Vox populi policy
Politics, policy and people - why nuance, deliberation and the long view matter
It’s still there. That it could be symptomatic of a malaise in politics and policymaking only adds to my irritation.
It won’t surprise you to learn that some time ago I personalised my feed on the BBC News app so that I could quickly access stories tagged as being about ‘public opinion’. There were only ever a few, occasional stories on this topic, but they dried up completely and then this message became a permanent fixture underneath an ugly explanation mark:
“There was a problem loading this content…”
What happened? I doubt I’ll ever know, but could this reflect an uncertainty and distrust about the use of insights and evidence about public behaviour, attitudes and preferences?
The answer to this question matters because, cultural disconnect, and its close relative group think, have been key factors in a catalogue of policy blunders. According to Anthony King and Ivor Crewe’ study, those in charge are prone to being out of touch with reality, over-reliant on, and over-confident about, their faulty antennae.
This diagnosis wasn’t new. Just before the turn of the century, James C. Scott wrote in Seeing like a state that policymakers were “at least one step, often several steps, removed from the society they are governing”.
For King and Crewe, disconnect was mostly the product of incompetence rather than wilful disregard, but Matthew Goodwin’s recent description of the New Elite took this in a different direction. His assessment was that Britain’s rulers have been “…completely focused on pushing through a revolution which reflected their values, interests and priorities but showed little interest in everybody else.”
In his view, the elite’s pursuit of a progressive liberal monoculture created a populist backlash as the mainstream felt they were being marginalised. This made them receptive to ‘taking back control’ and created a disruptive realignment in British politics.
Ben Ansell has taken issue with this analysis, challenging the notion that there is a single ‘will of the people’. His view is that there is no one people pitted against a monolithic elite and described such mistaken analysis as the ‘democracy trap’.
This hampered the endeavour to ‘get Brexit done’. Parliament couldn’t agree on how to ‘do’ Brexit because there were a multitude of views about what this meant. But it didn’t see public opinion in such terms; it turned in on itself at a time when it should have looked outwards.
A tendency towards superficiality is visible in politics when swathes of the electorate are pigeon-holed in seductively simple segmentations which reduce complexity to ‘Worcester woman’, Workington man’ and ‘Millennial Millie’. Basic survey questions are often used to get nothing more than a cursory glimpse of respondents’ very basic thoughts about a fledgling policy.
The big issues are impossible to solve without deep insights and conversations. As an example, it has been calculated that 32 per cent of the emissions reductions required up to 2035 will rely on decisions by individuals and households, 63% “on the involvement of the public in some form”.
So, it matters when nuance is missed, when engagement is too ‘passive’ (using the terminology of Sheryl Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation) or happens too late. Claudia Chwalisz, CEO of DemocracyNext, has recently turned the attention on public distrust in government on its head, posing an equally legitimate question — why does government fail to trust people?
Housebuilding provides a good example. People, even entire communities, are described as nimby based on objections to planning applications or surveys which ask about ‘in principle’ views. The reality is more nuanced, more ‘maybe’. For example, Ipsos has found support for building more local homes varying from 46% to 71% depending on the proposed nature of new development, its location and who would benefit. And when it comes to policy, public opinion is influenced by the ‘messengers’ as well as the message.
Road pricing is a similarly fluid issue. A recent Ipsos poll for The Economist found people split evenly on the prospect of pricing replacing fuel duty with two-fifths indifferent. However, previous polling on proposals to introduce local schemes has found variation in levels of support depending on the detail. For example, support increases with hypothecation i.e. earmarking the revenues raised for a specific purpose.
These are no mere trifling issues. A dysfunctional housing market has hampered local and national economic progress while it is estimated that the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles will create a £35 billion fiscal black hole, accelerating the need for new revenue streams. We can add immigration and tax to the list of issues that are at risk of an often simplistic ‘…but people surely won’t stomach it’.
Public preference and tolerance is commonly underestimated and misunderstood. The worry is that the media, MPs and local politicians — attuned to the views of self-selecting samples who populate their inboxes — run scared of opinion, even blame it. Several years ago, the LGA asked councillors and planning officials why their local authority didn’t approve the building of more homes. Their top answer? Public opposition.
Policy and decision-making always involve balancing a need to lead sentiment and follow it, but if the reading of opinion is faulty, neither gets done. This could be at the heart of Britain being “stuck on the big issues” which, according to Janan Ganesh, creates a tendency towards keeping ourselves busy by focusing on trivia.
Ansell says failure is inherent in an “all-or-nothing” political system overly focused on the short-term. The resulting instability impairs progress something which isn’t lost on the public. Last year, a 50-country study by Ipsos found the British more negative than average about their government’s ability to plan for the long-term.
Insufficient reflection and debate were described by King and Sanders as a “deficit of deliberation”. A more modern version was found in the report last year by Involve and the Institute for Government who highlighted inadequate capacity to engage with the public as risking poorly formulated policies to tackle the climate crisis.
In Scotland, Holyrood’s Finance and Public Administration Committee, recently highlighted the risk of “rush” and the pace of decision-making overly “directing things”. They described a weak “challenge culture”. Meanwhile Wales has pioneered a Future Generations Commissioner whose remit includes encouraging government and public bodies to take a longer-term view on policy decisions.
Returning to the exclamation mark, and back in Scotland, I heard a snippet of a BBC interview with candidate Ash Regan during the SNP leadership contest. During questioning, she proposed using a citizen’s assembly to work through the matter of gender recognition if polls showed a majority wanted it. The interviewer described this as “ducking” the issue. Many would forcefully argue the opposite.
It is sometimes said that there is too much politics without policy in Britain. Perhaps there’s another dimension to this; too much politics without policy without people!
Recommended:
Ben Ansell, Why Politics Fails (2023)
Anthony King and Ivor Crewe, The Blunders of our Governments (2014)
