From fickle to flatline
Public opinion was different in 2023 — here’s how…
Calendar years are not considered in isolation. We tend to view them in relative terms, comparing them with what has gone before. In this way, 2023 has appeared less volatile than its predecessor, a year on a par with 2016 which had inspired the memorable social media meme — “Go Home, 2016, you’re drunk”.
It is often said these days that the only certainty is uncertainty. The terrible effects of the pandemic followed by the cost-of-living crisis sensitised us to change over continuity. During 2021–22 there was a strong desire for a “new normal”, for things calming down. That has happened this year but the problem for the country, and the Tories in particular, is that the new steady state is relentlessly negative.
The new abnormal
2022 was frenetic, particularly in Westminster. ‘Partygate’ was the catalyst to a breakdown in confidence in Boris Johnson’s leadership and a tumultuous, record-breaking period of ministerial resignations. Liz Truss took over and lasted 49 days as Prime Minister. At one point, her Deputy had to reassure the House of Commons that the country’s leader was not “hiding under a desk”.
Truss was the second of three Prime Ministers that year. She appointed Jeremy Hunt and was subsequently replaced by Rishi Sunak. Hunt promised to “steady the ship”, while Sunak initially reassured the nation that he was a trustworthy technocrat, a serious politician focused on the delivery of five pledges.
The Collins Dictionary made Permacrisis its word of the year in 2022 not just because of political instability but also due to climate change, war in Europe plus seemingly intractable domestic policy challenges. Germany’s equivalent was the more benign Zeitenwende.
What of 2023? Collins’ word this year is a more matter of fact AI — Artificial Intelligence — while the Cambridge Dictionary chose the associated hallucination. (The Oxford Dictionary went with “rizz” as its successor to “goblin mode”, basing its choice on public voting.)
Vox populi ‘23
In terms of public opinion, this year has been relatively calm by comparison to its predecessor but, on a range of measures, 2022 was no more volatile than 2021.
For example, according to Ipsos, the range between the Conservative’s best monthly voting intention share this year and its worst has been just 4 percentage points. This compares with 12 last year and 11 points in 2021. Satisfaction with the government has similarly ossified. The range is just 4 points this year, much less than 20 points and 19 in the previous two.
The effect is less pronounced for Labour. Its range has been 10 points this year having been 11 last year and 9 the year before. Even here, however, it looks like sentiment is in a groove with more moderate deviation and Labour’s share in December might yet prove to be an outlier (it was 41% compared to a monthly average of 47% during 2023 up to that point).
There is further evidence of this pattern when we consider attitudes towards the state of the economy. Every month, Ipsos asks a nationally representative sample whether it expects the general economic condition of the country to change. During 2023, the range in the proportion of people with negative expectations has been 11 percentage points. It was 21 points in 2022 and 29 in 2021.
At one point during the first full year of the pandemic, just 30% of people thought the general condition of the economy would get worse over the subsequent 12 months.
That year also saw relative optimism about the country’s direction of travel. A peak of 47% of Britons thought the country was heading the right way. The most optimistic they were in 2022 was 29% but the range of sentiment was similar across both years; 23 points in 2021, 20 in 2022. It has been a measly 5 points this year.
The perceived negative impact of Brexit, a kind of ‘Breget’, has also stabilised. There was a 12-point variation across 2021 in the proportion of people who thought leaving the EU was having a negative impact, followed by 8 points last year, and 4 points this year.
Up, down, flat…
People seem to have made up their minds and this looks like a ‘vibecession’. We shouldn’t, however, necessarily see the state of public opinion at the end of 2023 as placid, nor as predictable. We might come to look back and consider this year as one in which we “paused for breath” but an alternative viewpoint holds that this year can be seen as a point of inflection. Public opinion has become, for example, more pragmatic towards the environment, more wary of new tech.
There are two possible reasons for 2023 being more sedate. In politics, the Conservatives have reached rock bottom with little room for things to get worse. For example, satisfaction with the Government reached a low of 12% this year, while the Conservative’s vote share has never been higher than 28% in Ipsos polls.
A second reason is that for all the disruption of the pandemic, there was a sense that it would eventually pass, and things would get better. It was early days in terms of Brexit then. And there was some optimism, driven, in part, by the government being seen to be delivering in some areas — particularly the vaccination programme.
Bailouts, asteroids and aliens
Britons were happy to see the back of 2022 but had lower expectations of 2023 going into it than they had of 2022 at the end of 2021. In several respects, people’s worst fears about 2023 haven’t been realised.
Looking ahead at the end of 2022, 44% thought that it was very or fairly likely that Britain would need to be bailed out with emergency funding from the IMF during 2023, and 29% thought that a British city would be hit by a natural disaster.
Some context is needed here — 40% of Britons thought it likely that nuclear weapons would be used in conflict somewhere in the world during 2023, 15% that an asteroid would hit Earth and 10% that aliens would visit. These things didn’t happen; just as we tend towards rosy retrospection, we are possibly prone to pessimistic prospection.
Continued strikes during 2023, media stories about crumbling concrete, more sewage discharges, and storms regularly buffeting Britain, have all added to the feeling of an embattled, struggling kind of place. The sentiment of Britain being ‘broken’, identified in 2022 by media as diverse as The Telegraph and the New Statesman, appears to be firmly embedded in our psyche.
This isn’t a uniquely British phenomenon but is probably more keenly felt here. In 2022, Ipsos found that Britain was the only country surveyed of 28 in which its overall ‘broken system sentiment’ was growing. This year’s Ipsos Predictions found Britain ranking fourth highest of 34 countries in terms of negative ratings of 2023 for their country, but 22nd when answering about the year for their family. Half of Britons predict we will enter a recession in 2024, although this is tempered by the fact that the same proportion think that their personal finances will improve next year.
The only way is up?
Globally and in the UK, there are the first tentative signs of a more optimistic outlook. According to Ipsos, seven in ten people around the world think that 2024 will be a better year for them than 2023, up by 5 percentage points from 2022, when optimism dipped to a decade-low of 65%. It is 11 points higher in Britain.
While Ipsos’ Economic Optimism Index remains in negative territory at -36 in November and -28 this month, these are an improvement on last year when the Index regularly sat at -50 or even -60. Core inflation is slowing. This won’t be enough to save the Conservatives and changes in government tend to feed economic optimism (although political honeymoons, like popularity, seem more short-lived these days).
Things might not be as bad as they seem. On the economy, as with other domestic priorities including the NHS and immigration, The Economist’s Bagehot has argued that, taking the long view, “Some problems will fix themselves; some things are better than they look; and a few conundrums can be solved with only a little effort.”
That’s not the public’s perception though. The post-pandemic economy has been described as like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa — each time you look at it, you see something different — but Britons’ sentiment about their country is much less enigmatic, something more akin to Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
What about next year? In terms of public opinion, it could well be different to 2023, more like 2021 and 2022, less calm but with some glimmers of positivity and optimism. Maybe.
