Survey shows Britain most polarised over Brexit vote
TENSIONS BETWEEN LEAVERS AND REMAINERS ‘MATTER MORE THAN PARTY LOYALTIES’
THE Brexit vote is still seen as one of the greatest sources of tension in the UK, a new study revealed last Tuesday (29).
A survey by the Policy Institute at King’s College London and Ipsos MORI found that 78 per cent say there is at least a “fair amount of tension between leavers and remainers”, including 38 per cent who believe there is a “great deal” of tension. A similar number of respondents (75 per cent) believe there is tension between supporters of different political parties, but fewer (27 per cent) think it is at a particularly high level.
At the virtual launch of the Culture Wars in the UK report last week, Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos MORI, said, “The divisions – particularly between the extremes – are real, often coalescing around people’s Brexit positions which are a real dividing line five years on, and matter more than party political loyalties.”
Page added that it appeared remainers struggled to accept the outcome of the referendum vote. “They find it the hardest to come to terms with the other side, whereas the leavers who won can be a lot more generous,” Page said.
The study also found that the UK’s Brexit and political identities do not split the country to the same extent as the Republican-Democratic divide in the US.
Britons are much less likely than Americans to say their country is divided by culture wars, the poll said.
More than half of Britons believe the UK is currently the most divided it has been during their lifetime, the survey found. And almost a quarter (24 per cent) of the public say when it comes to giving ethnic minority groups equal rights with white people, things have “gone far enough” in the UK.
Findings also showed half the country has relatively strong views on ‘culture war’ issues in the UK (such as Britain’s colonial past), but the other half had moderate views or were disengaged from such debates. Among those polled, 73 per cent of people think the media “often makes the country feel more divided than it really is”, while 44 per cent believe politicians “invent or exaggerate culture wars” as a political tactic.
Experts cautioned the UK risks further divisions if a focus on “culture wars” continues in media and political discussions.
Professor Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, said one of the ways to stop a drift into conflict was to recognise there is no culture war in the UK. “The large majority of people are generally much less fired up about cultural issues than the rhetoric suggests,” Duffy explained. “But we also can’t wish the risk away or duck out of the arguments – we need to take practical steps to change how politicians, the media and social media conduct these debates, which in the end means appealing to all sides to look for what connects us rather than what divides us.”
On how to guard against the UK polarising further, the study put forward several recommendations.
These included calling on political leaders to make appeals that connect worldviews, rather than divide; support for civil society organisations to enable connections across divides; and increasing the amount of devolved and deliberative decision-making which brings the public into or closer to political and cultural debates, and each other.
Founder of integration think-tank British Future Sunder Katwala said his experiences had led him to believe that most people blamed culture wars on everyone else, leading to a mutual incomprehension about whose problem it is.
“So many of my friends on the liberal left think the culture war is a tactical strategy cooked up in Downing Street, being
pursued by aspects of the media, that all they are trying to do is pursue social justice, equality and diversity in the way that should happen, and that other people have turned that into a culture war,” Katwala said.
“If your main idea about stopping the culture war is that your political opponents should stop it, we’re not going (to get) very far.”
The analysis also revealed insights into the UK’s perception of terms such as ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture.’
The UK public are most likely to say they do not know what the term ‘woke’ means (38 per cent) while 72 per cent report they have either never heard of the term “microaggressions”. The surveys were taken from a representative sample of 2,834 adults across the UK in 2020 and 8,558 adults in April 2021.