In defence of ideas unpopular with the British public

Politicians tend to ignore ‘the people’ when it suits them

It wasn’t until I was a fairly grown up that I learned just how conservative many Labour voters were. My parents’ Labour-supporting friends had mostly belonged to what Ken Livingstone called ‘the party of the metropolitan pervert’, London types who worked in creative industries or the public sector and held ultra-liberal views (at least for the 90s). But out there in the real world there were all these Labour supporters who were even more Right-wing than my dad, whether on crime, immigration, Europe, sexual relations or pretty much any social issue. They just wanted, in Blackadder’s words, a few less fat bastards eating all the pie.

That is pretty much where the public are now. As Aaron Bastani put it: ‘The centre ground on domestic policy and public services is Corbynism with a union flag on it and the word “British”.’

Although Jeremy Corbyn lost decisively in 2019, many have forgotten the political lesson of the Corbyn era — that it wasn’t his economic policies that put people off, but his lack of patriotism. He came from that long line of Quaker-Unitarian radicals who have always been seen as too sympathetic to Britain’s enemies, whether it was Robespierre, Napoleon, the USSR, Irish republicans or Islamic radicals.

Corbynomics is certainly more popular than what the current Tory Party is offering, especially that served up in the recent mini-budget, after which it could be said that things are developing not necessarily to the Government’s advantage. 

I don’t have strong opinions on the aborted 45% tax cut; it didn’t seem very wise, or fair, but I’m not sure how drastic it was; Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times suggests that the proposal was not as bold as people make out. Yet it seems to be hugely unpopular, except with the Institute for Economic Affairs.  

But I’m not convinced that makes it bad.

The IEA’s Kristian Niemietz has repeatedly pointed out that free-market economics is generally quite unpopular, and during the depths of the Brexit dispute he wrote a piece opposing what he called ‘Bregalitarianism’:

‘The Bregalitarian loves to wallow in faux-indignation every time an opponent – which can be a Remainer, but it can also just be a more cautious, less enthusiastic Brexiteer – mentions the possibility that not everyone who cast a vote on 23 June 2016 was fully aware of all the possible ramifications. “How DARE you suggest that 17.4 million voters are stupid!”, cries the Bregalitarian. “How DARE you be so patronising and insulting!”

‘I find this Bregalitarian rhetoric deeply disingenuous – and never more so than when free-marketeers engage in it… Here’s a little home truth: if you are a free-marketeer in Britain in 2018, you are part of a small and unpopular minority. The vast majority of the British public disagree with you on virtually everything. There is majority support for a (re-) nationalisation of energy companies, the railways, water and bus companies. There is majority support for rent controls and various price controls.

‘As a free-marketeer, you probably want, if not fully privatised, then at least mixed systems of healthcare and education, with much greater private sector involvement. If so, you are almost alone in Britain with that view. There is also majority support for a lot more government regulation, a lot more government interference with private business decisions, higher taxes and a larger state.’

Indeed, public opinion on economic issues is quite eye-watering: a full 28 per cent of British adults want banks to be run by the state, and 30 per cent even want internet providers nationalised. A quarter want travel agents nationalised. 

It goes without saying that I think it’s a bad idea for the state to run most of these things — I can’t imagine many things worse than a holiday organised by the government or local council. On this subject the majority of people in the media would agree with me, because the media tends to be out of step with the population at large. It is disproportionately upper-middle-class, university-educated, and liberal on both economic and liberal issues. The public are not.

There was a similar misunderstanding of public opinion during Covid, with the lockdown sceptics convinced that the British people wouldn’t stand for this tyranny; wrong, the British people loved the tyranny, they wanted more of the tyranny. At one point polls showed that a fifth of the public thought that nightclubs should be locked down forever, even when Covid was gone. The median voter is a sentimental authoritarian, culturally but not socially conservative, hardline on immigration but viewing racism as the preserve of wrong‘uns, egalitarian and resentful, hostile to change, and extremely sentimental about animals.

The British public, both of Left and Right, have never really got over the Second World War and the Blitz spirit, when Britain became the most successful authoritarian socialist state in history. They want war communism, not freedom.

But none of this makes free-market capitalism or 45 per cent tax cuts a bad idea, nor necessarily is it wrong for the government to impose it on the country — if it’s for the long-term good.

Educationalist and Substack author Sam Freedman (subscribe here) spoke (well, tweeted) for many when he articulated what troubled him about the Truss regime: ‘The sheer arrogance required to try and aggressively impose an ideology on the country that 5% of the population, at best, subscribe to is unreal. Democracy isn’t just a series of institutional processes, it's a basic level of respect for the public.’

That is true, but isn’t this the case with pretty much every liberal reform of the past 70 years, imposed on the population by a small number of people with an unpopular ideology? Most of the social changes we have come to regard as part of the righteous march of progress were either actively unpopular with the public, or greeted with apathy.

