‘Mistrust is Populism’s Weapon’: Lord Puttnam on the Death of Public Trust – and How to Resurrect It
The former Labour peer warns that Britain’s democratic crisis is rooted in a collapse of trust – and in the stories politicians tell to exploit it
Chairing a panel in the House of Commons on disinformation in campaigning, Lord David Puttnam issued a stark warning: public trust has all but evaporated. “Mistrust is populism’s weapon,” he told the audience. “Trust is the only thing that can beat it.”
The panel – featuring former Labour MP Ian Lucas, Green MP Ellie Chowns, Labour MP Justin Madders, and Reform Political Advertising founder Alex Tait – voiced cautious optimism that the Government’s forthcoming Elections Bill, with new transparency rules for political advertising and a code of conduct for campaigning, could help restore integrity to public life.
For Puttnam, though, the problem runs far deeper than any single piece of legislation. “Democracy is at its most critical point,” he told Byline Times. “Perfectly intelligent people are beginning to talk about it as being irrelevant.”
At the heart of that decline, he believes, lies the erosion of trust. “Everything we do is based on some degree of trust,” he said. “Can you think of any sustainable relationship that can be achieved where trust is absent?”
Puttnam traces this collapse to the early 1990s – an inflection point in modern politics. “You can’t pin it on any one person,” he said, “but when Peter Mandelson began talking about the ‘dark arts’ of politics, the media didn’t challenge it. They were fascinated.” What began as curiosity became normalisation. “Once you get to the point where you can come up with evasions and untruths – which are essentially lies – and get away with it, you’re in trouble.”
The “Murdoch-isation” of the press, he added, made matters worse. “It was unimaginable that it could be replicated in Britain,” said Puttnam, who had seen Rupert Murdoch’s dominance reshape Australia’s public sphere. “But amazingly, it was. It only took a few years.”
That shift, he believes, left Britain dangerously exposed to the digital age, where the “dark arts” have never been more potent.
A Culture of Lies
Puttnam’s frustration with deceit in politics is not abstract. It drove him to leave the House of Lords in 2021 after years of watching evasions and untruths become routine in the Brexit debates.
“I was challenging the Tory front bench,” he recalled. “They were lying to me, and I knew they were lying. And they knew I knew they were lying. But you’re not allowed to call anyone a liar. It was so frustrating that it was beginning to affect my health.”
Once, he said, dishonesty would have ended political careers. “If you go back a bit, there was a point where lying in Parliament meant you were gone. That was it. We need to get back to that.”
Byline Times has reported extensively on deceptive or false political advertising. Puttnam says, especially in comparison to ad regulation elsewhere, that political ads are left basically untouched. “What kind of country are you where you can do a political ad that would not conform to the same rules as an ad for Persil or Orangeade?” he asked.
Today, truth itself has become politically perilous. “The way we do politics makes it extremely difficult for politicians to tell the truth,” he said. “We don’t have a culture that encourages candour.”
For Puttnam, the antidote lies in example: politicians willing to put honesty above ambition. He cites former Labour Education Minister Estelle Morris, who resigned in 2002 after failing to meet literacy targets. “She stood up in a room once and everyone applauded her,” he said. “People know authenticity when they see it. Politicians are frightened to be authentic.”
Storytelling and the Battle for Cohesion
Puttnam’s background in advertising and film gave him a lifelong understanding of storytelling as persuasion. “I was a successful advertising executive,” he said. “It left me with no illusions whatsoever as to the ability of the right message at the right time to the right audience to actually change habits.”
“The people who vote have increasingly short attention spans,” he added. “Most people look for affirmation in their information.” Disinformation flatters. It tells voters what they already believe, locking them into identity-driven narratives that reinforce division.
“The one issue I come back to all the time is identity,” Puttnam said. “The core of a successful movie is you, the audience. Successful movies take you on a journey in which you’re the participant.” He admits that right-wing populists have succeeded in doing just that.
Democracy needs a better story, Puttnam claims, one that “gets people to look over the cliff at where they’re going.” And it “must remind people what freedom really is.”
“How does the anti-immigrant crew deal with the fact that so many of the things that keep the wheels moving – care homes, the NHS, hospitality – rely on an immigrant population? Remove them and the wheels come off.”
That, he said, is the real story of Britain: interdependence, contribution, and cohesion. “I like the word social cohesion,” he said. “People get it. You don’t want that to collapse.”
The New Frontier of Disinformation
If the 1990s was the era of political spin, the 2020s have brought something more dangerous: an algorithm-driven information ecosystem in which falsehood spreads faster than fact.
“An unregulated X [formerly Twitter] is an extremely dangerous threat to democracy,” Puttnam said. “Until the public declare that they don’t want to be a democracy, anything that undermines it is dangerous.”
He points to the inconsistency of Britain’s current approach to extremism: “There’s an absurdity in taking the position we’ve taken on Palestine Action, while ignoring the threat of Elon Musk talking about civil war. Absolute absurdity.”
Yet tackling the tech giants, he warns, will require far more than moral outrage. It will demand economic and geopolitical backbone.
“No matter how good a guy Starmer is, or how intent he is on trying to clean things up, he’ll be sitting in the cabinet with someone – probably from the Treasury – saying ‘that’s all very well here, but you do realise that Donald Trump won’t like that.’” Puttnam warned that such pressure is already visible, pointing to tariff threats reportedly issued by the Trump White House in retaliation for the Online Safety Act.
“Imagine this,” he said. “If we tell the truth, there will be economic consequences. If we try to clean this mess up, there will be economic consequences. If we actually make these social media platforms behave properly, there will be economic consequences. That’s the bind.”
Puttnam doubts Britain can take on Silicon Valley alone. “As an isolated nation, it’s not viable. Were we to form a coalition with Europe, a lot is possible – but that requires Europe developing a level of confidence which, at the moment, also seems to be missing.”
Resurrecting Trust
Puttnam calls the Lords’ Digital and Democracy Committee report “the most important thing I ever did in Parliament.” It made 45 recommendations to overhaul political regulation, including a real-time political advertising register and strengthening the UK’s Elections watchdog, the Electoral Commission.
For Puttnam, the forthcoming Elections Bill and the Hillsborough Law (which would place a duty of candour on Government ministers) are hopeful potential starting points – “opportunities to build on.” But only if matched by courage, education reform, and engendering a new culture of truth-telling.
Keir Starmer’s choice is clear, he claimed. “Either you make an absolute commitment: to be a trusted Prime Minister, come what may, and that might mean embarrassing yourself from time to time. But you’d be able to look at Farage and say: ‘You’re not telling the truth, I am telling the truth and I can prove it.’”
“We’ve gone past ‘renewal’,” Puttnam said. “We have to reinvent something that has been lost. I used the word ‘resurrection’ because that’s what it is – the resurrection of trust.”
No trust will be restored until failure and deception are seen to have consequences.
No-one has yet gone to jail over Grenfell, or profiteering during the pandemic, or shit in nation's waterways, or the financial crisis, or the gross criminality of Iraq (let alone the genocide in Gaza), or Post Office/Horizon. Or spy cops or any of half a dozen other profound scandals.
The Archbishop of effing Canterbury recently had to resign over his own personal role in convering up the violent sexual abuse of children but, again, no-one has gone to prison. And he was out in public a week later acting all hard done by.
The sheer shamelessness beggars belief
People will trust politicians again only when the law is once again seen to apply to all of us. And, when it does, I don't doubt that the powerful will be less blatantly criminal.