That was one of the issues which came up when I appeared on The Westminster Hour with Conservative MP Ed Vaizey on Sunday night. The trigger for the discussion was last week’s publication of the annual British Social Attitudes survey.
Many of its finding were – to a liberal like myself – welcome: for example, far fewer people now think that homosexuality is wrong (down to around a third from a majority back in 1987), whilst the public service ethos amongst those working to provide the rest of us with public services seems to have strengthened.
But several reports singled out the question of the attitudes of other people towards the poorest in our society: “Hearts are hardening against those who have least” said the Economist, whilst the FT said, “there are signs that attitudes towards state aid for the needy have hardened significantly“.
It was a good thing I’d had a quick rumination over the details before the radio show, because the details seem to me to tell a different story. The key is that these conclusions were drawn from questions such as whether or not the government should spend more on the neediest – and comparing today’s answers with those from 1991, when we were still in the immediate wake of the Thatcher years.
So the change in people’s answers doesn’t really reflect changing attitudes towards those who are poorest per se; rather, it tells us about the difference between the government now and the government, both in policy and in public perception. For all Gordon Brown’s faults, he isn’t Mrs Thatcher – and also the huge splurge in government spending in many public services without matching improvements to show for it means people are, understandably, generally more sceptical about policy solutions which are simply about increasing public spending.
Changing circumstances – changing policy preferences, but without it meaning we’re becoming meaner under all that. Thank goodness!
I’m on The Westminster Hour: Radio 4, 10pm, Sunday.