The obvious one is homosexuality. There is a surprisingly long tradition of tolerance, but from decriminalisation onwards reform has been led by an elite minority. With its most recent step, gay marriage wasn’t particularly unpopular in the UK, but it was barely thought of except by a few activists. Certainly no one voted for it.

In the US, the gap between elite and public over this subject was far greater. Gay marriage was defeated in 31 state votes and approved in just three, and only there because of the ‘vastly superior economic resources and lobbying networks that pro-gay marriage forces drew on’ in Christopher Caldwell’s words. ‘Support for gay marriage in Silicon Valley was almost unanimous. Google’s employees gave 96 percent of their campaign contributions, and Apple’s 94 percent, to oppose California’s anti–gay marriage Proposition 8. There were no equivalents on the other side… Celebrities and elites…. They were all on the pro-gay marriage side. Literally all. Reuters discovered in 2014 that of the country’s 200 largest law firms, 30 were representing lawsuits against state Defense of Marriage acts. Not one was defending these laws.’

If you go back in history, most liberal reforms have been unpopular to start with. In his book on democracy and illiberalism, Yascha Mounk pointed out that: ‘The end of segregation was brought about not by the will of the American people but rather by an institution that had the constitutional power to override it. When we think of the civil rights movement, we tend to think of the brave acts of ordinary citizens, from Rosa Parks to James Hood. And yet its history was just as much one of liberal decisions won against the resistance of electoral majorities.’

Most of these unpopular ideas become retrospectively popular because they succeeded, or were seen to have succeeded, or opponents have been crushed. The difference between social and economic liberalism is not how unpopular they are with the people, or how much they are imposed by an ideological minority; it’s how much support they get from elites. If Truss’s plans for a neo-Thatcherite revolution had the backing of academia, showbusiness, journalism and the wider intelligentsia, it wouldn’t matter what ‘the public’ thought. It would happen.

Often elites turn out to be right, although there a survivor bias in that we better remember the movements that succeeded; modernist housing was popular with intellectuals and hated by the people whose Victorian terraces were demolished; it’s now widely considered a failure; criminal reform, widely unpopular, was effectively reversed in the 1990s both in the US and Britain after decades of rising violence. Even in education, where the 1960s saw lots of new ideas adopted thanks to people who read too much Rousseau, a more conservative emphasis on discipline returned towards the end of the century.

Elites tend to be liberal, and across the West the growth of a more activist judiciary has become a source of tension in political systems, but it has also made the Left more suspicious of the public. Many progressives feel that while they’re there to help the people, and they theoretically love the people, the people are often idiots and democracy is therefore dangerous. They tend to be not unlike Bertolt Brecht who, when told by a plumber that he wanted free elections in East Germany, replied: ‘In that case the Nazis will be elected.’ 

And, of all the differences between elites and public, there is none bigger than that over immigration and multiculturalism, which in part drives this Brechtian political hypochondria. In 1968 Enoch Powell had received overwhelming public support following his Birmingham speech, and no one doubts that he would have won a landslide if Tory leader, and indeed probably helped the party win the 1970 election (the electoral map shows the biggest vote swings close to Powell’s Wolverhampton constituency). 

Since the election of Blair the public have consistently opposed six-figure immigration, almost the Platonic ideal of an ideology imposed on the country by a minority. It was so unpopular that many treated the 2016 vote as essentially a referendum on the subject, a message the Tory Government has completely ignored.

The public may come around to immigration being a positive thing, as American public opinion has (there are already signs of it). In general, the ‘people’ tend to adopt the social mores of the ruling class, who judge racism to be the number one moral sin, indeed so serious that they send people to jail for it. Public opinion follows elite opinion.

Of course there is the argument that Trusseconomics goes against what Tory voters were choosing in 2019, but then so is the government’s policy on immigration. In the long and even medium run, the Government’s plans for the top tax rate are infinitesimally less consequential than its planned increase in numbers, but this attracts little comment from journalists because high immigration is an unpopular policy they largely approve of. 

Something being unpopular doesn’t make it wrong or bad, and I personally dislike Right-wing populism’s veneration of ‘the people’, especially as most conservative journalists come from privileged backgrounds. I’ve been guilty of it myself.

I’m not against the idea that people’s views are unequal; the opinion of someone who knows nothing about politics or economics shouldn’t be respected just because they’ve got the vote. But it is true that educated, upper-middle-class voters aren’t necessarily better judges of ideas, being prone to adopt luxury beliefs, voting for tribal and class interests disguised under a moral banner, and adopting far more extreme ideological positions than the less educated. If it was just graduates allowed to vote, Corbyn would have won easily and we’d all be in a terrible mess right now (ho ho).

Unfortunately, as dreadful as graduate voters can be, elites tend to get their way. Even when the current government is voted out I have no hope that Labour will deliver anything resembling the alternative many disillusioned red Tories would like. Instead, we will get even more American-imported social justice activism involving both race and sexual identity. Just like Trussonomics, this will be unpopular with ‘the people’; the only difference will be that this crazed ideological agenda will have the social acceptance of the elites — and so it will win.