Someone told me the other day things weren’t all falling apart. I disagree. For me Brexit, the reaction to the High Court ruling and the Trump victory are all symptoms of the same malaise. And they have all happened because of complacency that “we” are right, that “we” know best – because of a failure to recognise that people are unhappy, and that the way we do things is fragile. We take democracy for granted as if it is some magic formula, and we foolishly assume our institutions are impenetrable, permanent. But everything can crumble. And through democracy vast numbers of people are telling us that things are not okay for them.

This morning I lay paralysed in bed waiting for the verdict, cringing at the President elect mouthing all the right words as if they would wipe from our memories his words about grabbing parts of our anatomy, about sexual violence.

As a result my drive to work was late, and as I got going the 9 o’clock pips went. I pressed every channel on my radio to escape the grating sound of that insulting speech being replayed before escaping by putting my music on shuffle and turning up the volume to wash my ears out.

I drove up over the ridge, low sun in my eyes, mountains of fallen leaves either side. I crawled behind a massive, slow tipper truck which sucked the leaves off the verge as it passed and into a whirlwind behind it in its wake. My drive was a blur of sere brown leaves dancing and tossing helplessly in front of me as the truck rolled on oblivious. Led Zeppelin on top volume didn’t help, the sounds of Robert Plant’s plaintiff melancholy wailing and the leaves swirling and the truck trucking gave me a sort of out of body moment. I shuffled. Joni Mitchell, blue. Shuffle. Janis Joplin, Cry baby. That drive felt like the end of days.

I’m back in my body now but I can’t focus. All these events are feeding on one another, and societies are becoming polarised, divided, hateful, dangerous.

Yesterday on my drive to work I listened to the Reith lecture by Kwame Anthony Appiah about why we need to discard the notion of our superior “western culture” or “Western civilisation” as a thing. We don’t own righteousness or culture or democracy – and the way we have constructed to order our society is neither universal nor permanent. It is breakable – and breaking. We need to learn some lessons from 2016. To disregard what has happened as the fault of stupid people would be both arrogant and foolish. We have allowed people to become disconnected, and our systems have failed to acknowledge or respond to their experiences or hear their voice. No wonder there is a growing disrespect for the decisions of even our most senior judges, and a growing willingness to talk hatefully, violently about and to one another in public.

Take family justice and justice generally. We talk about the rule of law. We need to educate people about it and why it is important – to them not just to us – we need to explain what we do and why it is for their benefit. We need to get much much better at it. Perhaps more importantly we need to listen to the increasing clamour of concern from people who don’t trust or are fearful of our courts, who can’t access our courts, who have had a poor experience or suffered an injustice in our courts or our justice system. It would be easy to think these people are on the margins, but they aren’t. They are legion.

The thousand small cuts do matter. The cuts to legal aid, the failure to increase resource to match demand, the squeeze the balloon effect of cuts to local authorities that has devastated early intervention and increased the pressure to take child protection matters to court, the stripping away or corrosion of the presumption of innocence by the exclusive focus on the rights of “victims”, the failure to prioritise transparency so people can see the best and the worst of what we do – the pretence that it is all alright and we have the best justice system in the world. Those of us who listen to people outside the legal bubble know that many, many people do not regard the justice system with the reverence or trust that we do. For these people the rule of law is meaningless and the courts are no solution. So, looking at things from their perspective, why shouldn’t they march on the Supreme Court, particularly if a politician, who should know better, is encouraging it? We have to confront this and respond constructively. What we mustn’t do is retreat into our bunker, as the court seems to have done in the face of a group of ten fathers4justice group recently. We need more openness and more dialogue, not a knee jerk closing down of dissent.

I deplore the pathetic and dangerous response of The Daily Mail and others, and I wish they would choose to behave differently. But it would only worsen the problem to stifle their rantings. We can’t restore trust in our systems of law and government by stifling freedom of speech, but those in government, particularly the Lord Chancellor should make the case and lead the push back against the nonsense in the papers. And our government should really reflect hard on the cumulative effect of years of degradation of our justice system and of our collective failure to listen to the people we serve, whether that be through Parliament, the Government or the Judicial system. We really do have to invest and care for every part of our constitutional structure if we want to maintain it. If we continue to neglect it it will continue to decay and crumble and we will all eventually regret it.