I have always found
psychological analysis of voting behaviour interesting, but was never
sure where it led. So what if research
suggests conservatives tend to desire security,
predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are
more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity. These
psychological differences may tend to make liberals more
concerned about the welfare of minorities or
immigrants than conservatives, but that has no bearing on whether it
is right or wrong to care about the welfare of minorities.
Where it does
matter, however, is in understanding what issues resonate with
particular groups. Winning elections is normally presented as
persuading undecided or floating voters to vote for a particular
party. It is also important for political parties to get their own
vote out by either attracting or scaring them. But it may be just as
important to persuade the other side’s voters not to vote for their
natural party, and instead vote for another party (not necessarily
your own) or not vote at all.
A good example of
the last point were the claims of antisemitism within the Labour
party when Corbyn was leader. Precisely because those with socially
liberal views tend to be more concerned about discrimination against
minorities, this issue was ideal for peeling off what might otherwise
have been natural Labour voters. In this post I want to suggest that
the controversy over sewage being continuously released by the
privatised water companies into rivers and onto beaches could become
a voting deterrent for natural Conservative supporters.
One of the pretty
robust findings linking political preferences to psychological traits
is that conservative voters react more strongly to what we might call
disgusting images or descriptions. As Kathleen
McAuliffe describes
in the Atlantic, “the brains of liberals and conservatives reacted
in wildly different ways to repulsive pictures: Both groups reacted,
but different brain networks were stimulated.” High sensitivity to
disgust tends to go hand in hand with a “conservative ethos.”
Whether this correlation reflects the reaction of disgust in general,
or disgust to particular things, is an
interesting issue but not relevant in the current
context. What the research does seem to suggest is that Conservative
voters, or more generally socially conservative voters, may be more
affected by stories of sewage pollution than voters of a more liberal
persuasion. [1]
Linking the
pollution of beaches and rivers (and, after floods, even
streets) to the Conservative party is very easy. Those
immediately at fault are private water companies, but the
privatisation of water has always been championed by the Conservative
party as a clear improvement over public ownership. If the news is
full of examples of beaches and rivers polluted by these private
companies, alongside the usual leaks and occasional gaps in supply,
the advantages of privatisation are far from obvious.
Of course just
because water companies were privatised does not mean the government
is powerless to act. The problem the government has is their actions
seem to be more sympathetic to the water companies than the
environment. In August
2021 Conservative MPs voted to make the release
of sewage by water companies into the environment legal, and gave
them until 2050 to completely deal with the problem. The government
has also deprived the Environment Agency of the resources and
leadership needed to effectively monitor water quality. They, along
with previous governments, have sat back while the regulator allowed
these companies to pile
up debt in order to pay large dividends to
shareholders, rather than use an era of low interest rates to invest
in the infrastructure needed to avoid pollution.
Natural monopolies
like water companies, where there is no competition or customer
choice, have little incentive to invest in sewage treatment or fixing
leaks. Regulators, without external pressure from politicians, may
tend to go easy on firms because, in part, of the problem of
revolving doors. One way to avoid this is to give groups who have an
interest in better investment a
say in what the regulator does. What you don’t do,
and what this government has done, is pass legislation that removes
what little legal incentive there was for water companies to deal
with the problems they have created.
The pollution story
also gets to the heart of those claims that Brexit allows the UK to
make its own laws and decisions. While we were part of the EU, UK
beaches and rivers gradually became cleaner in large part because EU
regulations helped that happen. By ‘taking back control’, the UK
government has now
allowed water companies decades before we might return
to standards we achieved whilst in the EU. The reality is that most
of the EU regulations Leavers go on about are popular with many Leave
voters, just not most Leave politicians and opinion writers.
With the government
failing on major issues like managing the economy and the NHS, the
problems of pollution of rivers and beaches might seem relatively
small beer. Up until now, most
of the political noise on this issue has come from interest groups
(e.g. river
fishing), ad
hoc groups or individual campaigners (most noticeably
Feargal
Sharkey) rather than the main opposition parties. This
is not to suggest that Jim McMahon, Labour’s environment spokesman,
has been silent on the issue – he
hasn’t. Starmer and the Liberal Democrats have also
made
statements on the issue; see also here.
But just as the Conservatives used to get references to antisemitism
into almost every statement they made about Labour under Corbyn,
perhaps Labour need to do the same about how the government has
allowed privatised water companies to pollute our rivers and beaches
with sometimes very serious consequences
(see also here).
[1] Of course these are tendencies, no more. It certainly does not mean that if you exercised by pollution in rivers or beaches you must be socially conservative!
