Trust.

Professionals: The vital elites

The publication on 4 September 2024 of the final report into the catastrophic 2017 Grenfell Tower fire highlighted a wider range of issues than any single disaster report before it. It compounded twenty years' worth of corporate and institutional malfeasance which have brought the "crisis in trust" to the fore. From Enron (2001) to the decades of the Post Office scandal (which arguably added judicial failure to the mix), these debacles gave impetus to the pervasive modern sense that no modern public body could be relied on to be decent or frank. Read more...

Published

03 September 2024

Be the Brightest and Best: vote Tory

Many people in the creative, inventive and caring industries - the Brightest and the Best - have never socialised with people who openly espouse the Conservative cause, or have only met them to have a row. This why they should expand their horizons..... Read more...

Published

27 April 2015

Building trust: Character or accountability?

There was a fascinating vignette of modern government when the former head of GCHQ (the government’s listening post), Sir David Omand, was quizzed by Keith Vaz, the chairman of the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee during on a session on counter-terrorism. (The Home Affairs Committee, 11 February 2014.) Sir David argued - rightly, and counter-intuitively - that character was a better guarantee of probity than transparency. Well, there was more to his argument than that... Read more...

Published

23 February 2014

Don’t professionalise journalism, Lord Leveson

The first tranche of professors of journalism testified to Lord Leveson today and the result was mildly reassuring. But it is worth stressing how important it is that this trade remain as free of professionalism, certificates, regulation, registration and general tick-box goody-goodiness as possible. Read more...

Published

08 December 2011
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