Too many statistics

Anthony Sampson

WE BRITISH: BRITAIN UNDER THE MORISCOPE by Eric Jacobs and Robert Worcester Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £15,pp. 222 The pollsters have finally entered their kingdom. So here we all are, we inscrut- able Brits, all neatly bundled up in percen- tages by Bob Worcester, the affable master-pollster from Kansas who set up Market & Opinion Research International (MORI) in Britain. And to make it more digestible, Eric Jacobs, of the newspaper Today, provides a chatty commentary ex- plaining what the percentages add up to.

It's a healthy corrective to all the sweep- ing generalisations which the British like to make about themselves. I like to imagine Worcester and Jacobs interrupting the saloon-bar bores as they exchange their clichés like: 'Of course the British all think of themselves as middle class'. `As a matter of fact', say Worcester & Jacobs, '67 per cent describe themselves as working-class — far more than 40 years ago'.

`No-one ever wants higher taxes', say the pundits: 'Actually', say W&J, '71 per cent wanted higher taxes, and only 15 per cent lower taxes'. 'Thatcher has changed every- thing', say the bores: 'But', say W&J, '74 per cent of Tory supporters believe that carers should be more highly rewarded than wealth creators . . . Mrs Thatcher has not won the hearts and minds of the British people'.

The chief message of this book is that Britain has been far less changed by the convulsions of the Eighties than appears from the political speeches on either side. Britain remains slow to change, and slow to regard luxuries — even colour TV — as necessities. 'It takes a long time to turn an option or a luxury into a habit or a need'.

And we are much less philistine and discontented with our jobs than you would ever guess from the advertisements and colour magazines. More people had been to a library over the previous year than to a cinema, and while 14 per cent had been to a football match, 17 per cent had been to an art exhibition. Orchestral concerts were as popular as pop concerts.

Forty-eight per cent of people in jobs were 'fairly satisfied' with their work, and 34 per cent were 'very satisfied'; and after ten years of Thatcher their attitudes to work remained almost entirely unchanged. As Dr Johnson put it:

How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!

Shrewd politicians will find these conclusions less surprising: the rhetoric of Thatcherism, and the images of acquisitive yuppies, have long been out of touch with the evidence of canvassing and by- elections. Romantic dons protected by tenure may preach the splendours of cut- throat competition and ruthless entre- preneurs; but ordinary workers and com- pany directors — not to mention their wives — prefer a quieter and safer life.

In the more domestic field, the question- ers have turned up more surprising answers. Men give more priority, it seems, to household chores like washing dishes than their wives do. Divorce is blamed much more on alcohol and drugs than on sex: and those two demons, drugs and alcohol, are considered far more danger- ous than Aids. There are also some fasci- nating sidelights about British quirks: 37 per cent of us still believe in astrology; and David Owen's SDP supporters were spe- cially gullible about the stars — 39 per cent of them.

There's bad news for left-handers like myself, who are accustomed to be branded as gauche and sinister: we're given omi- nous evidence that we do not live as long as right-handers — corroborated by a Canad- ian survey which shows that left-handers are 89 per cent more likely to suffer serious accidents than right-handers, and 85 per cent more likely to have a car crash. The modern world, and particularly the car, is firmly set against the left-hander.

Worcester and Jacobs have certainly produced a lively insight into British be- haviour, which no politician or journalist can safely ignore. But at the end of all these percentages we may still wonder: is this really what life and politics are about?

While columnists and reporters are con- stantly analysing the opinion polls, totting up the swings and trends, they are less and less inclined to indulge in the old-fashioned reporting from the pubs, the buses or the working men's clubs which can convey not just opinions but the depth and passion of feeling that lie behind them.

Before Bob Worcester began his polling he met up with small groups of people over drinks to help decide the questions; and their replies provide some of the most vivid insights in the book: 'With the tunnel, more and more people will go there [to France]. Then people will get even more anti-French'. 'You can get married to someone today and she could be lovely. But all of a sudden something happens, and it is not always the woman's fault'.

This reader could wish that there were more such insights; or that Eric Jacobs, himself an experienced industrial reporter, had been allowed to make more of his own assessments, away from the statistics. For however illuminating the percentages, they still do not convey the depths of feelings. How deep has been the revulsion against the unions and bureaucracies? At what point does resentment against foreign im- migrants spill over into real fear and anger? Will a new middle-class generation revolt against the materialism and yuppie- dom in the Nineties?

For the answers we still, I suspect, need novelists and reporters of the old- fashioned kind, like Defoe or Priestley to whom the authors give credit in their introduction — to give us the real sense of the tolerance or intolerance of the people; and of those undercurrents of feeling that determine the real movements in the coun- try.

In the introduction the authors compare Britain's collective mind to a sea, in which 'opinion' is on the surface, easily whipped up by a sudden storm; below it are 'atti- tudes', like slow-moving currents; and deeper still are 'values', like the tides with their own mysterious rhythms.

But it is the ground-swells and the sudden floodtides, which transform whole landscapes, that are hardest to calculate and predict. And later historians will have to look for their evidence not just to opinion polls and by-elections, but to the more personal clues to the passions and furies which can suddenly change people's views.

Countries, like people, can still experi- ence traumas and emotional surges which can take pollsters unawares. And even pollsters, in the end, are mortals who are subject to human laws. The time will come, alas, when even the inexhaustible Bob Worcester will have to be recorded as 51 per cent dead.