Cynicism rules, OK!

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A few weeks ago, I found myself standing outside a handsome office building on London’s Embankment, staring at a blue plaque.

According to the plaque, this was Savoy Hill — one of the first homes of the British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) after it began broadcasting in November 1922, exactly 90 years ago.

Today, seven days after the shambolic resignation of BBC director-general George Entwistle, that first BBC looks almost completely unrecognisable.

Worlds apart: The BBC is unrecognisable from the cheery amateur company it was 90 years ago

Back then, its handful of employees were largely drawn from engineering firms such as the Marconi Company. Its ethos was one of cheerful amateurism, and inside its tiny studio, the amiable spirit of the British boffin prevailed.

Above all, it was an institution with a profound sense of moral mission, epitomised by its first director-general, the stern Scottish Presbyterian John Reith.

Under Reith, the BBC refused to broadcast before noon on Sundays so that listeners would attend church instead. And one BBC legend holds that when Reith caught an announcer kissing his secretary, he banned the man from reading the late-night religious programme, Epilogue.

As the BBC marked its 90th birthday this week, those innocent days seem a long way away. 

The celebrations were almost completely overshadowed by the fallout from Newsnight’s catastrophically inaccurate allegations against Lord McAlpine, which forced the resignation of George Entwistle.

Shame: Entwistle resigned from the BBC following Newsnight's inaccurate allegations against Lord McAlpine

And even the BBC’s greatest admirers must admit that the scandal surrounding Jimmy Savile, now exposed as a squalid child abuser, has left a deep stain.

But the furore engulfing the BBC is just one of an apparently endless number of recent controversies to have soiled the reputation of Britain’s greatest institutions. From Parliament and the police to the banks and the courts, the tide of allegations has rolled inexorably on.

A generation ago, it would have seemed unthinkable that a newspaper would hack into an abducted girl’s phone, that an MP might fiddle his expenses, or that a hospital would allow an eccentric DJ to rampage through its children’s wards.

Perhaps we were naive. If so, our naivety has been comprehensively dispelled.

Polls show that the British people are inexorably losing faith in their governing elites and institutions.

According to researchers Ipsos-Mori, only 29 per cent of us trust our bankers, while a mere 19 per cent trust the Press. In just two years, trust in our judges has fallen by 8 per cent and in teachers by 7 per cent.

Out of touch: Both David Cameron and Nick Clegg received terrible favourability ratings in the last poll

But these professions are positively popular compared with those most loathed and despised characters, our nation’s politicians. Astonishingly, just 14 per cent of us trust politicians to tell the truth, and only 17 per cent of us trust government ministers. 

As for our leaders themselves, David Cameron’s favourability rating stands at minus 29 per cent, while Nick Clegg’s is an atrocious minus 45 per cent.

The turnout for Thursday’s three by-elections was shamefully small: 18 per cent in Manchester Central (the lowest in a parliamentary by-election since World War II) and 25 per cent in Cardiff South; and even worse — only 15 per cent — for the new votes for police and crime commissioners.

These figures, which make a mockery of the democratic process, tell a terribly disheartening story.

Perhaps never in our modern history has the reputation of politics itself been so tarnished, and never has the lack of trust in our governing institutions been so glaringly apparent.

What does this say about the health of our democracy? It is little wonder, though, that Parliament’s reputation is in the gutter. Many of us will never forgive our MPs for the grotesque avarice and corruption of the expenses scandal.

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Two weeks ago, the Labour MP Denis MacShane, formerly an extravagant cheerleader for the European Union, was forced to quit after revelations that he had submitted 19 bogus invoices for expenses. And this week, the disgraced former Labour MP Margaret Moran, who fiddled £53,000 in expenses, narrowly escaped prison after a judge ruled that she was ‘too depressed’ to stand trial.

You would not expect this sort of seedy, small-time graft from a double-glazing salesman, let alone a member of one of the oldest and most prestigious parliaments in the world. 

But then Parliament is not, frankly, the institution it was. Often the chamber is virtually deserted, with MPs preferring to court their friends in the media, cuddle up to their corporate sponsors or update their Twitter accounts.

The ghastly spectacle of Nadine Dorries abandoning the voters of Mid Bedfordshire for the gimcrack fame of ITV’s I’m A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! rather says it all.

Many commentators have described her bug-swallowing antics as the lowest point in parliamentary history. Certainly it is hard to imagine, say, Pitt the Younger, William Gladstone, David Lloyd George or Margaret Thatcher having behaved with such risible indifference to dignity and good taste.

Then there is the spectacle of the Speaker’s wife, Sally Bercow, hinting that Lord McAlpine was a paedophile on Twitter, only to backtrack when it emerged the allegations were completely false.

Meanwhile, it emerged last week that her husband was trying to interfere with the independence of the Parliamentary expenses watchdog, reawakening fears that our representatives are interested only in feathering their nests at our expense.

That may seem unfair: after all, there are plenty of decent, hard-working and law-abiding MPs. But mud sticks, and goodness knows there seems to be a lot of it about.

Yet the public revulsion over the political process is merely one symptom of a deeper malaise. Look at the police, for example.

For decades, children were taught to respect the bobby on the beat; as late as the 1970s, polls found that nine out of ten people trusted the police — thanks, partly, to their cuddly Dixon Of Dock Green image.

Alas, PC George Dixon, the star of the famously cosy BBC series which ran for 21 years, would not feel at home in today’s constabulary.

