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Almost half of people believe that those who lost their jobs during the pandemic likely performed poorly, according to a survey.
In findings that will raise fears about inequalities in Britain, an attitudes study by researchers from Kings College London showed that a significant minority thought that a widening income gap after Covid between whites and BAME groups would not be a trouble.
“This analysis highlights the complexity of people’s views on inequalities,” said Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, who will use the research for his five-year review of inequalities. “The British public is clearly concerned about some inequalities, but they also attach great importance to individual responsibility.”
People care more about differences between geographic areas than they do about races, genders and generations, the researchers found in the study titled Unequal Britain.
The findings may suggest widespread support for the government’s “leveling off” agenda as the country tries to recover after Covid, the authors said. But it will also raise questions about the popularity of anti-inequality policies that focus on ethnic minorities and women.
Unemployment rose to 1.74 million people this week, its highest level in five years, and business closures are disproportionately affecting women and ethnic minorities.
area-based inequality
In one of the starkest findings, one in eight Britons (13%) said they believe that blacks are more likely to be unemployed and have lower income because they “lack motivation or willpower.”
This attitude was held by more than one in five of the Conservative voters surveyed, compared with less than one in 20 Labor supporters. Overall, 47% said these inequalities are due to discrimination, but surprisingly racist views persist, and 4% of those surveyed said the inequality is due to the majority of blacks having “less innate ability to to learn”. The researchers discovered this by asking questions that are rarely asked in the UK, but often included in US social surveys.
inequality and black people
The authors said the overall findings showed that “meritocratic and individualistic trends” are likely to moderate calls to action on inequality.
“There is a strong belief in meritocracy in Britain, that hard work and ambition remain the key factors for success, and this influences opinions, even during a pandemic,” the report said. Despite the exceptional circumstances [of Covid]”Brits are more likely to think that the job losses caused by the crisis are the result of personal failure than chance.”
The view that individual performance was important in determining whether workers became unemployed during the Covid crisis was held by 47% of people. Only 31% attributed it to luck. Study author Bobby Duffy, a professor of social policy at KCL, said this was surprising. Between 57% and 39%, Conservative voters are much more likely than Labor voters to attribute these job losses to poor performance at work.
Of the more than 2,000 people surveyed, most thought that the gulfs between the most deprived and least deprived geographic areas were the most severe form of inequality the nation faced, followed by income and wealth. This view was held by Labor and Conservative supporters alike, one of the only topics in the study that bridged the political spectrum.
Duffy said that this rare moment of unity in attitudes toward inequalities “points to [support for] policies that are not just about moving some government department [out of London] or listen further north: it is the sense of supporting the initiatives of the local community. It’s something that has been underestimated since the late 2000s. “
Fewer than half of the people surveyed placed racial differences among the three or four most severe types of inequality and less than a third included gender inequality.
injustice and education
Amid evidence of the adverse consequences of the labor market for women in Britain as a result of the crisis, the study found that a third of people would not consider it a problem if gender inequality worsened due to the crisis.
“These findings underscore too clearly the growing importance of place in debates about politics in general and inequality in particular,” said Professor Anand Menon, UK Director in a Changing Europe, who contributed to the study. “The government should see this emerging consensus as a window of opportunity to act on the ambitious promises it has made to ‘level up’ the country.”
