The public is right, the politicians are wrong but the politics won’t change

The Scottish Government is not going out of its way to alert you to the publication of this year's Scottish Social Attitude Survey results. It isn't hard to see why – they make uncomfortable reading for society as a whole, and they are pretty damning of the Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament itself.

If the pattern of recent policy responses to data on public attitudes to public service, pubic services and the public realm is anything to go by, that lack of desire to address what these statistics are telling us will continue. Those in the Scottish public management class will tell themselves that this is 'just a global trend' and return to business as usual. This would be a serious mistake.

So what do these statistics tell us? Trust in government is low and still falling. Yes, the Scottish Government and the Scottish Parliament are trusted more than Westminster (certainly if framed as 'standing up for Scotland'), but we're still talking about three in eight thinking the Scottish Government works in Scotland's interests, one in four thinking it makes policy in the interests of them or other similar groups and one in three thinking they listen before they make decisions.

All these have declined further this year (though only slightly). Or, more accurately, that decline is as of last year since the survey work was done then and is only published now. But when you look at the decline in the last decade, it becomes even starker – trust has fallen by at least a third in that time.

Another aspect that should cause alarm is that for the first time, more people think the NHS is being run badly than being run well. This is often taken to be a proxy for public services as a whole, and certainly the NHS has generally had the best approval ratings among public services. Trust in local authorities is even lower than in the government.

But it isn't just government performance that is a warning sign; some of the most startling results are in measures of wider social outcomes. An alarming 77 per cent of people think that the standard of living has fallen in the last year. Those who think it has got better are close to being within a margin of data error.

Likewise, 66 per cent think the economy is weaker compared with a negligible seven per cent who think it has got better. These are generally considered to be key measures of whether a society is working, and few think that it is.

Where there is positive news is that the pubic are genuinely invested in the public realm. A clear plurality think taxes should be raised, while those who think they should be raised or stay the same are 84 per cent of the public. It is worth noting that Scotland's media consensus that taxes are too high is shared by about 12 per cent of voters. To put that in perspective, 18 per cent of Britons believe in demonic possession.

Overall, it produces a consistent picture of how the public feels. They want strong public services, they want to invest in the public realm, and they think civic participation is important (90 per cent think it is important to vote in the Scottish Election, tailing off only slightly for other elections).

But they think the core measures of a good society (a decent standard of living, an economy which provides that and public services when you need them) are getting worse, and they believe that this is because government is making decisions on someone's behalf other than their own and that they don't really care what the public thinks when they produce legislation.

The point is that this is all measurably true. Almost every indicator backs up this interpretation. It is the general public which appears to be right about all of this, and the politicians who are divorced from this reality.

And yet so far, what we have is a daily Scottish Government news bulletin that last week trumpeted giving a donation to someone on a sponsored walk (to indicate the sort of comparatively trivial issue they want you to know about) but yesterday failed to mention the Scottish Social Attitude Survey at all.

Politicians act as if they know better than the public on a lot of this. The evidence points in the opposite direction. Yet it is very difficult to think of any extent to which any lessons have been learned at all over the last decade, as this situation has continually deteriorated. Politicians either do not think that public consent is necessary or they do not know how to perform in a way that generates it.

This ought to be taken seriously in government, but is instead swept under the carpet. So we brace ourselves for next year's numbers and the social implications of a public that doesn't believe in its government or feel positive about the social outcomes it is producing.