Many people, especially in Liverpool, will find it impossible ever to forgive the police for their disgraceful conduct after the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989, when senior South Yorkshire officers lied and lied to conceal their culpability in the deaths of 96 innocent fans.

That one of the architects of the cover-up, Norman Bettison, rose to be Chief Constable of West Yorkshire — a post from which he has now resigned — says a great deal about the crooked, incestuous milieu in which he operated.

I yield to no one in my belief that the police deserve our admiration and respect. They are, after all, the guardians of our freedom. But after the Hillsborough revelations, who would instinctively trust them again?

Besmirched and unforgiven: People will always remember the police's disgraceful conduct at Hillsborough

Sadly, it is the same story with many other institutions that were once seen as impeccable pillars of society.

The judiciary, for example, are no longer held in automatic respect, partly because they often seem so limp and powerless in the face of European courts and directives.

It is little wonder that many ordinary people are losing faith in the British justice system. Even now, the Coalition is planning to introduce more secret courts, with judges listening to civil cases behind closed doors.

Once again, transparency and democracy are being sacrificed at the altar of so-called national security. Do our rulers care nothing for our proud traditions of law and freedom?

Then there is the NHS, the institution that film director Danny Boyle celebrated so enthusiastically in his acclaimed Olympic opening ceremony.

Polls show that ordinary Britons admire the NHS more than any other institution — no doubt because, at crucial moments such as childbirth, illness and death, most of us are so grateful for the aid and comfort of our doctors and nurses.

Yet, just like the BBC, the NHS appears to be up to its neck in the Jimmy Savile scandal. There are stories of Savile scouring the wards at Stoke Mandeville Hospital and Leeds General Infirmary for victims.

What were they thinking? Savile was allowed to work as a volunteer at the high-security Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, equipped with his own set of keys

Almost unbelievably, this weird and unstable man was not only allowed to work as a volunteer at the high-security Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, he had his own keys and was able to go in and out of patients’ rooms. 

What on earth were the authorities thinking?

Of course no institution can ever be perfect. Human beings are weak and feeble creatures; none of us is immune to the odd moment of laziness or selfishness, or downright incompetence.

Perhaps, then, we might turn to more spiritual institutions for guidance and inspiration? Not a bit of it. For more than half a century, the Church of England — once the essential pillar of our moral order and a key element of the body politic — has been engaged in a gigantic funk, chucking its traditions overboard in a desperate attempt to turn itself into a self-help group from the coast of California.

Alas, the appointment of the traditionally-inclined Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury has probably come too late. He is, after all, taking over a church in which many vicars refuse even to use the Book Of Common Prayer — one of the greatest works in the English language — preferring the management-speak of a PowerPoint presentation instead.

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church reels from one abuse scandal to another.

So the list of accusations goes on. Teachers are accused of inflating their pupils’ GCSE coursework marks; newspapers are accused of routinely hacking into celebrities’ phones.

Enlarge   The age of inquiry: Lord Justice Leveson will report on media ethics in the next couple of weeks

No wonder, then, that we live in the age of the inquiry, from the bloated circus under Lord Justice Leveson to the innumerable investigations into the Savile affair. As Labour’s Yvette Cooper pointed out, there are now so many inquiries into the former BBC presenter — including three different BBC inquiries, a Department of Health inquiry, several hospital inquiries, a Crown Prosecution Service inquiry and an inquiry by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary — that his crimes seem likely to become the best documented events in British history.

My fear is that all of this will inevitably have a corrosive effect. Although it is never possible to eliminate corruption entirely, public life depends upon trust.

During the high points in our modern history — at the peak of the Victorian age, for example, or when Britain stood alone against the Nazis — our central institutions commanded the instinctive loyalty and respect of millions.

Institutions such as Parliament, the Church of England and the BBC gave people a sense of belonging; a sense that they were part of something greater than themselves. They may sometimes have been remote, stuffy and complacent, but people trusted them. 

And, in turn, they encouraged people to think beyond their own narrow horizons, and fostered a genuine sense of civic pride and national unity.

What we have now, however, is a society in which our central institutions have never been in deeper disrepute. At the same time, our expectations have swollen to unrealistic heights. Thanks to the decline of self-help, we expect major institutions like the state and the NHS to do more for us than ever before.

But there is no getting away from the fact that most of them have been their own worst enemies.

Many have lost sight of their moral mission. The mind boggles at what John Reith would have made of the debauchery behind the scenes at Jimmy Savile’s Top Of The Pops.

Little wonder, then, that Britain feels more atomised, more fragmented and more selfish than ever before. Our politicians may talk airily about ‘one nation’, but the bonds of solidarity have frayed almost to breaking point.

The one chink of light is that trust can be rebuilt as well as destroyed.

Two decades ago, the monarchy seemed to be locked into a fatal spiral of self-indulgence and self-destruction. Today, despite Prince Harry’s recent naked antics in Las Vegas, its image has rarely been better.

The rebirth of the monarchy was no accident. It was the result of a canny campaign to restore its reputation, with younger royals working hard to emphasise their dedication to our country.

Other institutions, from Parliament and the police to the Press and the BBC, should learn from its example. In particular, they would do well to rediscover the simple, unfashionable but enduring moral values that the Queen has represented for so long.

If they fail, my fear is that we will become an ever more suspicious society, in which cynicism prevails over innocence, and in which our sense of the common good is completely corroded by scandal and self-interest.

That would be a victory for people such as Jimmy Savile and those who shielded him — people who embodied the very worst in human nature.

Surely, surely, we are better than that.