Control of immigration, Britain’s relationship with Europe, and devolution of powers to Scotland. are issues at the centre of British political debate. But mostly, people who think that there are too many immigrants, or that too much power has been ceded to Brussels or too little devolved to Edinburgh, do not have any specific policy proposals in mind. 

      They have little idea how many immigrants there are, When Ipsos Mori asked respondents to estimate the proportion of UK residents who are foreign born the average of answers was 31%. (The true figure is 13%, of whom almost half are students) Concern about immigration is greatest, not in  London, where there are many immigrants, but in rural areas, where there are few. There is wide agreement that immigration is a national problem but few people think it affect their locality.

        Most people find it easier to dislike abstractions  than real people.  My aunt was always scrupulous in exempting from her blanket condemnation of Pakistanis the only one she had ever met (he was actually Indian, but never mind).

      There is similar ignorance of  the relative competences of the European Commission, the Westminster government, and the Scottish Parliament. I have found little joy in asking eurosceptics which powers it is particularly important that Britain should regain from the European Commission and Parliament:  mostly, they do not know, and parrot some absurd tabloid newspaper canard about regulation of the shape of bananas or the frequency of rubbish collection. No one is interested in hearing that the issue of voting rights for prisoners arises as a result of Britain’s position as signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights rather than British membership of the European Union. And it is a waste of breath to explain to Scots who claim that Westminster will destroy the National Health Service in Scotland that health is a function already devolved.

But there is nothing reprehensible in the fact that most people do not have the same interest in the detail of constitutional arrangements as politicians or columnists.  Voting for UKIP, or Scottish independence, is the proper response of electors in a democratic society to a political system which – regardless of party – seems inadequate in both capabilities and performance. Citizens  express dissatisfaction with the current state of politics and the economy in a time-honoured fashion, by hostility to anonymous others, and complaint that too much power is exercised by people who are too far away and out of touch with their real needs.

         If issues of immigration, Europe and Scottish independence are for many the focus of a more general discontent rather than the real origins of their concerns, policy measures which partially address these specific problems are unlikely to have much effect on attitudes. If opinions are not based on facts, changing facts will not necessarily change opinions. The large percentage of the population who think there is too much immigration appears to be independent of  how many immigrants there are. No new delegation of power from Brussels to London would satisfy Conservative eurosceptics, because their real concern is Britain’s reduced role in world affairs, about which nothing much can be done.  And nationalist sentiment in Scotland is not going to be assuaged by the transfer of responsibility for housing benefit to the Scottish government, because the precise demarcation of devolved functions is not what the debate was ever about.

‘For forms of government let fools contest, what’er is best administered is best’, Alexander Pope wrote more than three centuries ago, and he got to the heart of the matter.  The discussion of forms of government gains traction only because of a wider sense that we are not well administered.  Effective political leadership and a strong economy are not just the way, but the only way, to define the resentments expressed in current public opinion.