This is a difficult time for any Government.
They have all been hit by COVID-19 and have had to work out a complex response, not only protecting the lives of their citizens but also avoiding lasting economic damage.
It would be natural to expect that perceptions of each government – and therefore voting intentions – would reflect how well that government has performed in managing these twin challenges.
Here is the kind of picture you see when you consult the data on these two issues (in this case the sources were Trading Economics and Statista).
Britain has the second worst result in the world for deaths from COVID-19 and a very poor record for its economic management. The two are linked, as the diagram suggests: it is hard to get an economy firing on all cylinders when many of its citizens are observing social distancing, so the countries which, like New Zealand, went in hard and early are now able to restart their economies.
On this basis, you might expect the British Government to be hugely unpopular with its people.
And yet in the polls, we see that the ruling Conservative Party is still leading. If there were an election tomorrow, they would probably be re-elected.
How can this be?
Is it because the British, though fully aware of the facts, nevertheless feel that the Conservative Party represents the best on offer?
Or is it that they are simply unaware of how poorly their government has performed? That somehow, the British media have failed to communicate these most basic and important of statistics?
Unfortunately, the latter seems a more plausible explanation. The print media in Britain are largely owned by off-shore, tax-avoiding billionaires with a strong vested interest in the current government remaining in power. And the Broadcast media largely follow their lead.
This concentration of media ownership – especially at a time like this when people need to be told the basic facts – puts UK democracy at serious risk.
If this matters to you, please do sign-up and join the 99% Organisation.
5 comments so far
With you 100% the realities need to be spread in truth to save our broken democracy
We must get out of this stranglehold
No wonder they all backed Brexit…Merkel and Macron have no truck with Murdoch and the rest…
Tories will never alter – have always “robbed the poor/masses to feed the rich”
It remains to be seen if the British electorate ever wakes up to the fact that only 2 parties post enough candidates in order to form a government in UK elections.
Given this it is a stark choice whether the country is rule by a party that may not be all you want or wish for but is a least fair in what they do and deals with issues on merit (Labour) and not for profit (Tories)
Attlee and the Labour government tried to teach us to pull together and embrace social justice , Thatcher played on our greed and did teach us that “there is no such thing as community” look after number one , Blair then got in bed with big business to look after himself and then we finally get a genuine politician in Corbyn who wanted to do the best for the country and the electorate as a whole and the electorate put in a bunch of charlatans whose whole ethos is to enrich themselves and their cronies
Alarming state of affairs. There is so much that could be improved to produce a more critical & less gullible public. In my opinion, a solution could begin with an upheaval of our educational system, which from the start produces the haves & have nots.