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:
Hello and welcome to the TCC Weekly – the Friday bulletin for people who know Ed Dando from Charles Domery.
This week we look, in our politics section, at the reaction to the banner on Rishi Sunak’s house and the concept of ‘civility’ in politics.
And of course, there’s the foul-mouthed psephological rant that is Charlie’s Attic, this week including polling about bidets.
Is politics personal?
Were Greenpeace protesters right to target Rishi Sunak’s house with a banner last week, whilst he was away on holiday? Not according to the Great British public who, according to YouGov, were more than twice as likely to oppose the protest as support it – 63% versus 27%.
These sorts of debates – about the divide between personal and political – now represent a major element of the political discourse. Activists and politicians at points claim that attacks on their side are overly personal and ad hominem; but at other points they complain that an insistence upon ‘civility’ is blocking legitimate anger. Civility is the “opiate of the centrists” complained one prominent left-winger a few years ago.
It is true that the YouGov poll reveals major differences once you break the data down by politics. Labour voters are five times as likely as Tories to see the Greenpeace stunt as ‘completely acceptable’, for instance. And Leave voters are nearly twice as likely as Remainers to condemn it.
Yet even here, there are silent majorities in favour of what might be called civility. A majority of Remain voters – and even, narrowly, of Labour voters – saw the stunt at Sunak’s house as wrong.
The desire to make the political personal is, ultimately, the preserve of the most partisan and politically engaged. Ideological blowhards may see civility as a straightjacket. But, as the YouGov poll showed, there remain many more who look at an incident like the Greenpeace banner through the everyday prism of ‘treating others as you’d like to be treated’.
And finally, Charlie’s Attic, the part of the Weekly that slings mud each Friday:
