How far has people's faith in the way we are governed been shaken by Brown's fumbling and dishonest governance, civil liberties outrages, and expenses fiddles in both Houses of Parliament? At first sight, at least, considerably, according to an ICM poll (opens pdf) for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust. And should we be cheering the result from the same poll, suggesting that two thirds of people want proportional representation for elections to Parliament?
My apologies: a lot of figures now!
"Faith in the system" has been measured by a single question in opinion polls since it was first asked in 1973 for the Crowther-Hunt's Royal Commission on the Constitution. Just under half of respondents then agreed that the system for governing Britain could be improved "quite a lot" or needed "a great deal of improvement". Public dissatisfaction rose to peaks of 69, 73 and 72 per cent under Mrs Thatcher in the 1990s, and then subsided to 68 per cent in 2003 and somewhat less in the mid-2000s
In last week's poll, ICM found that three-quarters of people (75 per cent) were dissatisfied, along whom two-fifths (42 per cent) agreed that the system needed "a great deal of improvement" - the highest ever level for real change recorded. Unfortunately, people who wanted change were not asked what "improvements" they would like to see.
Nor can we be sure how far this result reflects a genuine desire for change as against disillusion with the Brown government. Faith in the system seems to fall dramatically when governments become unpopular, as Stuart Wilks-Heeg, my boss at Democratic Audit, has noted - and especially after three terms in office! He also suggests that the economic cycle may also have an impact on how people assess the way we are governed. Moreover, does this new high perhaps reflect more popular anger and disgust at the expenses fiddles rather than more profound dissatisfaction?
The poll result on proportional representation, while heartening, does not reflect a major surge of support for electoral reform. In recent years around about 60 to 63 per cent of people have agreed that we should have PR elections to Parliament, so not any real change there. However, some two-thirds (61 per cent) support the proposal for a binding referendum on PR that Compass is championing, against a quarter (24 per cent).
That could perhaps cheer us up, but overall these findings are not great. But then Trevor Smith, who created the Rowntree Trust's State of the Nation poll series back in 1991, always maintained that polls which revealed opinion over time would give reformers a more accurate sense of what they were achieving than the occasional one-off. Stuart Wilks-Heeg also offers another caveat. The ICM sample of 1,006 respondents included 37 per cent of people educated to degree level or above while the national average is more like 20 per cent; and apparently only 10 per cent of people with no formal qualifications, against a national average of 29 per cent. So the results may be better for reformers than they might have been.
