Ashley Tiffen

Last updated 09:24, Saturday, 13 September 2008

Living in 21st century Britain can be said to be difficult at the best of times and we look to certain institutions to bring order to our increasingly chaotic lives. But are these pillars of our society still up to the job?

Clearly one of the longest lasting is the church. Until relatively recently the world revolved around ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and the battle between the two. Now it seems the Anglican Community has a threatened ‘church within a church’ where conservatives want to preach against the ‘false gospel’ of gay ordination and the like.

A more recent institution that has guided our lives has been the state – which we now all share in the democratic wealth of citizenship. Yeah, right! They don’t appear to listen and they can’t seem to string together a coherent set of policies let alone actually stick to the manifesto on which they were elected.

What about the Health Service, celebrating 60 years of caring for us from ‘cradle to grave’? All too often that celebration is drowned out by the issues surrounding bureaucracy, waste and C. Dificile or MRSA.

Finally, one of the recent additions, the Fourth Estate. Today’s news doesn’t seem to be generated by dedicated journalists pounding the street seeking out the truth. More likely it is regurgitated from the press releases which flood out from the ‘spin centre’ of every organisation.

For my part I would be happy to be ministered to by a gay, female clergy rather than a bigot. I would prefer my political representatives to be more accessible and not abandon me once the polls have closed. I want a health service where the funds are spent at the coalface of patient delivery and not on chocolate biscuits for the boardroom.

And finally, I want a media that reports what is important, not celebrity-centred titillation. Then we might restore a little bit of faith in humanity.

n Ashley Tiffen is a lecturer at the institute of police and criminal justice studies at the University of Cumbria