The government's got a problem; not the Government, the government

The government's got a problem; not the Government, the government 

MORI Chairman Bob Worcester frets about the conflict between spin and veracity, with a word for the current review into Government information.

The government (sic) has a problem. The problem is that when they say something, very few people believe them. In 1983, just after Mrs Thatcher's 143 seat majority victory, fewer than one person in six (16%) said they thought they could trust Government (Thatcher's) Ministers to tell the truth. In 1993, following John Major's surprise (to us, anyway) 21 seat majority in the 1992 General Election, barely one in ten (11%) said they could trust his Government's Ministers not to tell porkies.

In 1998 after the first Labour landslide, nearly a quarter, 23%, thought these guys could be trusted, but that's down now to one in five, 20%, who say they believe them when they say something.

That's not good for democracy, and it's not good for Britain.

Does it matter? I think it does. So going back to 1983 does the Government of that day, expressed by the head of the Central Statistical Office, the Government's Chief Statistician, who called me into his office to express his concern about the low standing of Government Ministers in the veracity stakes. 'Next you'll be saying that the public don't believe the national statistics', he said. I fell off my chair laughing.

And it isn't getting better.

Recently (last July) we carried out a national survey for the University of East Anglia under a grant from the ESRC's Science and Society Programme. They'd asked us to look at public attitudes to science and scientists, and the information sources received by the public, and selected five topical issues to use as case studies: climate change, genetic testing, genetically modified food, radiation from mobile phone handsets, and radioactive waste, all topical, all affecting millions of citizens, and all controversial, with not all scientists in agreement as to the benefits and risks of adopting or dealing with each issue.

On each issue, and on each test, the Government fails to persuade the British public that they can be trusted. I suspect this would be true of any government in power.

In all, our colleagues at UEA asked us to examine 13 aspects of the way people feel about the Government in relation to these scientific issues: are they fair, do they change policies without good reason, do they distort facts, have the necessary skilled people to judge, share information, too influenced by industry, etc. The table below shows four of the key items. All are on our web site and that of the University of East Anglia, www.uea.ac.uk

The government does least worst on acting in the public interest, standing in a hole only 22 points deep, and most worst on providing all relevant information about these issues. Although for reasons of respondent economy (there were many questions to be asked), the comparability of the responses suggest that what we are measuring is confidence in the Government's veracity and transparency rather than reactions to the particular issue.