Chatham House and YouGov published their annual survey of British attitudes on UK international priorities last week, and it’s worth a look. The survey covers both 2,000 or so members of the public, and over 800 opinion formers. Some findings:
First, as expected, the public strongly thinks that the UK spends too much on aid to poor countries (57% say so). I kind of wish the survey had asked them what proportion of GNI Britain spends on aid – I bet the mean estimate would have been over 5% (as opposed to less than 0.7%). But there we are.
And climate fares little better than development. Asked what are the biggest future threats to “the British way of life”, only 18% said climate change – this on a question where respondents could pick three or four issues, not just one. 31% of people are “not currently convinced that climate change is a serious threat”.
But here’s the interesting part. On that same question about future threats, interruptions to energy supply scored 37% – placing it second after terrorism (53%). And “long-term scarcity of essential natural resources, such as water, food and land” scored 30%. Among opinion formers, international financial instability comes a lot higher (59%, as compared to 36% among the public); but energy interruptions and resource scarcity are both in the top five.
It’s the same story when it comes to what UK foreign policy should focus on. Among opinion formers, “ensuring the continued supply of vital resources, such as oil, gas, food and water” comes out top in a list of issues that should be “the main focus of UK foreign policy”, with 48% selecting it as one of up to 3 issues. (Terrorism came joint first; climate was fourth, at 26%. Climate fatigue is not just limited to the public.) The public, meanwhile, put the resource scarcity priority second on the list, after securing Britain’s borders.
So, newsflash: scarcity is now a more resonant frame with both the UK public and UK opinion formers than either climate or development. I’ve suspected for a while that this was the way things were headed, but would certainly not have guessed that the agenda would shift this fast.
To be sure, it’s extremely worrying to see climate and development scoring so poorly. But I think the survey’s findings also signal an important opportunity to build new constituencies for action on climate and development – by pointing out the extent to which action in these two areas can deliver on scarcity concerns. (This has the added benefit of actually being true – in contrast, say, to arguing in favour of aid to fragile states on the basis that it will help protect UK national security, which is a much less convincing argument, as Stewart Patrick notes in the current edition of Foreign Policy.)
By extension, there may also be more political space than we thought for talking about the ‘fair shares’ aspects of resource scarcity that I wrote about in the Oxfam / WWF paper that came out last week (details here). That’s what Chatham House’s Rob Bailey argues too, in a short comment piece in which he notes that,
Both the general public and opinion-formers consider aid largely irrelevant to Britain’s international reputation, and as playing only a small role in serving national interests. This suggests that one argument in defence of aid employed by the Secretary of State for International Development, that Britain is an ‘Aid Superpower,’ is unlikely to resonate with voters, despite the fact that the UK is viewed internationally as a leader.
Would an international development strategy focused on sustainable, equitable and secure access to resources win greater voter approval? Maybe: as we have seen, there is a strong convergence in opinion that resource insecurity is a major threat to the UK and should be a foreign policy priority. This need not be window dressing, as there is a growing body of expert opinion that identifies resource scarcity as the major development challenge for the 21st century.
