THERE is a deep, pervasive rottenness at the heart of our institutions, our government, our financial sector, our industrial sector, even in the supposed innocence of sport.

The respected Financial Times commentator Martin Wolf — who tends towards Green Party views on more issues than you might think (from the universal basic income to the economic damage done by fractional reserve banking) — said only this week that there was a loss of confidence across much of the developed world in political and commercial elites.

He was reflecting on the public view, and I think he’s right. Where I’d depart from him is in his tone of surprise.

I’d say there’s an entirely understandable, very well-rooted, belief that our current political and economic institutions have been captured by the few, by the 1 per cent, for their benefit, at massive cost to the rest of us.

More, I’d say there’s a crisis of legitimacy. Our current politics, our current economics, our current treatment of the environment, clearly cannot deliver even in their own terms, let alone deliver a society that works for the common good.

They cannot be trusted. They are rotten to the core.

With just the latest scandal in a veritable flood of them, Volkswagen has admitting to fiddling, not just a little but by a factor of up to 40, the results of emissions tests on its diesel vehicles.

The “rotten apple” argument no longer holds — indeed it has been hanging by a thread for many years.

This is no mere technical argument: not when air pollution, with emissions from diesel vehicles a major contributor, covers us in a deadly if invisible fog that takes six months of life away from the average Briton. When one in 12 deaths in London sees some contribution from air pollution. When at least 29,000 deaths across Britain each year are attributed to air pollution.

This is not a victimless crime, but one that’s affected the lives of many — that’s why I’ve raised the issue of corporate manslaughter charges as a response that surely should be considered.

The chief executive, after a very long pause, has resigned, but currently stands to walk away with a breathtaking €28 million pension pot — and, to add insult to injury, a lifetime supply of free Volkswagen vehicles.

And there are strong suspicions that this scandal will spread beyond the one company. Indeed this week, tabled well before this issue broke, the European Parliament was to debate proposals from the European Greens to switch away from the suspicious current testing regime to a real-world-based, harder-to-fudge one.

That was the result of a growing mismatch between the actual quality of the air around our roads, and what the manufacturers’ figures for vehicles emissions said it should be.

We’re used to this with our fraud-ridden, corrupt financial sector. Its list of scandals is almost endless, from Libor to Forex rigging, PPI to money-laundering and tax evasion.

And the corruption in the financial sector is deeper than any individual scandal. The finance sector as currently constituted exists not to serve the real economy but to fuel speculation, in financial instruments and property that’s become entirely detached from the reality of homes and business premises, to fund its own empty structure, and expecting be propped up by the sweat and pain of communities far from the glass towers of Canary Wharf when it fails again.

But what about our industries? We’ve got foreign owners in our petrochemical and steel industries, to name just two, that are failing to invest in research and development, failing to invest in new technologies, then deciding to let thousands of workers fall into unemployment — a tiny blip on global empires.

And then there’s our politics. Just this week, in his own book (yes that book, but let’s not get caught up in sideshows), Lord Ashcroft acknowledged almost without noticing that he expected his donations and contributions of time to the Tory party to buy him a place at the heart of government. They certainly got him a place in an impressive-appearing, if deeply discredited, institution — the House of Lords.

And David Cameron’s recent dissolution list of new peers, showing that getting the public to pay for cleaning your moat is apparently a qualification for entry (if you haven’t spent time as a special adviser) might almost suggest that he’s a secret electoral reformer, so risible was much of its character.

Just to complete the package, we’ve got sport. The obvious example here is Fifa, clearly rotten to the core.

It was a rottenness that led the World Cup being given to Qatar, ignoring obvious climatic unsuitability, not to mention human rights abuses on a scale almost, if not quite, to the level of those of our friend and ally, and arms-sale client, Saudi Arabia.

This is a giant, very smelly, Augean stable. A massive cleanup of Herculean proportions is needed.

The obvious place to start is politics — and with electoral reform. An elected upper house, and a government elected to reflect the will of voters, not the will of 24 per cent of eligible voters (the support attracted by our current regime), would be a good place to begin the mammoth cleaning job.