“Ignorance is Strength”. Was Orwell’s Big Brother right?

Yes – for populists. Parties like Reform rely on voters overstating the scale of today’s problems

Why is Reform doing so well? Parts of the answer are obvious: the Government is in trouble, the Tories are in a mess, and the news has been full of stories about asylum seekers arriving by boat and staying in hotels at our expense.

However, I’m not sure that is the whole answer. A clue to the larger picture was provided by a recent YouGov survey for The Times. I missed it at the time; so my thanks to Mark Pack’s Substack for drawing attention to it.

YouGov asked respondents what had happened over the past 25 years to each of five measures of social harm in Britain today. One was knife crime. Seventy-two per cent of us say it has got worse. In fact, it has fallen by half. Only one per cent know this; just five per cent say it has fallen at all. The gulf between truth and belief is not quite as great on other issues, but still wide. Official data tell us that air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, road deaths and hospitalisations from assault have all fallen by more than half. Fewer than one person in ten is aware of any of these things.

Fraser Nelson, the author of the Times feature, observes that

The gap between the public debate and reality becomes so wide that many voters may no longer see the country they actually live in … Our society, for all its faults, is probably safer, richer and better than any before it. Today, progress is the truth that dare not speak its name.

This is an important observation – made more so by the fact that it confirms an established pattern across the world, not just in Britain. In 2018, Hans Rosling’s book, Factfulness, reported the results of a 14-country survey of views about the world as a whole. Adults in almost every country, and on almost every issue, greatly understated the progress that has been made in recent decades.

Here in Britain, Bobby Duffy – Professor of Public Policy at King’s College, London and formerly a pollster with Ipsos – devoted his 2018 book, Perils of Perception to the gulf between views and reality. Among other things, his research found that Britain’s voters overstated…

· The share of Britain’s wealth owned by the richest one per cent (the average guess was 59 per cent; reality: 23 per cent).

· The proportion of immigrants in Britain’s population (average guess 25 per cent; reality 12 per cent)

· The proportion of working age people who are unemployed and looking for work (average guess 24 per cent; reality 7 per cent)

Other surveys confirm the broad picture. It certainly applies to the politics of immigration. In 2013, when stories of “welfare tourism” by EU citizens caused a fuss, YouGov found that most people massively overstated the (actually very small) proportion of people born in the EU who claimed benefits. Ukip supporters overstated the figures most of all.

Last year Ipsos looked at today’s biggest controversy. It asked respondents about the various reasons immigrants have for coming to Britain – “to work; to study; to live with their family; or to seek refugee protection (asylum)” – and asked how much each group contributed to the total. The average figure given by the general public for asylum was 37 per cent. Among those who voted Reform last year the figure was 51 per cent. The reality? In 2024, those who crossed the channel by boat comprised just four per cent of all immigrants, while a further seven per cent came by legal routes and were admitted for humanitarian reasons (e.g. from Hong Kong, Iran and Ukraine). So, on the broadest interpretation of Ipsos’s question, the total seeking asylum was 11 per cent. Once again, Nigel Farage’s supporters were the ones who overstated the numbers the most.

Back to the big picture. Like Factfulness, Perils of Perceptions draws on multi-country comparisons. It confirms that people everywhere tend to say things are worse, and often much worse, than they really are. And where Duffy has tracked down comparisons with 20th century surveys, he finds that “nothing much has changed. People were as likely to be wrong then as they are now”. So what is going on?

One possibility is simply that plenty of us struggle with numbers. As Duffy says,

“MRI studies of the brains of humans indicate that we are particularly attuned to the numbers one, two and three, to dissecting large (not small) differences in comparing numbers of an object… Countless experiments show that around 10 per cent of the public don’t understand simple percentages”

However, if inadequate numeracy were the main problem (and Duffy doesn’t say it is), then we would expect much wider ranges of responses to questions of fact – not a consistent and significant bias to gloom on almost every issue, and in every country surveyed. We need to dig further.

