Obama’s phrase) followed by 10 steps towards restoring trust, with a further 20 core propo- sitions on the back cover, making the last part of the book rather like a textbook for a GCSE in trust. Seldon’s instinct is right; we need to take steps to restore trust. The Prime Minister has announced that he is setting up an “inquiry to look at the culture, the practices and the ethics of the British press”, which will “look at how our newspapers are regulated and make recommendations for the future”. This is a significant step towards restoring trust but past form, from the banking crisis for instance, does not inspire confidence that British society can pull this off. The Government gave Sir John Vickers and a small committee a brief to propose steps to prevent a future banking crisis (no looking into culture and ethics here but an aim of considering how to make banks safer and more competitive). His interim findings, pub- lished in May, provoked protests from the banks. These findings may go the way of the Basel agreement, which determines how much real money banks must keep in their posses- sion. A serious proposal to increase this sum dramatically has been beaten down by bankers.


T


he Vickers proposals on ring-fencing retail operations and bolstering cap- ital, and the Basel agreement, are central to restoring trust in our finan-


cial systems. Yet they are all about structures rather than behaviours. Indeed, when a pro- posal was seriously floated that bankers should, like doctors, sign up to a code of ethics, the British Banking Association spokeswoman rebuffed the idea with the dismissive claim that the credit crunch had nothing to do with ethics. If the investigation into the press goes the same way as investigations into banking, then human behaviour will be relegated to struc- tures and ethics reduced to conformity with regulations. The missing piece is that trust is built upon the ethics of human relationships independent of structures. Our culture needs to learn again the ancient Greek philosophers’ insight that virtue is essential to human flour- ishing and that it needs to be systematically taught rather than left to chance. The Church spread this insight throughout Europe and can do so once again. In spite of its mishandling of sexual abuse by clergy, the Church still retains trust at the local level and, with other faith communities, it is a key part- ner in the task of restoring trust. When the classic virtues of prudence, temperance, courage and justice are once again the pillars of our culture, then trust will be there too. If we try simply to regulate our way to trust, it will continue to be a diminishing feature of our way of life.


■Christopher Jamison OSB is currently director of the National Office for Vocation of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. In 2010, he was a consultant to the independent Future of Banking Commission chaired by David Davis MP.


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