“Being brave”: five ways we shouldn’t under-estimate British public opinion
In the lead-up to the unveiling of its social care plan, Jeremy Hunt described the importance of the Government “being brave” and referred to the priority Britons attach to the NHS, and their willingness to fund investment to improve it.
By saying this, Hunt was seeking to challenge the frame that tax is necessarily toxic and plays badly with voters, while also reminding us about the public’s strong affection for the NHS. Several days later, some of the response to the Government’s plan involved speculation that breaking a manifesto pledge would be electorally damaging although a Cabinet Minister told BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, “It looks good and polls well.”
British public opinion is often much more nuanced than snap polls and headlines suggest. With all this in mind, here are my suggestions about five ways British sentiment and worldviews are commonly underestimated and misunderstood.
1. Britons are a compliant bunch. Famously, one of the arguments for herd immunity and “letting it rip” was that the British wouldn’t tolerate forbearance and lockdowns for long. The opposite was true, and throughout the pandemic most Britons have ‘followed the rules’, tending towards caution at every stage of unlocking.
2. People are pragmatic; often, it really does depend. Many survey questions ask about ‘in principle’ support and opposition to specific policy propositions. This is for good reason, but we shouldn’t lose sight of this. Thus, in principle support for a range of things — such as local house building, paying more tax, renationalising the railways, private sector involvement in the delivery of public services and Net Zero interventions — might not easily translate into consent, tacit or otherwise, when practicalities and impacts play out.
3. People in Britain are more tolerant of U-turns than you might think. An Ipsos MORI survey last year found 36% of the opinion that when the government changes its course of action “it makes me lose confidence…”, but 30% said it made them “more confident” and 24% agreed equally with both. While the survey was focused on the use of evidence, it is symptomatic of a sentiment that prioritises competence, motivations and honesty. After all, changing your mind can be cause and effect of competence, and perhaps the pandemic has fed a sense that policy needs to ‘move fast(er) and break things’. Last year, we found more people opting for Government acting quickly in a crisis rather than waiting until all the evidence was available.
4. The British are gloomy, right? Wrong. Yes, we are aware of our limitations as a country and downbeat in many respects — for example, more think Britain is heading on the wrong track than the right one and 80% consider society to be divided these days (it was 86% during an acrimonious, Brexit-dominated 2019) — but in an Ipsos study across 25 countries this year the British were among the least likely to rate their country as being in decline (and were ten percentage points below the global country average).
5. Britons are ‘quietly’ patriotic and proud. There are many different perspectives on what being British means and what Britain’s (and the Union’s) future looks like. But over half would rather be a citizen here than anywhere else in the world while only one in five would prefer to be a citizen of another country. More are proud of the British Empire than ashamed of it (although a plurality are neutral). An unassuming pride encompasses the history and potential of local towns, cities and regions, something very evident in analyses of ‘Red Wall’ sentiment. People want local areas done-up, not talked-down.
The consequences of misunderstanding and underestimating public opinion are considerable in political and policy terms. For example, a recent report suggested that inadequate capacity to engage with the public risked poorly formulated policies to tackle the climate crisis. Being brave is one thing, being informed is another.
