Gerald Warner: Britain more right wing than in the 80s? Only up to a point

Published on Wednesday 23 June 2010 19:15

BRITAIN more right-wing than under Thatcher" - that headline must have put the Samaritans' helplines under serious pressure in those areas north of Gretna where the Great Unreconstructed linger on in the Jurassic parks of municipal socialism, the fossil beds of dependency and the Pleistocene deposits of PC media consensus.

These are hard times for the dwindling readerships of Marx, Gramsci and Robert Tressell. The last thing they need is to find their ideological drip-feeds - the BBC and The Guardian - contaminated by claims of increasing endorsement of "right-wing" opinion by the British public. To more phlegmatic observers, this phenomenon was no more than the annual navel-gazing in which the commentariat likes to indulge every time a new British Social Attitudes Survey is published.

Superficially, the findings did seem to justify a lemming stampede to the cliff-edge by all elements of the fatuous confederacy that calls itself "Civic Scotland". Only 36 per cent of those surveyed thought the government should redistribute income, compared to 51 per cent in 1989. Oh dear.

Only 27 per cent of these Scrooges believed the government should spend more on benefits for the poor, compared to 58 per cent in 1991. Ouch. And there was a widespread opinion that inequality was due to "individual laziness on the one hand and hard work on the other". That is what happens when you repeal the blasphemy laws.

There was bad news too for the bar-room Bravehearts ("Urr yew Unglish, Jimmie?") of the separatist tendency: after the cold douche of reality delivered by recession - in an independent Scotland the bailout of RBS and HBOS would have cost 204,347 per household - support for the Union has soared to the point where it seems only his long-standing demise prevents Edward Longshanks being a shoo-in for Scot of the Year.

Picking themselves off the ropes, the progressive forces counter-attacked. They pointed to more appropriate sentiments also expressed in the survey. For example, 64 per cent of respondents were satisfied with the way the NHS is run, compared to 34 per cent in 1997. A whopping 73 per cent were satisfied with the teaching of basic skills in schools, an increase from 56 per cent in 1996. That approximately coincides with the period during which Britain's schools have declined in international ratings from sixth for science to 16th and from 12th for maths to 28th, which suggests the respondents themselves are largely the products of our imploded schools system.

The problem is the unreliability of opinion surveys once they delve deeper than "How do you intend to cast your vote?" There is nothing wrong with the methodology of the British Social Attitudes Survey; it is conscientiously and scientifically researched; it does accurately convey attitudes - but that is all. If it is considered useful to identify the views of those who do not know what they are talking about - fair enough. To use it as any kind of compass in policy making, however, would be foolish.

Progressive forces derived much consolation from the report's revelation that 78 per cent of people now believe the gap between high and low wages is too large, compared to 73 per cent in 2004. Even socialist commentators were baffled by the apparent conflict between that view and the same respondents' hostility to wealth redistribution. Obviously, the iconic issue that weighted this response was bankers' bonuses: another question showed just 19 per cent thought banks were well run, compared to 90 per cent in 1983.

This survey, more economically focused than some of its predecessors, does not reflect a "right-wing" nation, though it is more Thatcherite. Such financial priorities are not a true ideological compass, however: it is social conservatism, from which Mrs Thatcher was largely detached, that determines ideology. The distorting terms Right and Left, derived from the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly in 1789, have infantilised political discourse - remember the "right-wing" Russian armoured columns advancing on Moscow in 1991 to restore Marxism-Leninism?

We are entering a period of vast ideological change. Democracy is no longer an exportable commodity; malign usurpations of power by supranational bodies such as the EU and the UN must soon be challenged; the global warming fraud, with its potential to wreck the world economy, could be the trigger for revolt against the elites; the impositions of political correctness are the last gasp of Marxism, in its Gramscian model; parliamentary democracy is a busted flush that will soon go the way of absolute monarchy.

In that perspective, navel-gazing exercises such as the British Social Attitudes Survey embarrassingly demonstrate our failure of imagination in analysing the real issues that will shortly overwhelm us.