It's a simple question but the answer might be rather complicated: Have our politicians got worse? As Britain struggles with a cost of living crisis – falling disposable incomes, high energy prices, rising taxes and interest rates – our politicians, north and south of the Border, don't seem to be up to the job.

MPs on the right fight culture wars over such marginal subjects as "woke" children's books, while on the left there seems an obsession with issues equally removed from our daily lives – such as apologies for things that happened decades and sometimes hundreds of years before any of us were born.

It's perhaps no wonder, then, that polls show a rising level of dissatisfaction with the political system. A major IPPR report illustrated how a decline in political trust is undermining liberal democracy. It found that in 1944, just one in three British people (35 per cent) saw politicians as merely "out for themselves", while by 2014 that number was 48 per cent and, by the end of 2021, 63 per cent said they shared this view. You wouldn't bet against those numbers being even higher now – after Liz Truss's disastrous premiership.

It's an understandable point of view but a worrying trend for anyone who values democracy.

I was talking to an ex-Labour minister recently, he claimed politicians were of a higher quality in the 1980s-90s. His argument was that they were more serious, substantial figures and that even some of the Tory MPs, such as Alick Buchanan-Smith, who supported devolution, had open, reforming minds.

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But were the likes of Michael Forsyth and Nicholas Fairbairn, or Tommy Graham and George Foulkes, really political giants compared to today's crop?

I'm not sure. They were operating in an easier era with no 24-hour rolling news on TV. No hysterical online commentary. No social media onslaught. No pandemic. An age where politics was less binary – Yes/No to independence, Remain/Leave for Brexit.

The roots of the current disaffection are deep and won't be easily repaired. They stretch back to the lies about weapons of mass destruction, under Tony Blair's Labour in 2002, that took the UK to war in Iraq; the expenses scandal in 2009 that included claims for a Tory MP's duck house and the anger that surrounded revelations that Boris Johnson partied while the rest of the UK was in lockdown. In Scotland, the SNP has become embroiled in a police probe into their finances. Even if no criminal charges follow, the episode has tarnished hopes for a different sort of politics at Holyrood.

However, the truth is that the majority of politicians want to make our country and our communities better. You may not agree with how they plan to do that but to cast them all as being as bad as each other plays into the hands of those who would divide us – just look at the divisions bedevilling the US.

That's why, while always holding those in power to account, The Herald will never fall into the trap – as some of our competitors do – of condemning everything a particular party or government does. Because if faith in democracy being able to bring about meaningful change dies, something far worse could take its place.