r/UKPolitics autumn ’23 survey

Three weeks ago, I put up the r/UKPolitics autumn ’23 survey, and got a healthy 1776 responses, which is a good political number of course.

First, we have our demographic questions. The first two questions asked who people would vote for in a general election tomorrow, firstly under real life conditions ie considering where you live and any tactical voting considerations, and then next under a hypothetical where all parties stood an equal chance of winning.

If there were a GE tomorrow, which party would you vote for, considering where you live and any tactical voting considerations

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If there were a GE tomorrow, which party would you vote for, if all parties stood an equal chance of winning?

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Then some other demographic queries

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Section two: the test

For the next section, people were invited to estimate various demographics of the UK, without looking up the answer.

This one was surprisingly hard to get an actual UK-wide answer for, so I’ve done my own calculation from the various census data as below

At 83.5%, the closest answer was the plurality answer of 85%, so well done to the 37% who got that.

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Per wikipedia, 22.6% of British people aged 25 to 64 attained a bachelor’s degree or higher (as at 2017), so well done to the 4.3% of correct answerers!

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Per KCL, the answer is 49%, so well the 22.9% who went for 50% got this one.

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Per the govt, the answer is 7%, so the 5% or lower crowd get this one.

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Section 3 – agree?

Finally, we ended with the classic set of statements, to which respondents gave a 1 to 7 answer, which generally meant 1 – strongly disagree, 4 – neither agree nor disagree, 7 strongly disagree. The exception was the bin question, in which it actually meant 1 to 7 bins.

Please note, in dividing up the answers by party here, I used the party vote if all parties could win, rather than how people voted considering tactical voting etc.

Firstly, the answers to the questions that showed little difference between how various parties’ voters answered:

1. If I came across an injured elephant at the zoo, and it turned out it needed £200 for medicine to live, and only I could pay it, I would pay the bill, rather than letting the elephant die.
2. It’s reasonable to protest against housing developments where there is an apparent lack of school or health provision
3. In order to prevent rising crime, we should hire many more police officers
4. HS2 should be built according to the full original plan, and I’m not too worried about how much it will cost
5. What is the maximum number of bins you would be willing to sort your rubbish into?

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Building luxury housing makes housing cheaper for everyone

Now here I’m going to be a little bit naughty; I rarely do this, but this is a question that actually has quite a lot of economic data behind it.

In studies such as this one, or this one (London specific) or even this one, it is shown again and again that building luxury housing does make housing cheaper for everyone, and there’s pretty much no data to suggest otherwise.

Therefore, almost all of you are wrong 🙂

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In order to meet climate targets people should have a limit on how many flights they can take per year

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In order to meet climate targets, a tax on meat will be necessary

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I would have no objection about my teenage daughter competing against a trans girl in a sport

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The people who say ‘multiculturalism has failed’ are generally racist

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Private schools should be abolished

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16 year olds are too young to have the vote