Mal Fletcher comments

Mal Fletcher

Britain is going through a house cleaning operation the like of which it hasn't seen for perhaps a generation.

We are experiencing a maelstrom of public unease and self-questioning, amidst a growing distrust of major institutions which have traditionally provided the foundations for a stable social order.

Tony Blair is, on one level, right to argue that England's recent riots were not a sign of widespread moral breakdown, as the Prime Minister has suggested. That type of hyperbole is largely inaccurate - as evidenced by the moral outrage the majority of Brits seem to have felt in the aftermath to the riots.

As Blair suggests, the riots point to a breakdown of the system for some people and this needs to be addressed in a very specific way.

Yet David Cameron is also correct up to a point. Many of the rioters and looters were people who were, for all intents and purposes, normal young people. They had no particular grievance with 'the system'; many had jobs and were from healthy, sound families. They were not gang members, nor did they have any history of trouble with the law.

Where was their moral compass during the rioting? Why did they get involved? Where were the inbuilt ethical parameters that would normally keep young people - and the not-so-young - out of harm's way in situations like these?

This is a time for collective self-evaluation in the wider society, but perhaps even more so it is a time for self-examination among those who lead our major societal institutions.

In any economic downturn, the currency that suffers most is the currency of public confidence and trust. Once shaken, it can take years to re-establish.

The sharp outbreak of the financial crisis, arriving unexpectedly as it did on the back of a sustained period of growth, left public confidence reeling.

At the height of the recession, public anger was first directed at corporate leaders, particularly in the finance and banking sectors. Multi-million pound bonuses were being paid to people who had failed to provide due care in their management of mortgage and pension funds and the like.

The same anger was directed at MPs when, at a time of austerity, it became clear that many of the people's servants had been lining their pockets. The reputation of Parliament as an institution still hasn't fully recovered in the eyes of the electorate.

Just prior to the recession, the institutional church had its moral authority called into question in the wake of devastating stories about child abuse. The Catholic Church in particular has still not recovered from the revelations.

More recently, the ongoing phone hacking saga has raised serious questions, not only about the propriety of news gathering methods but about the relationship between the press and other institutions.

The News of the World saga brought into sharp focus the relationship between what I call newslite - the type of news normally associated with celebrity culture - and what used to be dubbed 'hard news'.