Postscript
The Argument Continues
Goodbye Trust was never meant to be my last word. Postscript is where I extend its arguments by adding new insights.
These essays are also part of a personal experiment to incorporate AI into the writing process. AI helped with research, structure and testing my arguments. At times, it also supplied words that I accepted, rejected or reshaped. The final decisions were mine.
That distinction matters. These are human-led essays, not machine-written. They are attempts to test and extend the arguments of Goodbye Trust using a new and imperfect tool.
The essays are grouped into three areas: Media, Academia and Politics. Together, they update the arguments of Goodbye Trust and explore, with sometimes frightening effect, the implications of what the book was already warning about.
Media
Why is the legacy media more concerned on performance and activism than reporting?
The media was meant to help us understand reality. Too often it now simplifies, amplifies and moralises rather than explaining. These essays examine how news, commentary and digital platforms shape public trust – not just by what they report, but by what they ignore, distort, exaggerate or decide to censor. Too much of the media now behaves less like an impartial observer than an activist with a press pass.
Academia
What happens when expensive credentials stop proving competence?
Academia once carried the authority of independence, seriousness and intellectual courage. That authority is now weakening at the worst possible moment. Universities are becoming financially fragile just as AI forces them to rethink teaching, assessment, research and the value of the credential itself. At the same time, their culture and assumptions seem increasingly distant from the instincts of the wider public. These essays ask whether institutions built to test idea s can still tolerate ideas that test them.
Politics
How does the decline in the UK’s system of government end–a whimper or a bang?
British politics still performs the rituals of power, but fewer people believe the performance.These essays explore the widening gap between promise and delivery, between what voters expect and what the state can afford, and between the scale of Britain’s problems and the political class’s addiction to theatre. The UK faces hard constraints: rising welfare spending, weak growth, nervous gilt markets and voters fragmenting into hostile camps.The question is whether the state’s problems are now too entrenched for politicians to solve