Martin Bell’s The Truth that Sticks is billed as a critique of New Labour. Bell, a BBC reporter and the man in the white suit who ran for Parliament in 1997 and eas elected as a sleaze-busting independent, should be well placed to observe what a decade of New Labour has done to Parliament and the country. But his book doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Bell has some valuable insights: as a member of the Committee for Standards in Public Life during Labour’s first term under Blair he saw at firsthand the committee’s failure to address the corruption of political life. From the off it was designed as a toothless watchdog, a self-regulatory body with no independent power, and he notes how Elizabeth Filkin, who became the committee’s commissioner in 1998, was removed from her post essentially for doing her job too well.

Bell laments the inadequacies of the MPs on the committee; they were either too junior or too desperate for their party’s favour and their own career advancement. The overweening power of whips along with the party hierarchy means that MPs who want to advance from the backbenches must submit to the will of the party rather than their constituencies. This malaise is largely responsible for the absence of intelligent debate in Parliament.

Indeed, Bell’s most striking suggestion is simple. Why not let the major parties go bust, if they can no longer generate support, be it popular or financial? Why not open up the Houses of Parliament to independent MPs and the great unwashed? Bell catalogues the Labour Party’s lust for donations, he trots through cash-for-peerages and the loans wheeze. Labour, falling victim to its own laws once again, relied on undeclared loans rather than declared donations to help them through 2005 election, and now party bosses find they can’t repay them.

Here, Bell could delve a little deeper. He follows police inquiries into the ‘cash for honours’ scandal, but only says, ‘that is the problem with gifts of this kind: the motive of both givers and takers, pure as the driven snow though they may be, are too easily misunderstood.’ But what’s to misunderstand? He ought to point out the police cannot enforce a law against the law-makers when the rules have been written to suit their writers. The problem isn’t the corruption of individuals, but a corrupt system. This corruption itself does not corrupt thought, as he says at one stage, the Labour Party was bankrupt of ideas and principle before it became obvious in its balance sheet. But similarly, his oft repeated mantra, this also undermined trust in public life doesn’t exactly explain much, or fire my outrage. Public trust is about whether politicians are honest and competent, and its measure is the politicians’ performance itself, not how great our disappointment in them is.

Bell also condemns Blair’s military adventures, but not for the right reasons. Most of his sympathies are reserved for the betrayal of the British armed forces, whilst his criticisms concern our soldiers’ lack of good armour, health-care and pay. No doubt the army was betrayed, under-equipped and ill-prepared for wars with no apparent end or purpose. But the suffering of Iraqis is the crime that needs comment, as well as the devastation wrought to the county’s infrastructure. Bell also thinks one justification for war is whether it is ‘doable’. In his view, the war in Afghanistan is ‘lawful’, ‘proportionate’ and ‘widely supported by the people in whose name it is carried out’ (and here I am not quite sure whether he is referring to the Afghans or the Brits). His qualm is it might be unwinnable. Any interrogation of the motives and reasons for the wars in – or invasions of – Iraq and Afghanistan, remain untouched.

Why does Bell get himself in such a mess? He really likes the British Army, and informs his reader frequently he was once a soldier. He wants the Army to be a force for good. I, for one, would prefer it to concentrate on defending the realm and so on, rather attempting to project this good round the world. Bell argues wars require responses appropriate to their situation, so Bosnia becomes an example of armed intervention being too long delayed. But the twin nightmares of Iraq and Afghanistan are not shameful because they undermine the doctrine of ‘ethical’ intervention; they are nightmarish examples of how blowing things up does not produce peace, stability or anything constructive.

Bell says little about the media’s political role over last decade, on whether there has really been a revolution in communication control, as is commonly believed. A big question is how complicit the media has been in the machinations of the political class. Adrian Monck’s book asks ‘Can We Trust the Media?’. Though, as with Bell, it’s not obvious whether he gets to the bottom of his topic. He certainly heads off in the right direction, going through polls that show journalists are perceived to be more trustworthy than politicians, for instance (admittedly a rally from a low base). He has numerous examples of its failings, the Sun hunting for great white sharks off the coast of Cornwall for instance. Monck’s general point is that not trusting the press doesn’t stop people from buying papers; the more outrageous the lie, the better the paper’s circulation.

Monck argues the point of the media as whole is to package and sell news stories. This is undoubtedly true of course, in the sense that newspapers aren’t charities. He characterises the media’s preoccupation with trust as an effort on their part to legitimise themselves as their readership has fallen away. He includes a chapter on the battle for trust between the BBC and Blair’s government after the death of Dr David Kelly.

Monck’s book is quite a good primer on the media landscape, which implies that trust, at least in the media, is overrated, as can be the power of the press. There are examples of media barons failing to use their power and examples of others succeeding. But his approach, taking the media as a whole, is probably not helpful. I can accept a certain amount of infotainment, especially from a tabloid. However from the ‘quality’ end of the market, the FTs of this world, there is a greater expectation of accuracy and truth. These media may well have a smaller circulation but the fact remains that people, and probably a lot of them, read newspapers to find out about the world, and for that you need things like accuracy and truth, as well as critical faculties to draw conclusions that are reasonable to believe. These are the things that give journalism its quality.

‘The main role of news media,’ Monck writes, ‘is to filter and aggregate information, repackaging it with some entertainment value’. I suppose I can agree with that, depending on what he means by entertainment value, but then he says, ‘It’s not the media but ourselves we shouldn’t trust’. But there’s nothing wrong with advising a healthy scepticism when reading the papers, because our journalists or their editors are not good enough. Monck claims we have a ‘need as social animals for stories to trade’, but this is at odds with our need ‘as rational beings for hard information’. In other words, Monck thinks that turning facts into a story by definition twists the facts, and his suggested remedy is to give up expecting the press to be better, and instead have greater access to public records and public information. That would surely be a good thing, but his diagnosis of the media’s ills, I think, is fundamentally wrong.

Our need for stories does not contradict the need for hard facts or the truth. Quite the opposite. We are rational beings, but this doesn’t mean we merely collate pieces of data: I interpret the information I receive. In fact, to understand the world around me I make a story out of it. And when it comes to inquiring about certain aspects of the world, I am quite happy to outsource the effort. I will pay possibly 80p a day for someone else to trawl through the data, figure out why it’s a big deal, ring round some experts to get some perspective and wrap it up in a pithy 500 words. This is not easy, and the press we’re lumped with is not good enough. Our media may not be trustworthy, but that doesn’t mean that’s the way it should be. It doesn’t mean we ought not to trust the media per se. And it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t do better.