‘The economy’ is not people’s political priority - if you ask the right question

Yesterday we looked at the (under-reported) release of the latest Scottish Social Attitude Survey, but on a quiet news day there is an important factor in those findings that is worth looking at more closely – the list of political priorities of Scottish voters.

Unsurprisingly, 'the economy' comes top again. This is the standard answer that people tend to give if they do not instead prioritise NHS waiting lists or general performance, the two issues which ten to vie for which is the top priority.

And yet this must be put in the context of what isn't asked. Most of the main polling companies use similar lists of political priorities in polling, and there is a clear ideological slant in the selection of issues. At the moment, none of the main polling companies include 'standard of living' or 'affordability' in their lists of priorities.

The closest YouGov comes is “economy”. Ipsos does have an “inflation/prices” option but also a straight “Economy” one. The Scottish Social Attitudes Survey itself only uses “Improve the Economy”, though it also has a “Reduce Inequality” option as well.

Both Survation and Savanta do use a “Cost of Living” option, but this itself shows a particular political slant. These options for 'affordability' or 'standard of life' all use the same proxy – that the issue is purely prices. For example, Ipsos sometimes uses a “Delivering economic stability to keep taxes, inflation and mortgages as low as possible”.

What is important is that the concept of 'affordability' is explicitly about the balance between income and prices where as 'cost of living' and 'inflation' are only about rising prices. In fact if you frame 'affordability' as 'inflation' then you enable policy-makers to draw precisely the wrong conclusion.

The standard monetarist approach to inflation is to take steps to reduce demand, which generally means pushing for wage restraint and increasing interest rates. But wage restraint and higher mortgage payments make affordability worse, not better. By failing to ask the right questions it enables vested interests to invert what appears to be the intention of the public.

Because while economy comes top if that is the only option on the list that relates to 'the spending power of households', it drops very significantly if a 'cost of living' option is included as well. For example, if you ask questions without a 'cost of living' option, 'economy' regularly scores over 50 per cent with respondents.

But if you include any version of a 'cost of living' option, it falls to something closer to 30 per cent. Economy is only the top priority in Britain if you force respondents to use it as a proxy for affordability and standard of life. And if 'raise wages' is entirely excluded, the focus shifts to inflation, which as above results in different policy outcomes than the apparent public intention.

The language of all of these polls is heavily ideological. Take for example the way Ipsos's links 'economic stability' to 'keep[ing] taxes, inflation and mortgages as low as possible'. That it is possible to have a 'stable' economy with high prices and low household standard of living is not considered a possibility.

What these polls do is redirect all public sentiment of unhappiness back into reinforcing the rationale for the policies that resulted in the unhappiness in the first place. The public says 'we want better affordability' but are forced to do it in a way that enables the politicians to say 'so we need to increase interest rates and reduce corporation tax'.

The current politics of the US are very different. There the election campaign of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani was entirely focussed on the question of 'affordability' precisely because it shifts the policy narrative away from 'what do corporate vested interests want?'. It was so successful politicians of every party are now adopting the affordability frame.

But in the UK, and with this Social Attitude Survey in Scotland, we refuse to see any issue of standard of living, household financial wellbeing or affordability as anything other than an 'economy issue'. And 'economy' is taken to mean 'more corporate-friendly deregulation and subsidy'.

If you ask bad questions you get bad answers. 'Do you think the economy is important?' is a bad question. “Are you satisfied with your standard of life and if not, why not' should not be a radical approach to gathering public sentiment. In Britain and in Scotland, it is.