Throughout the Autumn, Engage Britain—a new organisation focused on tackling our country’s most complicated and divisive challenges—worked with Ipsos MORI to hold discussion groups in towns and cities across the country. The aim was simple: to bring together people with different views, knowledge and experience and give them the space and support to hold constructive and frank conversations on a range of subjects. This shouldn’t be revelatory. But for many participants it was, because these discussions were the first time they felt like their voice mattered.
For too long, our politics and policy have been remote, designed in Whitehall offices with very little role for those most affected by it. The received wisdom has emerged that our political paralysis is due to us being a hopelessly divided country: “polarisation” is the buzzword for it.
While polarisation might make for good headlines, the evidence for it is, at best, thin. Of course, people have differences and disagreements on what the biggest issues facing the country are and how to solve them. But the idea that we are in the middle of a US-style culture war—where someone’s opinion on one issue is a guaranteed predictor of how they feel about other, seemingly unrelated ones—doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
The best way to describe what is happening in the UK is not polarisation but fragmentation. Much has been written about Leave and Remain, but less about the Uber-hailing, Deliveroo-ordering Labour voter or the Conservative who wants to see rapid investment in the NHS. Our politics is becoming more unpredictable; in the parlance of the time, it is being disrupted.
So for many economic issues, the traditional left-right split that governed our party politics for decades is still important. Nearly 50 per cent of Labour voters strongly agree the economy is rigged towards the rich and powerful, while for Tories it’s around 10 per cent. It makes little difference whether they are Leave or Remain supporters.
In contrast, issues like immigration are tracking a social liberal/social conservative split, which is highly related to people’s Brexit position. So over 20 per cent of both Tory and Labour Leave supporters strongly agree that immigrants take away jobs from “real Britons,” while only around 5 per cent of Remainers from either party share this view.
Just to complicate things further, on yet other issues, like the degree of collectivism in society, the left-right and social spectrums interact—with the divides running across a spectrum from Labour Remainers to Labour Leavers to Tory Remainers to Tory Leavers.
And finally, on issues like gender roles and same-sex marriage, there has been a big liberalisation in attitudes across society.
Finding common ground
These shifting fault lines throw up interesting possibilities for anyone considering how to tackle some of the big issues. For any particular division, there are usually views that cut across it. Last summer, Engage Britain and BritainThinks undertook detailed polling to establish the relative priorities of the different policy challenges facing the UK. The results were striking.[su_pullquote]Conservative voters are just as likely to support seeing their taxes rise to pay for health[/su_pullquote]
Properly funding health and care is prioritised across all demographics and voting intentions. Indeed Conservative voters are just as likely to support seeing their taxes rise to pay for health than voters in general (63 per cent compared to 62 per cent). While concern about the environment is still highest among the youngest, it is rising just as rapidly across all age groups—the measure of importance rose by 2.4 index points for people aged 18-24 and 2.3 index points among those aged over-65.
And when you delve down into the details, clear areas of consensus emerge: for example, ensuring that the same treatment is available to anyone, no matter where in the country they live and that people do not have to sell their homes to meet the cost of care. 77 per cent of Conservatives and 83 per cent of Labour voters agreed that no one should be financially worse off just because they need long term care in old age—a key reason the 2017 Conservative election manifesto proposals proved so unpopular.
What’s more, as our discussion groups with Ipsos-MORI over the autumn showed, the opportunity to meet and collaborate with those from across the political spectrum is welcomed. People quickly see that those with different opinions to them are not speaking a different language. The experience was repeatedly described by participants as “eye-opening.” They wanted to be involved in finding ways forward on challenges that would have broad support.
Radical and simple
This should not be a surprise. In many places, people are solving seemingly intractable local problems through solutions that are at once radical and simple. In Enniskillen, Lauri McCusker of the Fermanagh Trust is offering extra resources that parents and children want—simple things, like music lessons—but provided both Catholic and Protestant schools share the classes. These mixed lessons take place at the beginning or end of the day, ensuring that parents from both communities meet each other in a social context at the school gates.In Glasgow, Karyn McCluskey, a police officer horrified by the city’s knife crime, approached violence in a completely different way: as a public health issue. Working together, police officers, medical staff, teachers and parents have more than halved the murder rate in ten years.
Britain urgently needs to transfer the energy and innovations of such approaches to the national challenges we all face. We need solutions that appeal to people’s values, reaching across divides. But too often solving the conundrums involved has led to heartfelt pleas for compromise, seeking a bland solution that everyone can live with. A better method would be to focus on collaboration—where people with different views and experience find a way to build something together, rather than pull each other down.
Of course, such approaches should be of interest to Boris Johnson, as he takes his seat in No 10, or whoever emerges as the new leader of Labour. Both need to either rebuild or hold together their uneasy coalitions of voters. The next Labour leader faces the challenge of winning back older, more socially conservative, blue-collar voters while maintaining its new base of young, urban liberals. And after the transformative 2019 election, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives need to embed their appeal in traditionally Labour areas, from Gresford to Bedlington.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1yR5u7zJ9g&feature=youtu.be
Watch: inside Engage Britain's discussion groups.
Anyone sitting in on our discussion groups back in September in which people described themselves as “sick of hearing about” Brexit—and I assume there were plenty of Tory strategists sitting in similar groups at the time—will have immediately recognised the vote-grabbing potential of Boris Johnson’s straightforward pledge to get it done.
But they would also have heard the importance of having concrete answers to the challenges people really wanted to talk about. Our polling with BritainThinks found that for 51 per cent of people, funding health and care was in their top three priorities, while for 43 per cent it was providing opportunities for families living in poverty. A bunch of issues—education, housing and the environment—were a little further behind. These were the challenges that voters repeatedly brought up in the discussions.
The Government now faces the sticky business of transitioning from campaigning slogans to the essentially collaborative nature of governing, a change that previous administrations have struggled with. If the Prime Minister is serious about creating a “People’s Government” that can really make a difference, then he should be putting his faith in our citizens, communities and frontline practitioners. It is they who can help to chart a new, more dynamic course for our policymaking, bridge our myriad divides and get to the heart of the challenges facing the country.
Read the full report here
