The thing I used to dread about being a teacher, above all, was Parents’ Evening. Especially if the child was struggling. Then it seemed there were only three types of parents. There were Group A – the ones who made you feel sorry for the kid: (“Sorry he’s so crap. Shall I ground him?”). There were Group B – the belligerent:
“I’m afraid I think your child’s dyslexic.”
“He’s not.”
“But I sent him to the Special Educational Needs supervisor and had him tested.”
“He’s not.”
“He can’t spell his own name.”
“He’s not.”
And then there were possibly the worst, Group C – the ones who, quite rightly, put absolute blind faith in you: “You know best, you’re the expert, you just tell us what to do.” Well: actually I’m in my mid-twenties, I spend my evenings playing FIFA on my Playstation and wondering how spending hours in the company of your recalcitrant child turned out to be my life, and frankly I’m scared I’ll screw him up to such an extent that he’ll end up like, well, me. I’m the last person I’d ask.
And that’s the thing about professionalism. Half of it is resisting the urge to say to Group A either, “Everything’s fine” or “Yes. ground him for as long as you can – till the age of 21, preferably”, to say to Group B “Everything’s fine” or “Get out of my face, you bumptious little arsehole”, and to refrain from breaking down in tears in front of Group C and asking them why your girlfriend left you.
According to YouGov’s latest poll on trust, 70 per cent of us trust teachers to tell the truth – a steep decline from 2003, when apparently 88 per cent of people were happily taking me at my word. I’d say that’s probably right – not because 30 per cent of teachers are untrustworthy, but because teachers are people, trying their best, and, being human, sometimes choose to evade, equivocate, or maybe tell a white lie from time to time.
I’d been wanting to write a blog about the breakdown of trust in public life for ages, but I realised there was a problem: most of you don’t believe a word I say. Only 38 per cent of people trust journalists on “upmarket newspapers” to tell the truth. And I’m being disingenuous by putting myself in that category, what with most of my stuff appearing online these days and the New Statesman not being a newspaper. You probably need to extend the chart a few columns down, so “bloggers” can slot in behind Jeffrey Archer and Bernie Madoff.
But let’s see what this poll tells us about society. What it paints is either a depressing picture, or a heartening one, depending on how you look on it. Our faith in every single institution but one has, over the last nine years, dipped. Judges, journalists, doctors, policemen, teachers – we’ve lost faith in all of them. As I said, you could frame an example like teaching in a positive light – our populace is more skeptical; less credulous. Our faith in newspapers is inversely proportional to their circulations: this week the Sun ran an information box containing the figures on the huge decline in trust of BBC journalists (from 81 per cent to 44 per cent), but neglected to mention that red tops had also declined – to 10 per cent from an initially meagre 14 in 2003. It’s that sort of behaviour that means, well, only one in ten people trust you. Yet this doesn’t stop the Sun having far and away the highest circulation. We know it’s full of balls, but we buy it anyway: that’s us Brits, reading the news while taking a pinch of salt with our tongues in our cheeks.
But I think a far sadder picture lurks behind this chart. I am 31 years old this month. It feels to me – perhaps older readers with a different historical perspective will have another view – like the last few years have drastically undermined my view of the Britain in which I grew up.
Of course, nine years ago I wouldn’t have said the media or the Met were squeaky clean – but I never dreamed of the scale of corruption and illegality that’s been exposed in recent times. Likewise we’d had parliamentary scandals before, but the sheer arrogance of those involved in the MPs expenses scandal still shocked me. I didn’t march in protest over Iraq. I thought the intelligence services and Cabinet knew something I didn’t.
And on it goes, with the systematic cover-up over Hillsborough, the scale of Savile’s debauchery, the crisis at the BBC – all happening at a time when we’re suffering the greatest betrayal of all. This young man believed we’d cracked the balance of economic growth and social equality. He deferred to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – without realising, he also deferred to Fred Goodwin. Look at the world our young face: sky-high youth unemployment, student debts, worse pensions, a lack of affordable housing – what would I say at those parents’ evenings now?
That is the story of my generation – lied to, again and again, yet ultimately powerless, until all that’s left is nihilistic cynicism. I wanted to believe in the big society, because I felt that endemic to many of these scandals was a centralising of power. It was another dream that fell by the wayside. It’s all so horrifying we barely know which way to turn – as Nick Cohen says of Occupy, it was “representative of our directionless times when reformers have no coherent ideology.”
That’s what I read from the YouGov chart, anyway. But then I could also ask why our faith in judges rocketed in 2006; why our faith in directors of big companies has gone up. It seems to make no sense. Maybe the methodology’s flawed. But at least we can trust our polling companies, can’t we?
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