Trust deficit

GERMAN prosecutors are now investigating Volkswagen’s board chairman, Hans Dieter Poetsch, because they suspect that even he may have known of the diesel emission cheating. The car firm’s former boss, Martin Winterkorn, is already subject to the same police probe. This extraordinary scandal has destroyed the reputation of one of the world’s leading brands. There was a time when the Volkswagen and its sister Audi brand stood for everything thing that was excellent in German automotive engineering. Indeed it could be argued that they still remain outstanding examples of quality mechanical engineering. The greatest early advances in automotive technology emerged from Germany. Something similar has happened with certain political structures. In terms of democracies with apparently robust foundations, the UK and the US stand out. Both the British and the American systems are the result of evolution rather than revolution. Yet just like Volkswagen, the reputation of the US and British politics has been besmirched. British legislators were caught paying themselves absurd expenses in a scandal that broke seven years ago. The reputation of the British parliament has still not recovered. The shock was that at a time of austerity for most Britons in the wake of the global financial collapse, members of parliament should be claiming huge sums of tax payers’ money for such extraordinary items as duck-houses in the middle of a pond, or second homes which were then rented out. It is not the mechanics of German cars or British or American politics that are in question. It is the degree of trust that they now enjoy. As Americans today choose their next president, it is not just the two candidates that they do not trust. There is a sense of unbelief that the US political process could have ever thrown up such a difficult choice. How could a racist, Islamophobic bigot like Donald Trump seizes the Republican Party nomination against all predictions? The ironic answer may well be that in his political innocence, Trump seemed to be a breath of fresh air compared with the deeply untrustworthy Hillary Clinton, even though the reality is that the air around the Trump campaign has in fact been fetid with deep prejudice and hate-speech. Trust is very hard to earn and extremely easy to lose. When US regulators accused VW of deliberately fitting a device to the engine management system which would cheat the system immediately it detected that the engine emissions were being tested, there was initial disbelief. How could a major automotive corporation take such an insane risk? It was almost inevitable that at some point this cheating would be discovered when someone checked the coding in the engine management system. There was always going to be a smoking gun. Taking that level of risk with hard-earned and immensely valuable trust, borders on the insane. The oddity with the US presidential system is that there seems no obvious point where anyone decided to risk the trust that most Americans vest in the office of their president. There has been no calculation that brought about the difficult choice that US voters are making today. It is hard to see how there could have been. But whatever the outcome of today’s vote, the issue of trust in the nomination system surely needs to be addressed by both Republicans and Democrats in readiness for the 2020.