Shaping opinion

 Opinion polls play a major role in our political culture and many people see them as an indication of how people actually think about particular issues. They are, these days, often supplemented with focus groups which appear to confirm the results of the opinion polls they are set up to examine. Such is the poverty of ideas in political life these days that politicians often say things like “It’s no good having the correct view on everything if no-one trusts you to put it into practice.” This has become the line being pushed by “senior” Labour politicians as they seek to ditch the policies that made Jeremy Corbyn’s manifesto so popular. That particular line was presented by Shadow Treasury Spokesperson Bridget Phillipson during a ‘Labour To Win’ online rally, but we can expect to hear it more and more as Labour desperately try to get back into Government.

 

The problem with relying on “what people think” to guide your policies, is that so-called public opinion is not quite as objective as Labour (and they are not alone in this) would have you believe. But first a disclaimer. If you care to look back through my blogs I have been critical of opinion polls but have also cited them. Does this make me a hypocrite? I should add that I spent the best part of 25 years teaching research methods in higher education. Students would often ask:

“How do I know which polls to trust”, to which I would usually reply:

“In practice, people tend to trust the polls which confirm what they already think, and work hard to disprove the ones they disagree with. For us (I meant social scientists) we should look at the questions asked, the sample and the time frame. In truth we are as prone to confirmation bias as everybody else.”

 

But the major issue with “public opinion” is not that polls have methodological problems, but they also have what we might call ‘ontological’ problems. Aware as I am that people reading this might be resistant to social science jargon I’ll explain what I mean. If you are going to try to measure a thing, any thing, you need to be clear what it is and what would be an appropriate measuring tool. A tape measure is a pretty good measure of length; and either metres or feet tend to be standard. You don’t spend much time, I’m guessing, debating whether a metre is a metre. It just is. Unless you are a philosophy undergraduate and the less said about them the better.

 

So, what is an opinion? We all have them, and they are clearly important, but what they are precisely remains elusive. That is the ‘ontological’ problem. In short ontology refers to the state of being. For our purposes what we can say is that being able to measure ‘opinions’ is not quite the same as being able to define precisely what they are. Now, quite rightly you might be wondering why any of this is important and whether it has any political ramifications?

 

Claire Ainsley, Labour’s new Director of Policy had this to say about polling in a paper in Political Quarterly:

“Public opinion is clearly central to political decision making.”

But, she does not attempt to define what ‘public opinion’ actually means, though to be fair nor do many policy analysts. She does go on to say:

“But the practice of using public opinion in politics is fairly blunt, and has not necessarily been experienced by the electorate as a democratically enriching process.”

 

I don’t disagree with her but she tends to take for granted that the electorate want democracy to be enriching. In truth, whilst this sounds good it is layering concept on concept, because I have no idea at all what a “democratically enriching process” would look like. What she proposes sounds good. Policy which is led by the public. But, on closer examination it is not a move away from public opinion, but a reshaping.

 

“Public attitudes-led policy making suggests that politicians should start with where the public is, and build from there,” as Ainsley puts it. Although this might sound as if policy making simply mirrors the prejudices of the electorate, Ainsley wants to build in checks and balances. Relying on public attitudes, she notes, could lead to the populism popular on the continent but instead she proposes “that it is possible to use public insight and inclusive democratic innovations to develop policy that has public legitimacy, is based on evidence, and is tested amongst the public.”

 

This is important for, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, this view that Labour must get in tune with the electorate is being repeated by the front bench. In the online rally Bridget Phillipson, went on to say:

“..we do need to understand the priorities of the people who haven’t been giving us a hearing. We need to listen, learn and use their language.”

 

This view that all you need to do is listen to ‘ordinary people’ and reflect back their demands in language they recognise is a persistent one in politics, particularly amongst Labour’s right-wing. This leads to the conclusion, as Phillipson puts it that,  “Our language and our framing must reflect the world as our electors see it..” However, beyond saying that Labour should not commit to spending too much or blame austerity for everything there is very little evidence that ordinary voters have been engaged. Rather, the entire speech was a swipe at Labour’s membership which is clearly seen as too left-wing and too out of touch with ordinary voters to engage ordinary people.

 

This brings us back to public opinion. The problem that Labour’s right-wing dominated front bench have is that they seem to believe that there is such a thing as public opinion and that Labour between 2015 and 2019 was not listening to it. They are clearer however what it is not than what it is. According to Philipson the voters Labour needs to speak to, “..don’t follow the news much, they don’t follow Labour politicians on Twitter and they don’t have time to follow the detail of policies that don’t affect them.” These voters, according to this new orthodoxy are disengaged from politics entirely and don’t appear to have much idea what is going on. Nevertheless, we can gauge their views from opinion polls and attitudinal surveys, and when these are translated into policies, these Tory-voting ex-Labour voters will abandon the Tories and sweep Labour to power. It would be laughable if they weren’t so sincere.

 

There has been little attempt by political scientists to understand the nature of political opinions. For data obsessed politicians and journalists opinions are held up as some form of objective measurement of what people believe. The implicit understanding is that opinions are fixed so if, to paraphrase the old saying, the opinion won’t come to the party’s mountain, then the party will have to come to the opinion. The role of politicians in this is not to convince the electorate of anything but simply reflect back to them what they already think. Any sense that politics should be about debate and argument is lost because, especially these days, people reject policies which do not accord with their already formed views.

