Values, voters and the law
The revelations this weekend that a senior government aide travelled from London to Durham while someone in their household had symptoms of Coronavirus has dominated discussion and media coverage. Some commentators making claims that the next election was being lost in front of our eyes. The next election is, of course, some way off and as is often the case with these events it is entirely possible that this episode of the Westminster drama barely registers with the wider, dare we say ‘ordinary’ public not spending their Bank Holiday weekend on twitter.
It is impossible to say what the impact of these kinds of events are, they rarely register in opinion polling in the short-term but may feed into the broader sense of the values parties represent and how these align with those of the electorate.
The British Social Attitudes series ask two questions which appear relevant to this particular episode. Respondents to the survey are asked to say whether they agree or disagree with these statements on a five point scale. First, ‘There is one law for the rich and one for the poor’ (an item that forms part of the ‘economic left-right’ values scale) and second ‘The law should be obeyed even when a particular law is wrong’ (this sometimes appears in the ‘liberal-authoritarian scale though not in versions I have used recently as it coheres less well with other items on the scale).
These two items tap into different aspects of the story. Whether the ‘elites’ are adhering to a different set of guidelines to those that they issued to the genreal public and whether it is ok to go against the rule of law when it is perceived to be better to do so because the law itself is wrong.
Using the 2017 British Social Attitudes survey we can relate attitudes on these items to recent voting behaviour. If Conservative voters are less likely to agree with these items, or agree in small numbers then we might expect less impact than if these voters feel strongly about this.
Turning first the ‘economic’ side of this. Overall, 58% of the electorate agree (either agree or strongly agree) with this statement. As this is associated with being on the economic left it is not surprising to find Labour voters are more likely to agree, regardless of whether they voted leave or remain in the 2016 referendum. In fact, we find the highest levels of agreement among 2017 Labour leave voters — 4 out of 5 of these voters agree that there is one law for the rich. That this group are perceived as key to the Conservative victory in 2019 might give pause for thought here. Even among the Conservative leave voters, almost half agreed with this statement. It is not an issue likely to be perceived as trivial among either of these groups. The group least likely to agree with this statement are the 2017 Conservative remain voters.
The second statement, ‘The law should be obeyed even when a particular law is wrong’ is a little less likely to ba supported; 40% of the electorate agree.
The divide here is between the 2017 Labour remain voters and the other groups. Just 3 in 10 of Labour remain voters agree with this statement, while for each other group it is close to 50%.
Paradoxically, this may mean that the defense being offered — that it was ‘instinct’ or ‘common sense’ to break the rules in this case might fight more readily with the group perhaps least likely to have a favourable view of Dominic Cummings to begin with. For the other groups half think that people should comply with the law even if the law is wrong.
How do these different items combine? Relatively few voters agree with both of them; 23% of the electorate. Though this rises to 38% about 2017 Labour remain voters. However, an overwhelming majority agree with one or other of the statements. This is lowest among the 2017 Conservative remain voters (64%) and highest among the 2017 Labour leave voters (9 in 10 of this group agree with at least one of these statements).
This may be where we eventually see the impact of this weekend’s events, though I would not expect the impact to be a sudden shift in the polling. The Conservatives managed to convert a substantial part of the 2017 Labour leave vote in 2019. But many of these maintained their Labour party identity, and may come to feel that their new political representatives do not share their sense of right and wrong or look out for people like them.