General Confession of Collective Culpability
Speaking with authority and gravitas will no longer suffice.
All that remains, in this post-Elizabethan era, are dwindling fragments of respect. We know and might even believe this — if we were bothered to read last week’s declaration — the General Confession of Collective Culpability.
But the electorate are long past being bothered.
Of all the decade’s damages — the fiscal black holes, climatic disasters, crumbling hospitals, contaminated blood, midwifery mistakes, flammable flats, irregular regulators — the single greatest disaster is that we no longer know who to trust.
Is this readiness to question everything a new sign of maturity? Or has trust been traded away to some slipping and sliding marketplace?
The House of Lords Statutory Committee for Inquiry into Enquiries could not have been less outspoken. PABOSY — the UK’s Prestigious Award for Blindingly Obvious Statement of the Year goes to the Committee Chair: ’Lessons learned’ is an entirely vacuous phrase if lessons aren’t being learned because inquiry recommendations are ignored or delayed . . . it is insulting and upsetting for victims, survivors and their families who frequently hope that, from their unimaginable grief, something positive might prevail.’
But we’ve been here before. The 2014 Enquiry into Inquiries made 33 recommendations of which 19 were accepted and 14 rejected by successive Conservative governments. Now, a full decade later, it seems 32 were never implemented but their Lordships are still keen to push on with 26.
Ed said (and Keir concurs) that restoring trust is a parliamentary priority — but they both know, and we all know, that rebottling that spirit is even more difficult than implementing Carbon Capture & Storage — itself a wishful action-avoiding fantasy. The very best that Ed & Keir might hope for is to not incur further damage.
We may earnestly wish for a world where regulators regulate, where countries collaborate on climate action, where everyone believes in human rights — but, sadly, we now live in societies where these wishes are increasingly ignored. As David Lammy MP said, in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, “we must now ask if the post-Thatcher shift away from public duty and towards private profit in the name of ‘efficiency’ requires us now to consider if the nation still believes in a welfare state with a safety net for citizens who fall on hard times.’
David, bless, now finds himself at the helm of a Foreign Office suspected of squandering Overseas Aid billions through cosy contracts anywhere but overseas.
Good luck if you want someone to realise the wish for instant restoration of trust, but let’s face it, we have collectively visited these sins of commission and omission upon ourselves. It is increasingly clear that the evolution of economies must now be a spiritual quest, a reformation, a rejection of faith-based pseudo-sciences, and a resurgence of honest accountability. Either that or humanity is squashed under the crushing weight of late-stage capitalist conventions.
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Notes:
This article supplements ‘Eternal Shame’ and was written for publication during the Labour Party’s Autumn conference. It is archived in Governance section of the Groupe Intellex library — a resource for students. A version of this story was also published by LibDemVoice.org