Roslin suggests that evolution is responsible:

“The human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we are hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive in small groups of hunters and gatherers. Our brains often jump to swift conclusions, without much thinking, that we use to help us to avoid immediate dangers. We are interested in gossip and dramatic stories. [These] give meaning to our world and get us through the day. If we sifted every input and analysed every decision rationally, a normal life would be impossible.”

Does that explain the near-universal bias towards an over pessimistic view of what is going on? Is it simply an evolutionary impulse to be more alert to danger than to the everyday comforts we take for granted?

One contributory factor may be the way we consume news. By its nature, news is mostly about what goes wrong, not what is going right. The UK has 32,000 schools. A child stabbed on his way home from one of them makes news; kids from the other 31,999 whose pupils get home safely do not. Those news priorities are of course right. To suppress crime stories on the grounds that they distort our picture of everyday life would be grotesque and probably in the end counterproductive. But does the cumulative impact of such stories distort our understanding of our society?

One strong but circumstantial piece of evidence about the media’s role comes from a consistent pattern of findings during my years at YouGov. Respondents invariably had a higher view of their local public services – schools, hospitals, police etc – than the same services nationally. Their judgement from their own and their neighbours’ experiences was more favourable than the wider picture painted by the media.

So, to take Nelson’s examples, is it the media’s fault that voters fail to appreciate the truth about what is really going on in Britain today? Would the better presentation of the facts produce more well-informed opinions?

Last October, when I suggested that misinformation, whatever its root, was a cause of much hostility to immigrants, Matthew Parris sent me a brief email: “No, Peter. The misbelief does not cause the hostility. The hostility causes the misbelief.”

I fear Matt is at least half right; but not completely. Duffy offers a compromise verdict. The media do bear some responsibility for distorting what goes on, but…

“The media more generally is not actually the most important root cause of our misconceptions, though it is influential: we get the media we deserve, or demand.”

However, Duffy is concerned that our “demands” are changing:

“These days, information technology and social media present even more challenges to our perception of facts… ‘Filter bubble’ and ‘echo chambers’ incubate our misconceptions. Unseen algorithms and our own selection biases help create our own individual realities.”

All in all, it’s a pretty gloomy state of affairs. And we see its effects these days in the rise in populism in many democracies – parties and their leaders who exploit the fears of voters rooted in false notions of what is going on around them.

What to do about it? Fair and balanced journalism? Schools that help pupils sift truth from lies on social media? Politicians who admit their mistakes, treat each other with more respect, and stop evading the questions interviewers put to them?

I wish these things would all come true. I also wish the rain would never fall till after sundown, and that by 9pm the moonlight will appear. Enough of dreams, for Camelot will never happen here. We are condemned to face the world as we find it. For the foreseeable future shall have an electorate with a distorted view of what’s going wrong.

However, there are ways for incumbent governments, in Britain‘s case Labour, to ameliorate the damage.

First, governments need some successes, especially on immigration and the economy. This won’t shift the public opinion dial from negative to positive, but it might make the public mood a little less negative. In all probability, optimists will still be in the minority, but it might be a slightly larger minority.

This leads to the second point. Elections are decided by relatively few voters. Not everybody needs to be convinced that their perceptions are wrong. The dial needs to move just a little to change the result.

Third – and as recovering journalist and pollster who has been spent decades crunching political numbers, it pains me to say this – the route to success does not go through tables and graphs. In political science jargon it goes through “valence”. A looser but more familiar word is character. When wavering voters size up a political leader, they ask themselves: Can I believe what they say? Are they on my side? Are they strong? Will they stand up for Britain? Ministers who earn trust will carry credibility when they say progress is being made to improve the NHS, reduce pollution and tackle crime and immigration. Leaders who fail the valence test stand no chance.

Which, as the data I reported last week shows, is precisely where we are these days with Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch. We have a grim view of our traditional party leaders as well as the health of British society. No wonder Nigel Farage is so cheerful.