“Ignorance is Strength”. Was Orwell’s Big Brother right?
Yes – for
populists. Parties like Reform rely on voters overstating the scale of today’s
problems
Peter
Kellner
Sep 23,
2025
https://kellnerp.substack.com/p/ignorance-is-strength-was-orwells
Why is
Reform doing so well? Parts of the answer are obvious: the Government is in
trouble, the Tories are in a mess, and the news has been full of stories about
asylum seekers arriving by boat and staying in hotels at our expense.
However,
I’m not sure that is the whole answer. A clue to the larger picture was
provided by a recent YouGov survey for The Times. I missed it at the time; so
my thanks to Mark Pack’s Substack for drawing attention to it.
YouGov
asked respondents what had happened over the past 25 years to each of five
measures of social harm in Britain today. One was knife crime. Seventy-two per
cent of us say it has got worse. In fact, it has fallen by half. Only one per
cent know this; just five per cent say it has fallen at all. The gulf between
truth and belief is not quite as great on other issues, but still wide.
Official data tell us that air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, road deaths
and hospitalisations from assault have all fallen by more than half. Fewer than
one person in ten is aware of any of these things.
Fraser
Nelson, the author of the Times feature, observes that
The gap
between the public debate and reality becomes so wide that many voters may no
longer see the country they actually live in … Our society, for all its faults,
is probably safer, richer and better than any before it. Today, progress is the
truth that dare not speak its name.
This is
an important observation – made more so by the fact that it confirms an
established pattern across the world, not just in Britain. In 2018, Hans
Rosling’s book, Factfulness, reported the results of a 14-country survey of
views about the world as a whole. Adults in almost every country, and on almost
every issue, greatly understated the progress that has been made in recent
decades.
Here in
Britain, Bobby Duffy – Professor of Public Policy at King’s College, London and
formerly a pollster with Ipsos – devoted his 2018 book, Perils of Perception to
the gulf between views and reality. Among other things, his research found that
Britain’s voters overstated…
· The
share of Britain’s wealth owned by the richest one per cent (the average guess
was 59 per cent; reality: 23 per cent).
· The
proportion of immigrants in Britain’s population (average guess 25 per cent;
reality 12 per cent)
· The
proportion of working age people who are unemployed and looking for work
(average guess 24 per cent; reality 7 per cent)
Other
surveys confirm the broad picture. It certainly applies to the politics of
immigration. In 2013, when stories of “welfare tourism” by EU citizens caused a
fuss, YouGov found that most people massively overstated the (actually very
small) proportion of people born in the EU who claimed benefits. Ukip
supporters overstated the figures most of all.
Last year
Ipsos looked at today’s biggest controversy. It asked respondents about the
various reasons immigrants have for coming to Britain – “to work; to study; to
live with their family; or to seek refugee protection (asylum)” – and asked how
much each group contributed to the total. The average figure given by the
general public for asylum was 37 per cent. Among those who voted Reform last
year the figure was 51 per cent. The reality? In 2024, those who crossed the
channel by boat comprised just four per cent of all immigrants, while a further
seven per cent came by legal routes and were admitted for humanitarian reasons
(e.g. from Hong Kong, Iran and Ukraine). So, on the broadest interpretation of
Ipsos’s question, the total seeking asylum was 11 per cent. Once again, Nigel
Farage’s supporters were the ones who overstated the numbers the most.
Back to
the big picture. Like Factfulness, Perils of Perceptions draws on multi-country
comparisons. It confirms that people everywhere tend to say things are worse,
and often much worse, than they really are. And where Duffy has tracked down
comparisons with 20th century surveys, he finds that “nothing much has changed.
People were as likely to be wrong then as they are now”. So what is going on?
One
possibility is simply that plenty of us struggle with numbers. As Duffy says,
“MRI
studies of the brains of humans indicate that we are particularly attuned to
the numbers one, two and three, to dissecting large (not small) differences in
comparing numbers of an object… Countless experiments show that around 10 per
cent of the public don’t understand simple percentages”
However,
if inadequate numeracy were the main problem (and Duffy doesn’t say it is),
then we would expect much wider ranges of responses to questions of fact – not
a consistent and significant bias to gloom on almost every issue, and in every
country surveyed. We need to dig further.
