Trust in British politics has fallen to an all-time low as nearly half of the public believes politicians put the interests of their party over the betterment of the country.
After 14 years of Conservative Party rule and just three weeks out from a general election, the public is more jaded than ever according to the British Social Attitudes (BSA) report released this week by the National Centre for Social Research, which found that people’s trust in governments and politicians is at its lowest level in at least 50 years, The Guardian reports.
The survey found that 45 per cent of the public said they “almost never” trusted “British governments of any party to put the needs of the country above the interests of their own political party”. This was up from 34 per cent in 2019 and the highest percentage on record since the question was first posed over 30 years ago.
Professor Sir John Curtice of the National Centre for Social Research said: “The next government will not simply face the challenge of reviving Britain’s stuttering economy and its struggling public services. It will also need to address the concerns of a public that is as doubtful as it has ever been about the trustworthiness and efficacy of the country’s system of government.
“Addressing some of the policy challenges will help in that endeavour. However, it is likely to require much more than that – in particular, a style and manner of governing that persuades people that the government has their interests at heart after all.”
The BSA said the lack of faith in the UK political system has come amid “significant changes in the public mood” since the last general election in 2019. The previous election, a vote very much defined by Brexit, saw the public give an 80-seat majority to Boris Johnson’s Conservatives to finally “get Brexit done”.
However, while the Johnson government did successfully remove the UK from the EU, it failed to deliver on the actual promises of the Brexit movement. While pledges were made to “take back control” of the nation’s borders, the opposite happened, with over 120,000 illegal migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats from France since Brexit.
Rather than taking a hardline approach with Paris and sending the illegals directly back to the French coast, the “Conservative” governments not only use the border force to ferry the illegals to British beaches but also have paid hundreds of millions of pounds sterling to Macron’s government for the pleasure.
The government also betrayed the public on the promise of reducing net legal migration to the country after leaving the EU’s open borders scheme. Instead, Boris Johnson’s post-Brexit immigration bill opened up easy access to migrate to the UK to the rest of the world, crucially without an annual cap, and therefore unsurprisingly leading to record numbers of foreigners flooding into the country, with over two million allowed in over the past two years.
This comes despite the Conservatives promising to reduce net immigration to the “tens of thousands” in their 2010, 2015, and 2017 election manifestos, and promised that immigration would “come down” in their 2019 manifesto. Former Chancellor and David Cameron’s right-hand man, George Osborne admitted in 2017 that “none of the senior members” of Cameron’s government believed in the promise they made to the public and had no intention of actually fulfilling it.
Trust in the political class was also eroded significantly during the Chinese coronavirus crisis, during which the supposedly libertarian Boris Johnson imposed some of the harshest lockdown restrictions in the Western world. However, while normal citizens were being arrested and fined for breaching the draconian rules, it was later revealed that top members of the government, including Johnson, had violated their own convoluted rules during a series of Downing Street parties.
Despite also being fined for breaking lockdown rules, Rishi Sunak was later installed as prime minister. The Conservative Party membership expressly rejected Sunak during the 2022 summer leadership race to replace Johnson, however, a globalist-organised palace coup cut the Liz Truss administration short and saw Sunak put in her place. Unsurprisingly, the unelected prime minister has struggled to connect with the public since.
Amid the failures and betrayals, the British Social Attitudes report found that the public is coalescing around ideas of change to the political system. For example, 49 per cent said they would support some form of devolution in England, such as the creation of an England-specific parliament or assembly, as is the case in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
A record 53 per cent also said they would change the first-past-the-post voting system for the House of Commons to allow for smaller parties to “get a fair share of MPs”. A proportional representation system — the norm in most parliamentary systems in Europe — would likely serve to bolster upstart political parties like Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
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