It’s often the peripheral that catches the eye, gets you thinking. My newspaper’s fringe meeting at the Labour conference in Liverpool this week, featuring an analysis of Labour’s standing by the Times’s Populus pollster, Rick Nye, was really centred on the immediate: what was the electorate’s perception of Ed Miliband-led Labour? Our guest, the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, was there to discuss this with the audience. But a rather different question leapt at me from Mr Nye’s presentation: one of the very few polling questions to which respondents were returning consistently and overwhelmingly pro-Labour replies. It started:
‘Regardless of which party you would vote for, please say if you think each word or phrase is true or not true of the Labour/Conservative/Liberal Democrat party?
…after which followed a series of seven attributes, in not one of which Labour’s score reached anything like 50 per cent, except for this: ‘For ordinary people, not just the better-off’.
Here Labour scored 52 per cent this September, seven points ahead of the Liberal Democrats and 22 points ahead of the Tories. Looking back over previous polls I saw that, on this, Labour have not just beaten but whopped the Tories for as long as the question has been asked — since 2006. They were 21 points ahead in the year when they lost the general election. Curiously, Labour’s lead on this question was at its narrowest (13 points) in 2006, just after the party’s third general election victory in a row.
So when questions were invited from the fringe’s audience, I asked the panel why Labour’s consistently strong lead on the issue of which party was most on the side of ordinary people did not seem to correlate with an inclination to vote for this party. Should we conclude (I asked) that ordinary people do not want a government that was on the side of ordinary people?
Rick Nye said there had never been a clear correlation. A different attribute, ‘shares my values’, fitted better with voting intentions.
I checked, and Rick was right. But even that question didn’t correlate particularly convincingly. In 2010 slightly more people (39 per cent) thought Labour shared their values than thought the Tories did (38 per cent) yet the Tories got many more votes in the 2010 general election.
Yvette Cooper gave a slightly different answer. To most voters, she suggested, whether a party was on their side would be immaterial unless they were confident that that party would make a competent government. Ms Cooper’s analysis made sense, but still I found it counter-intuitive that a powerful impression that a party like the Conservative party was not on ordinary people’s side could sit in so many minds with a willingness to vote them into government. Perhaps Cooper’s explanation was part of, but not the whole, story? This might include two further possible reasons for supporting a party that isn’t on the ordinary person’s side.
The first is that, to many people, ‘ordinary’ means other people. Our chairman at that meeting, my fellow columnist Phil Collins, described canvassing a householder who asked him who he was. ‘Just an … er … ordinary person,’ stammered Phil. ‘Yes,’ snorted the householder. ‘That’s evident.’ We tend not to include ourselves among those we visualise as the masses. To voters on average incomes (or above) or with an average or better than average education, ‘ordinary’ voters may be poorer or more ignorant people whom we may see as either a social or cultural threat, or as making a claim on our own pockets from outside our stockade, through taxation. We want a government on our side, not theirs.
I’m as sure this plays a part as I am that Cooper’s explanation does. But I believe there’s a third possible reason: and a subtler and more interesting one than both these. Even to the extent that we do see ourselves as ordinary, we’re still ambivalent about whether we want a government on ordinary people’s side; and that’s because we’re ambivalent whether we want a government on our side. We don’t entirely trust ourselves and our demands. We want a third party — disinterested (in the old-fashioned meaning of that term) — to make decisions for us.
There’s a probably apocryphal story about a child in one of the progressive educationalist A.S. Neill’s child-centred, rules-free classes, who put up his hand in class and said, ‘Please, must we do as we please today?’ And who can disclaim the occasional irritated reaction to people who say ‘you choose’ when the question is what to do, where to go or what to eat. To a much more important degree than is contemplated by the ‘bottom up’, ‘you tell us’ view of the function of democratic government in vogue today, people understand the term ‘leadership’ to mean leading, not following.
The reasons for this are complex, many-stranded, but include a suspicion that most people (including ourselves) don’t really know what they want; or want things that are incompatible with other things they want; or want things that they cannot have or would be bad for them. To saddle ourselves with a leader who, to the question ‘What are we to do?’, simply bounced it back with a ‘what do you want us to do?’, would be terrifying.
It follows that those in contention for the reins of power should never assume that simply persuading people you’re on their side will win their trust. Government by echo, government by empathy, government by familiarity, can never be the whole, or even the beginning, of what we mean by good government. From a modern politician, the declaration that ‘I’m on your side’ can cause a little shudder.
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