The Rise of the Disaffected Citizen

Our Communications Manager Liz Banks writes about our Lib Dem conference Fringe Event hosted with RSA and Ipsos MORI.  

The Rise of the Disaffected Citizen debate addressed political engagement and how a government can deliver on the core voter concerns of prosperity and security in a time economic constraint.

Opening the session, Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos MORI, began by presenting data that showed the British public has held politicians in pretty low regard for quite a while. Responding to a recent survey 40% of people said they would never trust politicians to put the country’s interests above those of their party. But a poll from August 1944 – when there was a national unity government and the country was at war with the Nazis – reported very similar sentiments and found that only 36% of people thought that politicians were acting predominantly in the national interest.

Matthew Taylor, head of the RSA and former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair, had some sympathy for politicians in that the demands the public make of them are often impossible to meet. It’s generally the case, he said, Quoting Ben Page, next to him on the panel, that people want Scandinavian levels of public service delivered on American levels of taxation.  He coined the phrase “social aspiration gap” to describe the persistent disparity between the kind of society people say they want to live in, and their willingness to engage in the actions and behaviours necessary to achieve such a society. Governments also face a similar dilemma trying to reconcile demands for further devolution of decision making with people’s dissatisfaction with variation of services aka ‘post code lotteries’.

Chair Jenni Russell from The Guardian and Mary Ann Seighart from The Independent both touched on how the recent riots in London and other cities and recession related job losses among the professional classes have made the issues of security and prosperity of greater importance to middle class voters.

Our chair, Sir Stephen Bubb, invoked twentieth century Liberal hero William Beveridge who had warned of the mistake of letting the state crowd out the charitable sector. People often trust and engage with services provided by community organisations, embedded in their communities, more than services provided by a state monopoly, he argued.

Simon Hughes had some practical ways in which he felt the electoral system itself could be reformed to make it easier for citizens to engage with – such as making it easier to register to vote and increasing the number of places people can physically vote on polling days. But he also warned that changes to constituency boundaries that carve up natural neighbourhoods could make people feel more disengaged with politics. For him youth employment opportunities were vital as if people have a stake in society and are earning, they are less likely to be disaffected.

After questions from the floor panellists summed up with the idea that perhaps we need to look to ourselves, rather than politicians, if we want more social action and civic engagement. By way of illustration Ben Page noted – polls revealed that everyone thinks one solution to so-called ‘Broken Britain’ is that other parents need to take more responsibility for their kids!   Adding “Polling shows that the more young people living in an area, the less happy people there are!”