 

An academic paper by political scientist Stanley Feldman gives a hint of one of the problems of relying on opinions. It is not that opinions do not matter, but that they are related to what he calls core or basic beliefs. As he points out:

“Basic beliefs may affect people’s evaluations of public policy issues not only through their preferences for government action but also in terms of their retrospective evaluations of government performance.”

 

In other words, in formulating policy it is not enough to try to emulate people’s expressed opinions unless you are clear that you are in tune with their core beliefs.

 

Opinions on particular issues, Brexit, immigration, the environment, party leaders etc., are not fixed. Indeed, the truth is that most people do not spend much time thinking about them at all. If presented with an opinion poll they will answer the questions posed, but then in most cases, forget about the issue and go back to catching up on the latest gossip from the world of celebrities or sport. But, whilst opinions on issues may be short-term and malleable, behind these are a set of core beliefs that are more difficult to shift.

 

The problem from Labour’s point of view is that many on the front bench (and their acolytes in the constituencies) are not clear about their own core beliefs. As was indicated in the Ashcroft post-election survey this group overwhelmingly endorsed the proposal that “the most important thing is to win a General Election even if that means making a compromise on principles.” To be honest if you are without principles to start with, those compromises are less painful than they might otherwise be.

 

There is, of course, a fatal flaw for any party pursuing policy on the basis of “starting where people” are at. People’s opinions are often contradictory, political policies cannot afford to be if they are to be credible. People’s opinions can change fairly quickly dependent on events, political parties need to be able to respond to events whilst maintaining their commitment to their policies. But, the biggest flaw is that whilst people want a party to reflect their core beliefs, they also expect a party to lead and to have principled positions. Most people don’t expect a party to simply reflect back their prejudices but expect to be convinced to vote for them. And it needs to be said Tory voters do tend to be more loyal than many Labour ones.

 

If defining ‘opinion’ is difficult, no less so is deciding what represents ‘public’. Politicians often refer to “the public” when they want to show that they are not being partisan. But the public is not an amorphous grouping with one opinion, but is segmented by, amongst other things, gender, ethnicity, class, geography, education, age. These segments are overlapping and people can exist in more than one of them.  Opinions may well differ both between and within segments making attributing an opinion to a particular segment incredibly difficult.

 

Public opinion does not exist in a social vacuum, it is entirely a social construction. Opinion polls do not simply reflect people’s views they help shape them. The way a question is asked, see almost any YouGov poll for evidence, can suggest what people are supposed to be thinking about, even if they do not necessarily tell you what you should think. A question for example such as “Anti-Semitism was a real problem in the Labour Party and the leadership should do more about it”, does more than test your opinion it reinforces the view that Labour has a problem with anti-Semitism (this was part of a battery of items used in an Ashcroft poll).

 

For Labour, if it wants to be credible, the task is to create policies that can transform Britain and then go out and argue for them with passion and commitment. If people disagree have a dialogue with them, be prepared to explain why the policies are in their interests, but accept also that people whose core beliefs are, to put it in simple terms, Conservative, will not be won over to Labour’s cause no matter how much their beliefs are pandered to.

 

In the General Election 2019 over 10.2 million people voted Labour. The immediate task is to ensure that the vote in 2024 does not fall below that. Remember that Ed Miliband’s version of Labour managed 9.3 million, whilst even Tony Blair only managed 9.5 million in 2005. Chasing voters by reflecting back to them beliefs that seem more Tory than Labour will not only fail to win over Tories, but may also lead to demoralisation amongst Labour voters. Of course the base will always vote Labour but that base is not sufficient to deliver a victory, and following the excitement generated by the 2019 manifesto is going to be difficult to enthuse if most of the policies, as seems likely, are sacrificed on the alter of public opinion. Whilst, some right-wing Labour voters may return, the danger is that by appealing to the illusion of public opinion far more left leaning voters, especially younger ones, will simply not bother to vote at all.

 

Let me be clear, I am not saying that Labour cannot win with their current strategy. There is growing disillusionment amongst Tory voters with the handling of the pandemic and that is without the inevitable additional chaos which will be caused by the now highly likely no deal exit from the EU. But winning is not enough. The Tory media will allow a Tory-lite Labour Party into office if they are themselves disillusioned by their own party, but they will also hold a Labour government to its manifesto commitments in a way which they would never do with the Tories. This is especially the case if that manifesto is designed with “conservative” minded voters at its core.

 

Public opinion, such as it is, is able to be manipulated by the establishment so that people without any discernible stake in the system will continue to vote for the continuation of that system. Jeremy Corbyn managed to change the narrative by refusing to play the game. By circumventing the mainstream media for 5 years Labour felt like a real alternative. SirKeir has quickly taken Labour back to ground on which the Tories can always out-perform Labour. For all their talk of going “forwards, we don’t need to reenact the past”, the fact is that Labour is trying to rerun the 1997 Election when Blair won a landslide. That victory, as I have pointed out previously, was as much a result of the collapsing Tory vote as enthusiasm for Labour. If in the midst of the worst pandemic in living memory and it’s atrocious handling Labour is still trailing in the polls, it does not auger well for Labour going forward. The Tories will almost certainly change their leader before the next election, if Labour fail to change theirs then despite having victory handed them on a plate, Labour will, yet again, leave the election feast with only crumbs.