Far Right Britons

Posted on March 10, 2012 by Clive D. Field

The negativity of far right political parties, and particularly the British National Party (BNP), towards Islam and Muslims has been reaffirmed in a new report by academics at Nottingham and Salford Universities which was launched at Chatham House on 8 March 2012. Distributed by Searchlight Educational Trust, it is available online at:

http://www.channel4.com/media/c4-news/images/voting-to-violence%20(7).pdf

The research for Matthew Goodwin and Jocelyn Evans, From Voting to Violence? Far Right Extremism in Britain was funded by the British Academy. It is based on online interviews with 2,152 supporters of far right parties pre-screened from YouGov’s panel of 350,000 adults aged 18 and over. Fieldwork was presumably conducted in 2011.

Supporters exhibited a range of attachments to their parties: members, former members, identifiers, voters, and prospective voters. There were 485 supporters of the BNP (formed in 1982) in the sample, 1,505 of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP, 1993), and 210 of the English Defence League (EDL, 2009). Some support overlapped.

74% of BNP supporters and 46% of UKIP supporters cited immigration or Muslims as the most important issue facing Britain today, and a minority (22% and 8% respectively) even suggested that the position of Muslims already in British society was the most significant challenge faced by the country.

88% of BNP and 85% of UKIP supporters disagreed with the statement that Islam did not pose a serious danger to Western civilization; just 7% and 9% agreed. In the case of the BNP, core supporters (members and identifiers) felt more strongly about this than those on the periphery (voters or potential voters), but the distinction did not hold true for UKIP.

92% of BNP and 84% of UKIP followers said that they would be bothered by the prospect of a mosque being built in their community, considerably more than the 55% recorded by the British Social Attitudes Survey in 2008. Again, BNP’s core supporters were especially concerned.

Perhaps the most worrying finding of all was that 92% of BNP and 75% of UKIP supporters felt that violence between different ethnic, racial or religious groups in Britain is largely inevitable, with the core of both parties most likely to agree with this forecast.

Although far right parties often try to galvanize public hostility towards minorities by emphasizing Christian themes, respondents to this poll were not unduly religious relative to the population as a whole. The proportion professing no religion was 46% for BNP, 42% for EDL, and 39% for UKIP supporters. However, there were fewer non-Christians in the sample than the norm.

The number of EDL interviewees in this survey was small. Therefore, BRIN readers might like to be reminded of our coverage of another investigation of EDL supporters at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/2011/inside-the-english-defence-league/

 

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Communicating Evangelicals

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Clive D. Field

‘Christians are engaging in politics to a far greater degree than the average British citizen, and their weapon of choice is social media, new research shows. The research also finds that their range of concerns goes far beyond the stereotyped moralising viewpoint.’

This is one of the principal conclusions drawn by the Evangelical Alliance from its new report, in partnership with 10 other organizations forming its Research Club. Entitled 21st Century Evangelicals: Are We Communicating? it is available at:

http://www.eauk.org/snapshot/upload/EA-AUTUMN-11-REPORT-WEB.pdf

Continue reading →

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Occupy London, Act II – Enter the Archbishop

Posted on November 6, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Occupy London’s anti-capitalist campsite outside St Paul’s Cathedral has now been there for three weeks and seems dug in for the long haul. The Dean and Chapter and the wider leadership of the Church of England have been increasingly challenged by its presence, not simply in terms of how to respond to it as a physical ‘neighbour’ but what line to take about the morality of capitalism and the world of high finance.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, finally entered the fray early last week in a statement on the resignation of the Dean of St Paul’s, an article in the Financial Times, and an interview with BBC News. In these utterances he stressed the importance of addressing the urgent issues raised by the protesters, put forward some solutions of his own for doing so (notably the Tobin Tax), and conceded that the Church had failed ‘to square the circle of public interest and public protest’ in dealing with Occupy London.

