Restoring Political Trust by Getting Brexit Done? Insights from English focus groups

Focus groups in the time of COVID-19

Jennifer Cyr (2019) argues that focus groups are underutilised in the social sciences and can be a powerful tool because they generate data at three levels of analysis. At an individual level, they reveal what individuals think about topics and why. At a group level, they enable us to explore whether participants interpret issues in the same way. This is particularly useful, Cyr argues, for ‘thicker concepts’ – the complex ideas and dynamics that are typically of concern to social scientists. Finally, analysis at the interactive level may provide an additional source of information on what specifically takes place between participants: whether there are tensions or ambiguities that either influence individual opinions or shape how consensus is eventually achieved. Using these three levels of analysis, focus group data can produce unexpected ideas or generate new hypotheses and yield different types of information, that can then be leveraged for different ends. They are also used extensively by some political strategists in the development of campaign messages – and as such have had their own impact on the course of recent referendums and elections in the UK.

The onset of the Coronavirus pandemic earlier in the year forced us to move our focus groups on Brexit and trust online. While enabling us to overcome the risks of COVID-19 and abide by the restrictions in place during our fieldwork, the online groups presented a range of obstacles for our planned triple-level analysis. Because of the computer-mediated environment, the conversations did not flow as easily as in face-to-face settings, and the moderator had to work hard to bring the participants into the discussion. This meant that it was possible to get to the individual and group levels of analysis but made the interactive aspect much harder to interpret.

Nevertheless, we were able to gain invaluable insights. Our choice of groups was designed to explore the Brexit divide in English politics – both according to Leave and Remain identities, and according to place. We held four of the focus groups in towns in the North West that have experienced relative demographic and economic decline in recent decades (Blackpool, Oldham and Bolton), contrasted with six groups in major cities in the South that have experienced relative growth (London and Bristol). Across the different areas we held groups of both Leavers and Remainers, drawn from different age groups and social classes, with a mix of partisans. In the groups we asked participants whether they trusted government to make their lives better, what issues they most and least trusted government on, how they formed judgements about who to trust, the sources of information they relied upon, and how they viewed people on the other side of the Brexit divide. We also asked people what ‘get Brexit done’ meant to them and what the government needed to do to repay the trust of voters who had switched to the Conservatives for the first time.

Getting Brexit done?

We analysed the data along three main axes at the individual and group levels: we looked for areas of consensus within and across the groups around the themes that emerged in participants’ answers; we identified areas where Leave and Remain supporters provided similar and diverging answers; and we examined constructions of trust positions and perspectives along the Brexit divide. Not only do these findings offer insights into the state of public trust on Brexit in the summer of 2020, they also hint at how voters might react to the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020, as the UK faces the dilemma of ‘deal or no deal’.

A first finding is that the PM was correct to focus on trust – it matters. Some four out of five participants claimed that trust in government matters to them, but at the same time two out of three feel it does not matter to the government whether the public trust them or not. Generally, people do not trust the government to make their lives better, with roughly three in five participants making it plain that they did not trust government, and just one in ten offering a positive view. There is a sense that citizens want to trust, but that this desire is unlikely to be fulfilled. Moreover, we found that citizens make trust judgements using a combination of analytical and emotional reasoning, drawing on a variety of sources of information, not all of which can be framed or driven by elites. People’s trust judgements are also updated over time in response to events. The dominant self-image of voters is as sceptical observers, judging trust by what they see. As such, being perceived as ‘getting Brexit done’ might well serve to enhance trust in the government. Indeed, when asked what the government could do to be trustworthy, most participants answered a mixture of ‘be honest’ and ‘deliver on promises’.

Our analysis, however, shows that the PM and his government are trusted on the issue of Brexit, but the benefits for longer-term public trust are limited as it is largely seen as already done by both Leavers and Remainers. Credit for that is granted happily by the former:

And more fatalistically by the latter:

Agreement on this issue was compounded by the strong sense among the groups that voters on both sides of the Brexit divide seem ready to move on, validating further the idea for both Leavers and Remainers that getting Brexit done is a card that has already been played. And it might illustrate the limitations of three-word slogans as a measure of government performance. Because beyond the consensus that the government had somewhat delivered on ‘getting Brexit done’, there were wide-ranging interpretations of what that actually meant, with fear, anxiety and cynicism dominating the prospects for the future post-Brexit deal (or no-deal).

Brexit and COVID

Most participants expected a need to delay the negotiations (even after the deadline had passed for an extension). Many expressed fears over the double whammy of simultaneous economic shocks of Brexit and COVID. There was a widespread cynicism especially among Leavers that government would try to ‘hide behind COVID’ when it came to any negative economic impacts of Brexit:

Future battles for the trust of the public are likely to be focused on assessing the realities of post-Brexit Britain in a post-COVID recovery. While it might seem advantageous at the moment to play up rifts with the EU over the terms of a deal, or an acrimonious no-deal, there is a risk that it undermines trust in the government, which is heavily premised on having got Brexit done, at a time when Leave voters expect everyone to see the benefits of Brexit:

And Remain voters, sceptical of post-Brexit outcomes, may currently be giving the government the benefit of the doubt in terms of their intentions to at least mitigate the double fallout of COVID and Brexit by conducting a fair and transparent process:

Trust rebuilt?

The government faces a political dilemma – of balancing the potential political gains of pitching the EU as the enemy, galvanising its Leave-voting base, but at the risk of highlighting that Brexit is not ‘over’ (at least in the way that many expected it to be), thus jeopardising the modest amount of trust it gained after the election over the longer-term. Our use of focus groups allowed us insights into the complexities of how people make trust judgements. It particularly highlighted the dynamic and contingent nature of these processes in the way that both Remainers and Leavers recognised that the government had delivered on its promise to get Brexit done, at the same time as retaining considerable scepticism about whether it could be trusted to deliver beyond that. The trust granted for delivering on Brexit is at a tipping point.

The prospects of trust being squandered are increased by the government’s troubled management of the COVID-19 crisis. As rising rates of infection from COVID-19 have led to local lockdowns in some parts of the country, tensions have grown between leaders of devolved authorities and the national government – with acrimony over a lack of communication and meagre financial bailouts on offer. Just at a time when the levelling-up agenda offered the prospect of repaying the trust to new Conservative voters in the North of England, the COVID pandemic is fuelling mutual distrust and discord between regions and the centre. As the pandemic rages, and lockdown measures are stepped up once again, the prospect that Brexit will restore trust seems rather wishful – with Britain once again a country that seems unusually difficult to govern, its problems particularly intractable and its people increasingly bloody-minded.