The results — and Mr Halpern has a book out later this year which will draw considerable attention — are fascinating. The conclusion that leaps from the figures and into sensational headlines is that social dislocation, religious decline, public scandals, family fragmentation and the fear of crime have made us less trusting. Comparative surveys over 40 years suggest that British trustfulness has halved: in the 1950s 60 per cent of us answered “yes, most people can be trusted”, in the 1980s 44 per cent, today only 29 per cent. Trust levels also continue to fall in Ireland and the US — meanwhile, the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes and Dutch express tremendous confidence in one another’s probity: levels are actually rising. In Mexico and Japan the level of trust is also increasing, which is interesting if mildly baffling. And the Palme d’Or for paranoid mutual suspicion goes to the Brazilians — with less than 3 per cent replying “yes” — and the Turks with 6.5 per cent. The French, apparently, never trusted one another and still don’t. So we become less Scandinavian and more French (or Turkish) every year.
Regarding Britain, the obvious conclusions are being drawn. Mr Halpern and others cite reasons why we appear less trustful: the demise of the job-for-life culture, rising divorce, physical mobility, higher immigration, an aggressive commercial ethic and the new isolation of mass media. “You use your wealth to free yourself of the inconvenience of other people,” says Halpern. “You ensure you have your own house, and you don’t even have to watch TV with your family because you have five TVs.”
All of that makes sense; so does the observation about damage to social cohesion caused by the miners’ strike, the food scandals and the pensions and endowment collapses which made us view the finance industry with a sour eye. Also, we have a large gap between rich and poor and a racially mixed society: some say that superior welfare and homogeneous populations in Scandinavia produce a higher “happiness index”, hence trust.
This is useful research, but there are a few caveats. The trouble is that you may not get a very thoughtful answer if you merely ask — as they did last year —- whether “generally speaking, most people can be trusted”. For the British like to think of themselves as canny, savvy, nobody’s fools. We have a powerful culture of satire and a hypercritical media which gleefully splash news of every private and public betrayal, however trivial. In our fantasy life we court paranoia, lapping up crime thrillers and spy novels. We are fascinated by rogues, from Chaucer’s Pardoner to Del Boy. We are bad at risk-assessment, and repeated surveys show that we fear crime far more than is justified. I wrote a novel, years ago, in which a runaway boy falls in with a fairground family and is given a casual job painting roundabouts for his keep and a scruffy caravan to sleep in. The first interviewer I encountered was openly indignant. “In real life,” she said huffily, “he would have been murdered by a paedophile.” Nothing would shift her from her media-driven conviction: no statistics about the rarity of child murders, no sense of the general goodwill of adults towards children. If I had written some far-fetched saga of murder, drugs and perversion the journalist would have commended me for “bleak modern realism”. Anybody suffering from a vaguely sunny nature, in or out of the media, will have had similar encounters.
So we are conditioned to claim that we don’t trust people much. A Scandinavian or Dutchman is proud to express trust and affection for his fellow-man (I have just been sailing on a Dutch ship for a fortnight and the prevailing open-heartedness makes any Briton feel like Scrooge). Our national preference is to purse the lips, shake the head and affect an air of judicious canniness. Nobody wants to be Fotherington-Thomas, skipping around saying “Hello sky, hello trees!”, while Molesworth lurks in the bushes waiting to trip him up with his skipping-rope.
But if you look at the actual daily workings of British society there is an astonishing degree of unquestioning trust of strangers, simply because we are a technological society. These respondents who tell the researchers that “generally speaking, people cannot be trusted” are in fact blithely trusting distant strangers all day long. Every time you get on a train or plane you put your life into the hands of unseen engineers and designers, drivers, pilots and traffic controllers. When you give a password to a bank call centre you are displaying trust; tapping your credit-card number on to an internet site, you affirm the rectitude of a company you have never seen, and rely on the conscientiousness of distant software designers. Setting out to meet friends or family in a big city, the young modern Briton doesn’t even fix a rendezvous until the last moment, having blithe confidence that the mobile phone network will function correctly, and that nobody will nick the phone before they have used it to pinpoint a bar to meet in.
The list of our trustful ways goes on and on, distancing us from the primitive peasant suspicion that keeps gold and a shotgun beneath the mattress. We crowd into cinemas and clubs, and eat unidentifiable burgers and ready-meals by the megaton. We know there are pitfalls — consumer programmes tell us so — but maybe the very reason for our proliferation of consumer journalism is that we are so trustful and contented. Twenty minutes’ contemplation of the simple scams uncovered by the BBC Watchdog should suggest that rather than living in a state of constant suspicion, in many areas of life we are relaxed to the point of gullibility.
But ask the bald question, and we think immediately about those who publicly let us down: politicians who broke election promises, pension funds that jeopardised our future while their directors swanned off with bonuses, stars who turned sleazy. We don’t want to look like fools, so we say no; but then return to our lamb-like faith that everything is OK really. Look around at your local leisure centre this week, and observe how many people don’t bother with a locker key. In all but the sharpest neighbourhoods, it’ll be a surprising proportion.
This is not entirely healthy. What we say will, in the end, become what we think. US evidence is denser than ours, but broadly speaking it is clear that trust is linked to “social capital” — networks, alliances, local societies, anything that takes people out into common spaces. Churches, clubs, charities and community colleges do obvious good. Commuting and long working hours do palpable harm, and so do bad town-planning and poor policing. The mass migration of women out of the home and neighbourhood into jobs hasn’t helped either. Short-contract culture kills the old workplace clubs.
There is much discussion in the English-speaking nations about how to “rebuild” social capital, with ideas ranging from “citizenship education” to pedestrianisation and arts; but I was glad to see that the 2002 report was extremely cautious about the ability of policy-makers to change things. The last thing we need is nagging. I also much enjoyed its worried little digression into the negative side of social capital — old-boy networks, micro-communities that exclude outsiders, ethnic ghettos, and so forth.
Mr Halpern’s book will come to more informed conclusions than I can; but my own instinct, from the research and from observation, is to draw only two. First, we’re not quite as cynical as we say we are, and nothing like as cynical as our media. Secondly, the worst crisis of trust is not actually between citizens, but between citizens and their government and institutions. The remedy for that is in the hands of politicians, who ought to police their own ambition and greed and that of their corporate friends. Interference from the top is a lousy idea. Example from the top would be much better.
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