Another day, another crisis. In the wake of the Savile affair, the BBC has joined a long line of British public institutions that have been engulfed by scandal since 2008.

Politics today remains dominated by arguments over how best to navigate the aftermath of the financial crisis and restore the economy – and the public finances – to health. Yet in the shadow of this debate, the country is experiencing a slow-burning crisis of governance. Many of the institutions that underpin the country’s public life and economic prosperity – parliament, Fleet Street, Scotland Yard and the City – have experienced a collapse in public confidence and perceived legitimacy as evidence of incompetence, venality, clientism and, in some cases, downright criminality has seeped into view. Britain appears to have experienced more major crises of its public institutions, broadly defined, in the last four years than it suffered in the previous three decades.

The hallmarks of each scandal are different, but their genesis has been remarkably similar. In each case, members of our institutions came to accept as normal and legitimate behaviour that became more and more removed from what the public found tolerable. Our institutions and their values became increasingly detached from those of the public they were meant to inform, protect and serve.

So some MPs came to believe it was perfectly legitimate to flip houses and treat their allowances as an additional salary. Sections of Fleet Street came to view phonehacking as a standard research tool. The police came to view potentially compromising relationships with elements of the press – and tolerance for some of their methods – as par for the course. And all too many people at the BBC and elsewhere, despite their personal qualms, decided not to ask questions about the behaviour of Jimmy Savile. In each case, crisis ensued when the public became aware of the conventions that these organisations had been operating under for years and the behaviour that flowed from them.

At their core, these crises have stemmed at least in part from the particular way many of the institutions of modern Britain are run. More so than in many other advanced democracies, Britain’s public institutions are self-regulated, with comparatively little outside oversight. Many of the main sinews of the state, including the civil service and the police are subject to only limited democratic accountability and tend to be answerable primarily to their own senior management, rather than directly to the public or their representatives. The situation is similar for institutions like Fleet Street and, to a lesser extent, the City. Our Victorian model of governance has helped foster the detachment and complacency which fed the crises.

Voters have reacted to these interlocking crises of governance and the economy by increasingly rejecting mainstream politics and – perhaps more worryingly – withdrawing from the public sphere altogether. Voter turnout has declined significantly, with turnout for the police and crime commissioner elections plummeting. Moreover, polling suggests that people have reacted to the double whammy of tough economic times and tainted public institutions by turning inward, focusing more on what they can do for themselves and their immediate circle of friends and family and less on their wider community. Evidence from the benchmark biennial survey of British Social Attitudes shows that support for social solidarity has reached its lowest point in almost two decades, while research on political activity shows that belief in the power of political engagement and willingness to get involved is similarly depressed.

This reaction is understandable. But it is toxic for the Labour project. Our politics is based on the idea that by working together and by engaging in the public realm we can change society and help people change their own lives for the better. Progressive parties find it hard to prosper when people stop thinking of their collective interests, stop valuing their wider communities and the benefits and obligations that come with them and desert the public square.

Ed Miliband is intensely aware of the importance of addressing this issue.  He has talked repeatedly of the need to reinvigorate popular engagement in politics and the topic will form the focus of one of the three streams of the party’s policy review.  But restoring public trust will require more than just overhauling politics. As the argument above suggests, it will require a more thoroughgoing change in the way the country is governed and in how our institutions work. There will need to be more transparency, responsiveness and accountability throughout the institutions that make up our public realm.

Carrying this off will be no easy task. Only two governments since the second world war have attempted to remake not just politics but the shape of our public sphere. One – Attlee’s – gave birth to the institutions of the postwar welfare state and the economic and social institutions that supported it. The other – Thatcher’s – broke up the corporatist consensus, returning the commanding heights of the economy to private hands and hollowing out the state, replacing democratic control with a landscape of arm’s-length institutions and oversight by quangos.

Moreover, the public appears to have little appetite for ambitious constitutional change, as the results of the referendum on the Alternative Vote or on the creation of mayors in major cities showed. But they do want institutions that are in tune with popular values and sentiments, act responsibly and can be held to account.

Making that aspiration a reality would require a mosaic of reforms to address the varied issues seen across different spheres of public life.  To take just three examples, for the press, it might mean enacting some form of statutory regulation down the lines that Lord Leveson may suggest. For the civil service, it could mean making senior officials directly accountable to parliament, extending the scrutiny that they have begun to receive from the public accounts committee under the leadership of Margaret Hodge. And for our public services in general, it could mean massively strengthening local accountability, to make local police, schools and hospitals far more directly accountable to the communities they serve.

Labour still has much thinking to do about the principles and practicalities of our approach to reforming and refreshing the politics and governance of this country. We have the chance to build a new public realm for the post-crisis age. Ed Miliband’s ‘One Nation’ approach could provide a platform for the project of remaking our shared public life. The party has begun to set out proposals for individual reforms. The task is now to articulate a broader vision.

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David Pinto-Duschinsky was formerly a special adviser at the Home Office and the Treasury

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Photo: Kyle Cheung