The ignorance of the Great British Public

A poll has just been produced by Ipsos MORI for the Royal Statistical Society and King’s College London, which reveals a high level of ignorance among the British public about various social statistics.

But before you read the results and get too smug, take this test published by the Guardian to check your own level of knowledge. (I managed ten out of ten, but only by guessing on the basis of choosing the opposite of likely tabloid newspaper prejudices).

IPSOS Mori’s results reveal a shocking level of ignorance among the Great British Public:

• On average, the public thinks that teenage pregnancy is 25 times higher than official estimates.
• 58% of people do not believe that crime is falling, even though it has been falling for many years.
• 29% of people think we spend more on Jobseeker’s Allowance than pensions, when in fact we spend 15 times more on pensions.
• 26% of people think foreign aid is one of the top two or three items of government expenditure, when it actually comprised only 1.1% of expenditure (£7.9bn) in the 2011/12 financial year. More people select this as a top item of expenditure than pensions (which cost nearly ten times as much, £74bn) and education (£51.5bn).
• People estimate that 34 times more benefit money is claimed fraudulently than official estimates. On average, the public thinks that £24 out of every £100 spent on benefits is claimed fraudulently, compared with official estimates of 70p per £100.
• On average, the public thinks that 31% of the population are immigrants, when the official figure is 13%.

Since I am writing this blog and you are reading it, it is safe to assume we share membership of a minority with an interest in public policy issues. Most people do not share our level of interest and cannot reasonably be expected to have a detailed knowledge. So the issue here is not ‘ignorance’ so much as the fact that perceptions vary so wildly from reality, and that this variance distorts the political climate in which decisions are made.

The Guardian’s analysis reports that the Royal Statistical Society cites three main reasons for popular misconceptions:

1. Political spin – Politicians tend to twist numbers for their own ends rather than discussing statistics even-handedly.
2. Tabloid journalism – The researchers argue “the media has to try and genuinely illuminate issues, rather than use statistics to sensationalise”.
3. Data literacy – If statistics were taught differently in UK schools, the public would have a better ability to critically assess evidence for themselves.

Politicians’ dishonesty, sensationalist journalism, poor education or merely popular indifference? All play their part but the most important question appears in the least likely of sources.

Of all the daily newspapers, you might expect the Daily Express to defend popular prejudices most but, to be fair, the Express’s report is even-handed. It quotes Hetan Shah, executive director of the Royal Statistical Society, who poses the key question:

Our data poses real challenges for policymakers. How can you develop good policy when public perceptions can be so out of kilter with the evidence?

This question reveals the risk, or rather two risks; two (small ‘c’) conservative responses.

The populist response – which is more likely in an age of followership – is for politicians to adopt policies intended to mollify popular prejudices irrespective of the evidence, for example by demonising welfare recipients. But why must public policy genuflect to popular ignorance? Yes, we live in a democracy and government should reflect the will of the people, but that does not absolve politicians of respect for the truth or responsible leadership. If an opinion poll says that a majority believes that 2 + 2 = 5, it remains the duty of politicians to remind people that it equals 4. To do otherwise is to abdicate all responsibility. After all, it’s not as if rank populism has succeeded in raising popular respect for politicians.

The elitist response is expressed by Alex Massie in the Spectator. He seems to suggest that popular ignorance can justify ignoring the public and concentrating power still further. His message seems to be, “leave it to the grown-ups”:

The public mood matters – and measuring it is important – but when it comes to the detail of actual government policy the public is, generally speaking, clueless.

Massie adds:

...the next time you find yourself outraged by some politician’s witless stupidity you might pause to remember the clay with which they have to work. It’s not a pretty business.

No, it’s not a pretty business, but we seem to have forgotten what true political leadership entails. It is neither the craven populism of “give ’em what they want” nor is it Massie’s contemptuous elitism. It is about standing up for truth and justice, even at the risk of short-term unpopularity.

As everyone involved in politics knows to their cost, the age of deference has gone. The Great British Public has no fear of challenging any politician. But what poll-fixated politician would risk reciprocating by telling the Great British Public when they are talking demonstrable bollocks? Paradoxically, such brutal honesty might earn more popular respect. Challenging popular falsehoods treats the falsehood not the believer with contempt. Repeating popular fallacies to curry favour with the public treats the believer with contempt, and is why such rank populism has contributed to the decline in popular respect for politics and politicians.

Mad swivel-eyed loons? Think before you laugh

Today’s newspapers are full of reports that an unnamed ally of the prime minister described Conservative grassroots activists as “mad swivel-eyed loons”.

Liberal Democrats might be inclined to agree. The idea that members of opposing parties are bonkers is a tempting one but we should avoid it. Tory blogger Iain Dale demonstrates why:

Of course there are swivel eyed loons among the Tory Party membership. Just as there are in any party. It’s just a shame that the Liberal Democrats have more than their fair share. Just go to a LibDem conference and you will see what I mean.

Not so funny now, is it? And this contemptuous view of Liberal Democrat members has been promoted less by Tories such as Iain Dale than by our own party leaders and their hangers on. A recent post on this blog discussed Nick Clegg’s travesty of his party members, but he is just the latest in a long line of Liberal leaders dismissing their activists. Indeed, successive leaders have accumulated so many straw men that they now constitute a serious fire hazard.

