The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Now that the business of Government is unpaused following the National Mourning period, this week’s Values Lab looks at new PM Liz Truss’s views on redistribution. What are the hazards and pitfalls, values-wise, of embracing a more Thatcherite economic agenda?
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the part of the bulletin that pulls itself up by its bootstraps each Friday. This week we feature a podcast on understanding your cat.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
The richer get richer - who thinks this is OK?
As had been expected for some time, Liz Truss became Prime Minister at the start of this month (data breakdown of her victory here). As life starts to return to normal following the death of Elizabeth II and a period of national mourning, we wanted to take a more detailed look at ‘Trussonomics’ – pondering, in particular, what the different values segments will make of it.
Truss set her stall on the weekend before her victory. Speaking to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, she promised tax cuts to the best off, stating that her proposed NI cut was “fair” despite it benefiting the wealthiest most. Truss stated that “to look at everything through the lens of redistribution I believe is wrong because what I'm about is growing the economy.”
As journalist Lewis Goodall pointed out on Twitter following the broadcast, this overt hostility to redistribution is “a departure even from recent Conservative thinking.” It represents “a clear return to an explicitly Thatcherite set of principles around economic thinking.” Goodall points out that even Cameron and Osborne, while cutting the size of the state, were keen to emphasise that “the net effects of their tax plans were progressive, with the poorest benefitting most.”
We thought we’d put this question in the Values Lab, with an attribute that includes the statement “I see no reason why rich people should feel obliged to help poor people.” Clearly, Truss’s answer to Laura Kuenssberg was not quite so bold as this, so we wouldn’t want to put words in her mouth. But the statement gives a sense of which parts of the values map would agree with explicitly anti-redistribution messaging, were Truss to major on these elements of her policy agenda.
The findings show that it is a relatively small sub-set of Prospectors who take this ‘on your bike’ view of politics and the state. They are not, in general, joined in this by other parts of the Values Modes spectrum.
As we wrote a few years ago, the Brexit faultline meant that the Conservative Party became increasingly strong in the Settler space in recent years, speaking to tradition, patriotism and cultural conformity, while promising to ‘level up’ the country. If, as the above heat map suggests, Truss takes a more economically individualist approach, then it will be interesting to see how her party’s Settler base responds. Anand Menon and Alan Wager have already pointed out, in an excellent blog for UK in a Changing Europe, the extent of the task she faces.
Her hope, of course, will be that Settler positioning on cultural issues will keep them onside. But it’s worth remembering that Settlers are often focused on security and belonging of all kinds – social as well as national. Very Thatcherite economic messages may fall flat among some of the poorer Leave-leaning areas, where the Tories have made inroads since 2016. Truss’s best-case scenario, from her point of view, is that she picks up economic Thatcherites while holding onto cultural conservatives. The worst-case scenario for her is that she loses ground among both.
These are very early days, of course. But it will be interesting, as the Truss Premiership progresses, to see whether these tectonic plates shift. The latest findings from the British Social Attitudes Survey suggest that a shift is starting.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the nanny state, spoon-feeding you the latest from the internet each Friday:
