad now are they - then we are falling back, unavoidably, very much on the BBC, and its governance is the absolutely crucial thing for us. We are pretty fortunate there, because I think that none of us is so robust as not to be susceptible to knowledge by rumour, innuendo and suggestion, and the BBC is more careful to check it, but it is still amazing that we do not have the regular practice of fact-checking in our print media. In the United States they cannot believe this. It is a humble discipline but it does do some things. Q373 Mr Prentice: And the BBC, as they say of Sky News, is never wrong for long? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: It has had its effect quickly. Q374 Chairman: Again, it is a sort of shorthand question. You have spoken about intelligent accountability and that is a very nice concept. What I want just to ask you really is, insofar as you can make a judgment on this, the kind of ethical regulation system that we have put in place in the last ten years and we have alluded to briefly today, in broad terms, do you think that does reflect your view of what intelligent accountability looks like? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: If we mean essentially the Committee on Standards in Public Life, I think it has done quite a lot; their pushing it down to parish level may not have been sensible. If we mean that plus the new Standards in Corporate Governance, I think that is good too. I come out of thinking about corporate governance and charity governance with a worry that certain things are being pushed in the box-ticking direction, as in some aspects of Standards in Public Life. I think this is a very important enterprise and I do think quite a lot of people have got jobs for very proper reasons who might have been overlooked under other circumstances, so that bringing, as it were, appointments procedures into being the routine way in which appointments are made seems to me to have done a lot. If that is what you are meaning by ethical regulation, I would give quite a high rating to what has been done. I am not so certain about other things which, under these flabbier conceptions of regulation, get called ethical regulation. Q375 Chairman: Two final questions, to take us to current events. John Prescott loses his trousers and there are demands for inquiries under the Ministerial Code. The Home Office loses a thousand foreign criminals and we do not even get an inquiry. Is there something odd going on here? Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: I think there is something culturally bananas. What can one say. That is probably very unparliamentary language, but I cannot see there is the slightest interest in what the Deputy Prime Minister has done in his spare time, and of course I have been very careful not to pander to the issue by reading about it, so I may know less than some people. It is hardly important, in the long run of things, and the fact that he retains certain perks, well there have been ministers without portfolio in the past, I am not really certain that this is a big issue either. On the other hand, the fact that there appears to be no system for keeping track of people upon release from prison on probation or on licence seems to me a very serious thing, and now that doubt has been cast on the figures about those who might have been candidates for consideration for being deported I am beginning to wonder about the other people who have been released; there is rather a lot of them. Professor Curtice: Could it not be argued that, in the case of the Deputy Prime Minister, he is still in office, albeit not such a grand office; in the case of the Home Office, the Minister has gone. Are you not underestimating the traditional forms of parliamentary accountability here? Q376 Chairman: No, but that takes us into deeper territories, which we explored with Gus O'Donnell when he came to see us earlier this week. Just finally, when I look at your recently-done table - thank you for doing it for us, by the way - "Whom do the public trust?", looking at that table, if you were the Prime Minister at the moment, it would not seem very sensible picking a fight with judges, would it? Mr Kellner: Maybe, occasionally, politicians, even Prime Ministers, do things that they think are right rather than they think are popular. I am not saying he is right, or not, but one thing I find, to take the point slightly more seriously, is that we ought to go through those episodes and issues where the Prime Minister has taken a hit. Oddly enough, it is because he has been honest and faithful to his view of what should be done, whereas had he behaved more cynically and read the polls and not invaded Iraq, for example, and maybe not pick a fight with the judges now, he might be more popular and he might be more trusted, even though, in fact, he had behaved more cynically. Professor Curtice: Perhaps the judges are more popular because they are being attacked by the Prime Minister. Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: Perhaps the judges are popular because they do not speak to the media. Chairman: Your last remark invites a new conversation, but which we shall not be able to have. I think we have had an absolutely fascinating discussion. I am sorry the Committee was a little depleted but it is the third meeting we have had this week and I suspect some members are a bit exhausted. All this is recorded, it will feed very much our inquiry and the wider public debate, I hope, and we have opened up issues, I think, which go just way beyond the narrow confines of a particular inquiry into some very, very important areas. Thank you very, very much indeed. Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve: Thank you for inviting us. Chairman: Thank you. [1] Annex 1 [2] Annex 1 |