The bunker mentality and a fear of the ‘enemy within’ began during Jeremy Thorpe’s leadership. Iain Brodie Browne reminded us recently of Thorpe commissioning Stephen Terrell QC to investigate the Young Liberals in 1970. During David Steel’s leadership, his coterie regularly accused grassroots members of not being “serious about power”, when what was really happening was that local pioneers of community politics were winning power and outshining a self-appointed nomenklatura who had never won so much as a seat on a parish council. In 1986, the then chief whip David Alton made up a baseless story about people “walking in off the streets” to vote in the defence debate at the Eastbourne party conference. Immediately after the 2005 general election, Charles Kennedy launched an attack on party activists, blaming them for controversial policies that he felt had embarrassed the party.

Party leaders come and go but the dishonest narrative remains the same. A small elite is convinced that it knows best; that politics is all about the people at the top; that if we want to be “serious about power”, we must become more centralised and jettison party democracy (a process described as ‘modernising’); and that the job of party members is to shut up and deliver the leaflets.

This paranoid narrative says more about the accusers than the accused. And it is the same story in the other mainstream parties. But we know it’s untrue. If you have worked with members of other parties in some joint endeavour such as local government, you will know that most of them are basically decent human beings who share your sense of duty to society. Conversely, you will have encountered a few people in your own party who are deranged or complete arseholes (and in some cases, both).

So a lot of Tories oppose the EU and gay marriage? Of course they do. That’s why they’re Tories. It is a political position with which Liberal Democrats strongly disagree, but we live in a pluralist society and it is legitimate to express those views. The Liberal position is that such views are fundamentally wrong, not a form of mental illness. The way to deal with them is through argument, not exclusion.

I’ll leave the last word to Tory MP Douglas Carswell, not someone Liberal Democrats would normally agree with, who expresses a universal truth about political participation:

“The Conservative Party has haemorrhaged members since 2005, but my own association in Clacton has massively expanded its membership. Instead of treating the membership as the enemy, the modernisers should respect them as shareholders,” he said.

“If you treat the membership as the problem, you will eventually end up with a membership of one.”

The end of democracy?

Why is the public gradually disengaging from democratic politics?

Henry Farrell thinks he knows the answer. In an essay inspired by Colin Crouch’s influential book Post-Democracy, he writes a depressing epitaph for democracy. Globalisation and neoliberal economics have combined to shift power elsewhere, while the voters are left with less and less choice. In a postscript on the Crooked Timber blog, Farrell laments the current political chaos in Italy.

The problem with Farrell’s thesis is that he conflates the malaise of democracy in general with that of social democracy or moderate socialism. It is true that democracy is in trouble, and that neoliberalism has had a major role to play in the undermining of democratic politics. But just because the traditional left has no answer to the current economic crisis does not necessarily mean democratic politics as a whole is impotent.

The collapse of neoliberal orthodoxy in the recent financial crisis was a gift to its opponents but the traditional left has been completely unable to provide a coherent or compelling response. That is not because democracy is failing. It is because the social and economic conditions of the post-war era (which made the social democratic settlement possible) no longer apply. Like UKIP, social democrats yearn for a return to the 1950s, but for different reasons.

There is a coherent and compelling response for the Liberal Democrats to adopt (once they get over their current fixation on blending into the establishment). First, they should adopt the recommendations of the Rowntree-funded Power Inquiry (full report here and executive summary here), which examined popular disengagement from formal democratic politics in Britain (and which was previously discussed on this blog here). Second, they should develop some radical new economic thinking, and this work has already begun, in particular with the ALDC’s 2008 pamphlet by David Boyle and Bernard Greaves, The Theory and Practice of Community Economics, and the just-published Green Book.

One can at least agree with Farrell that things cannot continue as they are. One cannot accept his fatalism simply because the parties of the old left resemble exhausted volcanoes.

Jeremy Hardy summarises British politics

In Red Pepper, comedian Jeremy Hardy neatly sums up the attitudes of the three main parties:

Tories delight in a spat with Brussels, because upsetting foreigners is second only to killing them in stimulating the pleasure centres of the Conservative Party. Liberals, on the other hand, love Europe. They adore anything continental: the cheeses, the voting systems, anything. Their party’s whole raison d’etre is the vast superiority of French campsites. I refer, obviously, to sleek, modern Liberals, not the old-fashioned radicals who were content with a good cheddar, a thermos and a wet walking holiday, reading a biography of Jo Grimond.

And to be fair to Liberals, all of them have always loved democracy. The left is ambivalent about it. We pay lip-service to it but can’t help suspecting that people might be too stupid to realise the high regard we have for them. And Conservatives, despite belligerently enthusing about western democratic values, have never truly been convinced by this country’s experiment with universal suffrage. Their greatest terror is the mob. That’s probably why they want the troops home from Afghanistan. They don’t want to be left without a squadron of dragoons when the millworkers get restless.

The rise of virtual activism across Europe

Florian Hartleb has an article on the LSE European Politics and Policy blog looking at the opportunities and dangers inherent in the emergence of ‘virtual politics’ in Europe:

New technologies bring with them the advantage of virtual activism and the possibility of grass roots movements in a democratic and global way.

Such developments also contain some anti-democratic tendencies, however, including the creation of a more passive and drifting base of support, less ability to hold leaders accountable, and the emergence of a new, narrower digital elite that has displaced the older, more traditional activist base.

Parties which can no longer rely on the notion of membership for their legitimising myth work instead on their digital presence; they find themselves suffering a loss of real members and general support, forcing them to turn to alternative resources to retain influence.