Roslin
suggests that evolution is responsible:
“The
human brain is a product of millions of years of evolution, and we are
hard-wired with instincts that helped our ancestors to survive in small groups
of hunters and gatherers. Our brains often jump to swift conclusions, without
much thinking, that we use to help us to avoid immediate dangers. We are
interested in gossip and dramatic stories. [These] give meaning to our world
and get us through the day. If we sifted every input and analysed every
decision rationally, a normal life would be impossible.”
Does that
explain the near-universal bias towards an over pessimistic view of what is
going on? Is it simply an evolutionary impulse to be more alert to danger than
to the everyday comforts we take for granted?
One
contributory factor may be the way we consume news. By its nature, news is
mostly about what goes wrong, not what is going right. The UK has 32,000
schools. A child stabbed on his way home from one of them makes news; kids from
the other 31,999 whose pupils get home safely do not. Those news priorities are
of course right. To suppress crime stories on the grounds that they distort our
picture of everyday life would be grotesque and probably in the end
counterproductive. But does the cumulative impact of such stories distort our
understanding of our society?
One
strong but circumstantial piece of evidence about the media’s role comes from a
consistent pattern of findings during my years at YouGov. Respondents
invariably had a higher view of their local public services – schools,
hospitals, police etc – than the same services nationally. Their judgement from
their own and their neighbours’ experiences was more favourable than the wider
picture painted by the media.
So, to
take Nelson’s examples, is it the media’s fault that voters fail to appreciate
the truth about what is really going on in Britain today? Would the better
presentation of the facts produce more well-informed opinions?
Last
October, when I suggested that misinformation, whatever its root, was a cause
of much hostility to immigrants, Matthew Parris sent me a brief email: “No,
Peter. The misbelief does not cause the hostility. The hostility causes the
misbelief.”
I fear
Matt is at least half right; but not completely. Duffy offers a compromise
verdict. The media do bear some responsibility for distorting what goes on,
but…
“The
media more generally is not actually the most important root cause of our
misconceptions, though it is influential: we get the media we deserve, or
demand.”
However,
Duffy is concerned that our “demands” are changing:
“These
days, information technology and social media present even more challenges to
our perception of facts… ‘Filter bubble’ and ‘echo chambers’ incubate our
misconceptions. Unseen algorithms and our own selection biases help create our
own individual realities.”
All in
all, it’s a pretty gloomy state of affairs. And we see its effects these days
in the rise in populism in many democracies – parties and their leaders who
exploit the fears of voters rooted in false notions of what is going on around
them.
What to
do about it? Fair and balanced journalism? Schools that help pupils sift truth
from lies on social media? Politicians who admit their mistakes, treat each
other with more respect, and stop evading the questions interviewers put to
them?
I wish
these things would all come true. I also wish the rain would never fall till
after sundown, and that by 9pm the moonlight will appear. Enough of dreams, for
Camelot will never happen here. We are condemned to face the world as we find
it. For the foreseeable future shall have an electorate with a distorted view
of what’s going wrong.
However,
there are ways for incumbent governments, in Britain‘s case Labour, to
ameliorate the damage.
First,
governments need some successes, especially on immigration and the economy.
This won’t shift the public opinion dial from negative to positive, but it
might make the public mood a little less negative. In all probability,
optimists will still be in the minority, but it might be a slightly larger
minority.
This
leads to the second point. Elections are decided by relatively few voters. Not
everybody needs to be convinced that their perceptions are wrong. The dial
needs to move just a little to change the result.
Third –
and as recovering journalist and pollster who has been spent decades crunching
political numbers, it pains me to say this – the route to success does not go
through tables and graphs. In political science jargon it goes through
“valence”. A looser but more familiar word is character. When wavering voters
size up a political leader, they ask themselves: Can I believe what they say?
Are they on my side? Are they strong? Will they stand up for Britain? Ministers
who earn trust will carry credibility when they say progress is being made to
improve the NHS, reduce pollution and tackle crime and immigration. Leaders who
fail the valence test stand no chance.
Which, as
the data I reported last week shows, is precisely where we are these days with
Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch. We have a grim view of our traditional party
leaders as well as the health of British society. No wonder Nigel Farage is so
cheerful.
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