The British public is in the mood for revolution

As with the Horizon scandal, every so often the voters show they’re not all that apathetic after all

Iadmit, I’m not that interested in the Golden Globe Awards or the Oscars. I won’t have heard of many of the actors, though I’ll take a couple of minutes’ interest in “best film”. The same is true of most sport. I am vaguely aware that there was some sort of darts championship last week. I couldn’t give you the name of anyone in the England rugby or cricket teams. Except at key moments, I don’t pay attention.

I don’t think I’m that unusual in this among politicians. I’m not channelling some out of touch High Court judge. I say it to make one simple point: this is how most people in this country think about politics.

My experience is that most people in the SW1 bubble struggle to remember this – or even grasp it. If you’re in a world obsessed with politics, it is hard to believe that the average voter is just not that into you. But the twists and turns of Westminster tactics, who’s up and who’s down, who’s briefing against whom, all this passes almost everyone in the country by.

Don’t believe me? The Hansard Society’s (now sadly discontinued) annual audit of political engagement showed that in 2019 – a dramatic political year – only one in 10 people discussed politics “nearly” every day. Over two thirds of people said they discussed it “a few times a month” or less – nearly half said “never”.

Or consider some anecdotes. Sir Ed Davey was confronted on the BBC in September by a word cloud of voters’ reactions to him. The top three were “don’t know”, “no idea” and “not sure”. (Admittedly, after the week he has just had, he might be quite pleased by those reactions.)

Or again, Olivia Utley, formerly of this parish, wrote on Twitter/x in November, at the height of the storm around the former home secretary, that “I went to [Suella] Braverman’s constituency the other day and had to vox [interview] over 30 people before I found one who knew who she was”.

So you, dear reader, are already highly unusual in even reading this column. The truth is that most voters pay almost no attention to politics apart from at a few days around elections. I don’t blame them. It’s absolutely rational and reasonable to do this. But it doesn’t happen out of lack of interest. It happens because people have switched off from the Westminster game. This isn’t apathy: it’s a total loss of confidence in the system.

We can see that because it wasn’t always like this. Tory party membership in the early 1950s was an incredible three million people. In a smaller population, not far short of one in a dozen adults was a Conservative member. Even as late as 1990, a million people were members. The figure now is probably about a tenth of that. Labour membership, too, was a million in 1950 and political engagement via the unions was comparable to the Tories’.

Contrast that with today. Political parties are for the committed few. Again, according to the Hansard Society, only one in six people admitted to going to the minimal effort of clicking on a political website or a politician’s social media feed just once in a year. Yougov reports that 73 per cent of people have a negative view of politics in Britain (and only 7 per cent are positive). Trust levels in politics are the lowest ever.

The ONS says that, if you ask voters whether a policy with a majority of voters against it would in fact be changed, only 30 per cent agree (and 51 per cent disagree). Not surprisingly, the public affairs company Edelman reports that 73 per cent of the country believes that “dealing with the country’s problems requires new thinking, new ideas and new approaches” and that two thirds of the country think we need a “completely new type of political party”. The pollster James Frayne wrote in these pages last week that “I cannot remember a more disillusioned and angrier electorate”.

In this environment, all the effort that goes into clever Westminster strategising is entirely wasted. Voters pay no attention and it just reinforces the disconnect. That’s why those politicians, the majority, who want to go back to a conventional pre-2016 style of politics are missing the point. Brexit and the 2019 election were clearly votes for something different. (So too, in a very different way, was Corbyn-mania.) In truth, the electorate is fed up to the back teeth with Westminster gameplaying and politicking and is beginning to despair about the capacity of normal politics to fix our problems.

This complete disconnect means that, for a lot of the time, there’s no real pressure on politicians. That’s why the Post Office’s Horizon IT scandal – and others – could linger for so long. But every so often, the anger spills over, as it did this week. Then, a real fury is visible at the failures of the political class.

This mood is ignored at our peril. I worry that too many politicians, of all parties, are utterly complacent about the implications. The Conservative Party has historically been good at sensing popular feeling and responding to it. We seem to have lost our touch. We must find it again – or risk being swept away.