It was a cynical way to treat an electorate, for which he was rewarded with a knighthood. Tory strategist Lynton Crosby calculated - correctly, as it turned out - that if nothing more interesting were discussed, the Tories would win by default. Today, it seems almost comic to recall, in the context of the eye-watering sums borrowed by successive Conservative governments, that the 2015 election was dominated by technical discussions of exactly what percentage point of austerity was appropriate to cut the deficit. This suggests that, rather than Brexit or the election of Trump, the shock outcome of the 2015 Labour leadership election was the first real marker of the new era of low-trust and high-volatility politics and the best way to understand it is by looking at the general election that took place immediately before. Antisemitism may have finally been dealt with in the Labour Party, but the mindset that drove it has not disappeared. Today, 42% of Labour voters agree with it, of whom 18% strongly agree. When I first tested this phrase at YouGov during the Labour leadership election of 2015, the belief that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite” was revealed to be a defining characteristic of supporters of Jeremy Corbyn: 28% of Corbyn’s backers strongly agreed with it, compared to 16% of Yvette Cooper’s and just 7% of Liz Kendall’s. There is a specific lesson here for the Labour Party. So, while the Brexit binary pushed a larger proportion of voters towards the two main parties in 2019, it seems there are millions of voters who remain potentially open to new populist appeals. More than any of the mainstream parties, including Labour, the voters most prone to a conspiratorial outlook come from the anti-establishment parties: 54% of Brexit Party voters agree with the statement, alongside 45% of Plaid Cymru voters and 43% of SNP voters. Thanks to our unusually large sample size of more than 10,000 respondents, we were able to measure the attitudes of voters who chose even the smallest parties in 2019 with a high degree of confidence. Second, the results should encourage new anti-establishment parties on both the Left and Right. It is a useful reminder to politicians of all parties that, while they may find conspiratorial voters troublesome, many come from the most disadvantaged communities. Meanwhile, in the rolling Chiltern hills of Chesham and Amersham and the affluent enclaves of Henley and Mole Valley, where the elites likely seem less distant and more on your side, few are concerned. In these places, a conspiratorial world view is the norm - in Birmingham Ladywood, for example, only 14% of people disagree with the statement. By this measure, the 10 most conspiratorial constituencies in the country are all safe Labour seats, whereas the 10 least conspiratorial constituencies are all Tory (except Chesham and Amersham, which switched to Lib Dem in the 2021 by-election).Īs the above table shows, the “most conspiratorial” list is made up of poor and highly diverse inner-city constituencies, which may explain why people come to feel so alienated and suspicious. Voters who believe in a controlling secretive elite are much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, and much more likely to live in a safe Labour constituency. The results shed new light on how these voters should be viewed by the main political parties.įirst, it is clear that conspiratorial thinking is not a “Right-wing” phenomenon. Thanks to our partner Focaldata and a statistical process called MRP, we can now see which constituencies are the most and least conspiratorial in the country. Whatever people believe about specific conspiracies - and this week offered no shortage of them, from UFOs over North America to hushed-up explosions in Ohio - our findings reveal how widespread the underlying mindset is that propels them. In this world view, the “elites” are faraway and malevolent, exercising control in self-serving ways meanwhile, democratic politics and the mainstream media are regarded as little more than distractions, likely in the service of powerful secret masters. It is a useful phrase to measure core beliefs because it takes us beyond the idea of conspiracy theories, with all their distracting details and absurdity, to the underlying intuition that fuels them.
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