A fine line between confidence and despair

Philip Schlesinger warns the public's fragile trust over foot and mouth may still rebound on Labour

AWFUL though it is, the news about foot-and-mouth disease has been easier for both the government and the public to handle than other recent crises such as BSE.

One reason is that we've been here before. Fuzzy black and white TV footage from 1967 taps into the popular memory of anyone over 40. Today's medieval scenes of flaming pyres of sacrificial animal carcases have their recent precursors. We recognise the familiar and think we know what to do.

Reactions to last week's Selby rail disaster have been equally revealing for different reasons. We're repeatedly told by reporters, safety experts and the rail industry that it's really an "accident". What on earth could this mean? Only that such an unlikely set of circumstances - a Land Rover and trailer coming off a motorway to obstruct a railway line, leading to a derailment and collision - is unrepeatable. Such a case won't seriously affect how we calculate risk when boarding a train or driving along the motorway. Both stories raise pressing questions. How do we deal daily with news and official revelations that strike at the foundations of our personal, familial and communal security? Risk awareness is now a fundamental challenge to all our institutions and, increasingly, to the credibility of democracy.

When accidents and health crises occur, governments usually take the hardest knocks. But the problem of how to handle bad news also extends across major industries and the established professions. We wouldn't have to be told that Selby was really an "accident" if - fairly or not - faith in the railways as a system hadn't already collapsed.

The foot-and-mouth disaster comes after a decade of public concern about the safety of food and deep-seated popular terrors about contracting CJD, a scare now rampant throughout Europe too.

Scratch beneath the surface of public anxiety and you discover the diminishing credibility of scientific advisers to government. There's also a steep decline in the trust accorded the medical profession, most recently epitomised by the collection of dead children's organs at Alder Hey Hospital, by the popular refusal to accept the combined measles-mumps-rubella vaccine for young children and by the dismal and well-publicised catalogue of fatal medical errors in recent cancer cases.

SUCH instances have shaped a climate of widespread public uncertainty in which the multiplication of single scares becomes far greater than the sum of its parts.

Each time the government tries to deal with a major case provoking fear and anxiety it reaches for its experts and sets up an official inquiry. But our deep-seated culture of increasingly unappeasable anxiety means that inquiries' findings are less able to address public concern. Lord Phillips' 16 volumes on BSE certainly exposed systemic failure. But nobody really took the rap. And because no identifiable individual is held responsible the public feels that impersonal systems will go on repeating errors. Apparently the foot- and mouth crisis hasn't yet involved any cover-ups of information. It's a solace to a spin-obsessed government that public anxiety can be addressed so directly by taking widely supported draconian measures.

Such clarity and openness is unusual as the case of repeated obfuscation over BSE has shown. If there is public mistrust of official reasurances, it's because that pattern is typical and openness is the exception.

We live in risky times and public scepticism of official reassurances runs deep. We believe what we're being told about foot- and-mouth disease and the government seems to have secured widespread public confidence. But it will take only a minor error in its communications strategy to shatter the fragile trust that has been established in its handling of what amounts to this latest scare.

Professor Philip Schlesinger is director of Stirling Media Research Institute. His latest book, Open Scotland? (with David Miller and William Dinan), will be published by Polygon on March 28

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