Public Opinion
What the public thinks about British democracy
Early in 2004 researchers for the UK Electoral Commission interviewed panels of people drawn from various walks of life to inquire into "voter apathy" and attitudes towards political participation. They got an unexpected response, which did not make it into their official findings: the people interviewed thanked them warmly for involving them in their inquiries and for taking their views seriously.
The poll records that 90 per cent of the public believe that "ordinary voters" should have a great deal or a fair amount of power over government policies, but only a third feel that they have such power. Two thirds say they have a little or no power at all over their government.
They have reason under a Prime Minister who took Britain into war against Iraq in the face of unprecedented public demonstrations – and who at home, for example, denies the public proper access to official information and who resolutely refuses to give people the second chamber in Parliament that most of them want – a chamber that is either wholly elected or has a majority of elected members.
But political exclusion is nothing new in the UK: in fact, it is built into the constitutional fabric of the country. The late Richard Crossman, an intellectual in the 1960s Labour cabinet, described the British constitution (and thus the existence of Parliamentary supremacy as opposed to popular sovereignty) as a "rock" against popular emotion in his diaries:
| This is the strength of our system, that, in one sense we have plebiscitary democracy, actually the leadership is insulated from the masses by the existence of Parliament. Parliament is the buffer which enables our leadership to avoid saying yes or no to the electorate. . . (The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Richard Crossman, vol. 3, Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape, 1977) |
The political class reinforce this "rock", building around it a culture that confines its interest to political "realities" and closes its eyes to the pre-democratic nature of constitutional arrangements. Indeed, politicians, officials, lawyers and commentators often celebrate the "exceptional" qualities of these arrangements; and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy was actually set up to export Britain's democratic lore and practice to democratising nations abroad.
From the 1970s onwards, reform-minded people began to challenge the status-quo – a challenge which gained a large new constituency when Charter 88 came into being in 1988, on the tercentenary of the Glorious Revolution, expressly to campaign publicly for a series of democratic reforms. The groundswell of public opinion was so strong that the Labour party, then in opposition under the late John Smith, committed itself to democratic reforms, including a Bill of Rights, devolution, freedom of information, limits on unchecked executive powers, and the promise of a referendum on the majoritarian "first past the post" system used for elections to Parliament.
Trevor (now Lord) Smith, then chairman of the Rowntree Reform Trust, which had funded the launch of Charter 88, decided in 1991 that the trust should monitor the progress that Charter 88 and other campaigns were making in convincing the wider public of the case for democratic reforms. Thus the Rowntree trust decided to fund a programme of State of the Nation polls on public attitudes on democratic issues; Professor Stuart Weir, director of the Audit, has been on the advisory team from the very first poll. The new major 2004 survey, for which ICM interviewed more than 2,000 people, is the sixth full-scale poll in the series.
From the outset, there was little need to monitor progress. The people, so to speak, were already aware of the need for the democratic reforms on which we canvassed their views. The evidence of 13 years of polls shows that the public takes a notably principled and consistent stand on democratic questions (the results up to 2001 are summarised in The Voices of the People, P. Dunleavy et al, Politicos, 2001).
There have been consistent majorities in favour of democratic reforms; and following the Labour's government's own programme of reforms, the public want both more complete reforms than those which the government has enacted, and reforms on which the government has failed to act. In general we found that the British public is committed to the principles of accountable government, the rule of law and the separation of powers; to a renunciation of the informality of Britain's old political arrangements; to the adoption of a written constitution and strong legal and formal scrutiny of executive conduct; to more popular participation in government decision-making; and to the proportional principle in elections.
In particular, the polls have shown:-
- Long-term and growing support for a written constitution, up to 80 per cent in favour in 2004;
- A strong and long established, if diffuse, dissatisfaction with the "present system of governing Britain" (in 2004, nearly two-thirds said that it needed "quite a lot" or a "great deal" of improvement);
- A resolute popular desire for a wholly or mostly elected chamber: in 2004, this is the choice of 66 per cent of respondents, as against 12 per cent who back Tony Blair's determination to have a largely appointed chamber (22 per cent were "undecided");
- Four to one majorities in favour of proportional representation in elections to Parliament and local councils (in 2004, people also agreed that local communities should be free t to adopt their own electoral systems);
- Overwhelming support for a Bill of Rights that protects economic and social rights alongside civil and political rights; and a belief that social justice is an important element in democracy;
- More far-reaching proposals for freedom of information than the government's recent Act allows for;
- Big majorities for a referendum on electoral reform for elections to Parliament, for fixed-term parliamentary elections, for decentralising powers, for more accountable government agencies (i.e., quangos);
- Growing public sympathy for most popular protests in recent years, with high levels of people in 2004 agreeing that the destruction of GM crops, petrol blockades, refusals by pensioners to pay council tax and Fathers for Justuce disruptions of traffic and other protests were justified;
- The strong desire for greater popular control over government policy-making is already noted above.
In 2004, we asked for people's views on other democratic questions. We found that a large majority (62 as against 27 per cent) agreed that the state should fund political parties with "significant public support" to reduce their dependence on donations from rich people, businesses and trade unions. People in general were convinced of the risk that donations could buy undesirable influence over parties. We found however that for the most part political parties were more disliked than liked, except for the Scottish National Party and Labour party in Scotland.
More innovatively, a majority also endorsed the idea that some members of the boards of local and national quangos, or government agencies or services, should be chosen by lot. The government recently rejected a proposal for experiments in the use of lot in selecting quango members from the Public Administration Select Committee to begin democratising this appointed sphere of governance.
It is in civil society that the great strength of democracy in Britain lies. The Rowntree polls demonstrate that the citizenry active in voluntary societies and action, trade unions, tenants and trade associations, non-governmental bodies such as the Child Poverty Action Group, Christian Aid, the Countryside Alliance, Liberty, Oxfam, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and a host of protest, sports and community groups, draw much of their strength from a public that might well be uninformed, but nevertheless demonstrates a normative sense of the importance of principles of democracy and social justice in British political life.
Of course, as Joe E Brown famously acknowledged at the end of Some Like it Hot, "nobody's perfect". Thus we found, for example, that while the BNP was the most unpopular party, with 62% of people disliking it and only 7% liking the party, nearly one in five people took a neutral view and said that they "might vote for them" in the future.
And while the public agree on the importance of formal civil and political rights, such as the right to a fair trial, they are at the same time ready to approve the incarceration without trial of foreign terrorist suspects and equivocal when it comes the proposals for lowering the standard of proof required for conviction in terrorism cases, trying suspects at least partly in private and preventing them from hearing some evidence against them.
The political class tends to reject the consistent findings of the Rowntree and similar polls, on the grounds that democratic issues may well command high levels of support in street or telephone interviews, but they do not have "salience" in the public mind or inspire debate in the Dog and Duck public house. Psephologists argue that poll questions often determine the responses and reveal contradictory and confused responses (though presumably not to their questions). Politicians complain that such concerns do not show up in their focus groups (though it is they who set the agendas).
We are convinced of the validity of the findings. Ever since 1991, the polls have employed "citizen-oriented" rather than "institutional" questions. We have followed the famous precept of old-fashioned popular journalism – never under-estimate the ignorance of the people, nor their intelligence. So we set our questions in context without making them leading questions, and we control for contradictory views. We believe that the polls have revealed a strong normative framework within which a reform-minded government that wishes to improve popular trust and participation in British government could debate the principles, practicalities and contradictions necessary to create a system in which the people could have confidence. But do we have a government or political class that trusts the people enough?
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