Back in July, Chatham House and YouGov, the polling organisation, published some data on UK attitudes on foreign policy (pdf). There’s lots of interesting stuff in there, including on attitudes to development, but for me the stand-out story is the extent to which opinion formers and the general public have strikingly different views of which global risks matter most for the UK.
As part of the survey, a group of opinion formers and a random sample of the general public were both read a list of “current or possible future threats to the British way of life”, and asked to select three or four as the greatest threats.
For the opinion formers, the top two risks were “failure of major banks / failure of the international financial system” and “interruptions to our energy supplies, such as oil and gas”. In each case, the percentage of the general public including these risks in their three or four responses was at least 15% lower than for policy elites. For climate change (fourth in opinion formers’ list of worries), the gulf between elites and public is 19%.
The public, on the other hand, is much more worried about hard security threats. While opinion formers rate “international terrorism” third on their list of worries, the public put it top, with 6% more of them citing it. The gap is even more pronounced on “more countries, such as Iran and North Korea, developing nuclear weapons” – 52% of the public versus 39% of opinion formers – and “organized crime, including hard drugs, operating across borders” (42% of rhe public, 23% of opinion formers).
None of this is all that surprising – but it’s kind of a big deal, given that publics actually wield considerable influence in determining how much political space policymakers have to play with when dealing with global risks, and the fact that so many key multilateral processes are currently stalled.
