Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 - [62]

Many of us feel we are living through a period of profound crisis. But perhaps democracy is more secure than at any time since the 1970s.

http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/02/notes-series-scandals

By David Runciman

6 February, 2014

British democracy is going through its worst crisis of confidence in decades. The underlying cause is economic. The recovery since the crash of 2008 has been the slowest in modern times. For Labour, the fear is that the party will continue to carry the can for allowing the mess to happen in the first place; for the coalition partners, it is that they will get blamed for the woefully unequal and piecemeal recovery. In this climate of uncertainty and distress, fringe parties and maverick voices have a golden opportunity. It's not only Nigel Farage who ends up being taken seriously — even Russell Brand gets his moment in the political sun.

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However, the primary symptoms of the malaise of British democracy are institutional. Over the past five years the standing of many of the central institutions of British public life has been undermined by scandal. The banks have forfeited public trust as a result of the corruption and incompetence that was exposed during and after the financial crisis. The reputation of parliament was gravely damaged by the expenses scandal that came to light in 2009 and has been rumbling on through the courts and the media ever since. The press saw what remained of its reputation for probity shredded by the phone-hacking scandal and subsequent Leveson inquiry.

The police have been heavily implicated in the worst examples of press behaviour. This is not only in relation to phone-hacking but dates back to the Hillsborough disaster nearly 25 years ago — in which the evidence of widespread misconduct by the South Yorkshire force drew a fulsome apology from the Prime Minister in 2012. Now the London Met is grappling with the fallout from “Plebgate”, a saga that is all the more damaging for being so absurd (the saying “It's not the crime, it's the cover-up” was never more true than in this case). The BBC is still reeling from the scandal surrounding the activities of Jimmy Savile and the exposure of ludicrously generous payoffs to executives caught up in it. This summer we discovered that the British secret services have been routinely eavesdropping on the everyday activities of ordinary British citizens, aiding and abetting the far more extensive surveillance operations being undertaken by the Americans.

The armed forces have emerged relatively unscathed from this period of purgatory for public institutions, although even they have been tarnished by revelations about past brutalities in Northern Ireland and Iraq. Perhaps it is only the monarchy whose reputation has risen in recent years, which says something about the state of British democracy. Elected politicians tiptoe around these scandals, looking for some way to ally themselves with public anger. At the same time, they are deeply wary of fuelling a backlash of disgust against the entire political establishment that would sweep them up as well.

What these institutional failings have in common is that they arose from a growing sense of impunity among small networks of elites. As British society has become more unequal it has created pockets of privilege whose inhabitants are tempted to think that the normal rules don't apply to them. In any democracy, people with power will abuse it. All public institutions follow the path of least resistance over time. The usual democratic remedy is for other public institutions to rein them in: it is the job of the press and the police to keep an eye on the politicians, just as it is the job of the politicians to keep an eye on the press and police. In Britain, it looks like the opposite was happening. A managerial political class, with extensive links to other elites in the media and business, colluded in the sort of lax scrutiny that served their joint interests. Much of this behaviour coincided with a period of unparalleled political stability and economic prosperity: the long boom that lasted from the early 1990s until 2007. But when boom turned to bust, the cosy world of the elites became a joint liability.

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The public's tolerance for managerial politics depends on the ability of the managers to keep delivering. Once that stops, they are exposed. You have to go back to the mid-1970s to find a comparable period of economic failure allied with institutional mistrust. Then, this toxic combination resulted in a similar anxiety among the political class about how they were going to find a way out. The Nixon shock of 1971 — which saw the unravelling of the Bretton Woods system of exchange controls — coupled with the oil shock of 1973 — which saw the price of crude oil quadruple in a matter of months following the Opec embargo — produced inflation, recession and rising unemployment across the western world. In Britain, industrial unrest broke first the will of the Heath government to resist inflationary pay rises and then its ability to sustain itself in office at all. The early 1970s brought an explosion of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, followed by a heavyhanded and brutal clampdown by the British army. By 1974 the violence had spread to the mainland. Parts of Britain appeared practically ungovernable. There were dark mutterings about the incapacity of the democratic British state to meet the challenges that it faced.