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:
Polls, politics and policy ~ Has Trussonomics got it all the wrong way round?
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know their Lazy Susan from their Spinning Jenny.
With the Government’s mini-budget rocking the markets and the Tories tanking in the polls, we look at public perceptions of the economy in our politics section. We ask whether Truss and Kwarteng could learn a thing or two from the 2015 Cruddas Review.
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, the part of the bulletin which guarantees value for money. This week we reveal the UK’s favourite cheese and expose the psychology behind your choice of avatar.
We wrote last week about Liz Truss’s plans to deliver tax cuts for the better off. Which values segments would respond best to this, we wondered? Since then, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, has delivered his much-anticipated mini budget, promising a range of right-wing economic policies – including unfunded tax cuts for the highest earners.
With the pound in freefall following the announcement, commentators from all sides have criticised both the political strategy and the economic strategy behind these policies. It has received a worse response from the public than any other Tory financial statement. And Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, used her slot at Labour Conference to pledge a reversal of the policy, presenting her party, at the same time, as the guardians of ‘sound money’ and budgetary prudence.
In the aftermath of the 2015 General Election, we teamed up with Jon Cruddas and others to help with the research findings behind his analysis of why Labour lost. One of the most interesting observations Cruddas made back then was that the electorate were both ‘economically radical and fiscally conservative’. They opposed inequality but took the view that you must balance the books before you could address it. Hence, they were willing to tolerate Tory austerity, as long as its effects were felt to be fairly applied.
Written three elections ago, prior to Brexit and to Covid, this assessment may now seem to have passed its sell-by-date. It certainly feels like a lifetime ago! But we wonder if it has renewed relevance in the present context. The Liz Truss Government, after all, appears to be enacting the very reverse of what Cruddas argued that the voters want. Her approach is both fiscally radical and economically conservative – ‘maxing out the national credit card’ (to use the language of Cameron and Osborne) and then spending the proceeds on policies which benefit the super-rich.
If the prognosis in the Cruddas Review was correct – and if the underlying attitudes of the electorate have remained more constant than we imagine (at least when it comes to the economy) – then the past few weeks could begin to look like a very grave error for the Conservative Party.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the part of the bulletin that our readers trickle-down to each Friday:
Understand the hindsight bias and work out how to avoid it.
Find out what happened when the public were asked to name a probe being sent to the planet Uranus.
Read Parts One and Two (the latter of which was recently published) of this thorough and expansive piece on how the government can renew seaside towns.