How has the public reacted to the Archbishop’s belated intervention? In an attempt to answer this question, YouGov covered the Occupy London movement in its poll for today’s issue of The Sunday Times. A representative sample of 1,561 British adults aged 18 and over was interviewed online on 3 and 4 November 2011, and the results have been posted at:

http://cdn.yougov.com/cumulus_uploads/document/2011-11-04/YG-Archives-Pol-Sun-results-041111.pdf

Asked to rate how Williams had dealt with the Occupy London campsite and subsequent events at the Cathedral, 41% said that he had handled the matter badly, 26% well, with 33% expressing no opinion (rising to 57% of the 18-24s). The groups most critical of the Archbishop were Conservative voters (54%), men (48%), and the over-60s (53%).

It is hard to interpret these findings, since the question was rather unspecific, gave no context about Williams’s views or actions, and thus will have been answered from diverse perspectives. In particular, was he being criticized by interviewees for the fact that he had intervened at all or because he had sat on the fence for so long before declaring his hand or a combination of both reasons?

Some clues may be implicit in replies to the next question about whether, regardless of this instance, senior clergy should comment on political matters. 45% said that it was wrong for them to do so, including 56% of Conservatives and 52% of over-60s. 38% accepted that the Church had a contribution to make to political debates, increasing to 45% among Labourites and Liberal Democrats and 44% of Londoners and Scots. 16% did not know what to think.

44% wanted the Cathedral and the Corporation of London to take legal action to remove the campsite from outside St Paul’s, 3% less than the figure in YouGov’s poll of 27-28 October, since when the threat of legal action has (in fact) been temporarily lifted. Conservatives (67%), men (51%), and the over-60s (53%) especially favoured invoking the law. 38% opposed legal action, with 18% undecided.

Support for Occupy London’s protest outside St Paul’s was only 20%, well down on the 39% who had endorsed the aims of the protesters in a somewhat different question the week before. 26% had then opposed the movement, whereas in the current poll 46% were hostile to it, particularly Conservatives (75%) and the over-60s (60%). But one-third expressed no views.

It is probably the case that the public is tiring of such physical occupations, on account of their disruptive effects on everyday life and what Williams has described as the dramatic ‘cataract of unintended consequences’ at St Paul’s, but the public perhaps does often continue to share the frustrations about the morality of the financial system which gave rise to the occupations.

It is noteworthy that, in an ICM telephone poll for The Guardian on 21-23 October (after Occupy London commenced its sit-in around St Paul’s on 15 October), 51% of 1,003 adults agreed that the worldwide protests were ‘right to want to call time on a system that puts profit before people’, whereas 38% believed there is no practical alternative to capitalism.

The flames of discord in the affair seem likely to be fanned tomorrow (7 November) by the publication of a report from the St Paul’s Institute on the moral standards of the City of London. This is based upon a ComRes survey of 500 workers in the City’s financial institutions conducted during the summer.

The report, previewed in today’s The Independent on Sunday, was originally due to appear on 27 October but was deferred when Dr Giles Fraser, Director of the Institute, resigned from his post of Canon Chancellor at St Paul’s Cathedral, the first of three ‘victims’ of the controversy at the Cathedral to date.

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21st Century Evangelicals – The Sequel

Posted on September 18, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The UK’s evangelical Christians are far more likely to be active in their communities than the average person, according to a new report from the Evangelical Alliance – Does Belief Touch Society? – published on 5 September. Hard copies can be purchased at £3 from the Alliance (at 186 Kennington Park Road, London, SE11 4BT) or the report can be downloaded for free from:

http://www.eauk.org/snapshot/upload/Does-Belief-touch-society.pdf

The publication is numbered as Series A, Issue 1 in a collection of reports on 21st Century Evangelicals, following on from the document of the same name released at the start of the year, and based upon 17,300 responses by Christians aged 16 and over in 2010 to a questionnaire devised by Christian Research on behalf of the Alliance. The sample divided between attenders at seven Christian festivals in the UK and congregants at 35 churches randomly selected from the Alliance’s membership. See the BRIN post of 12 January 2011 for further details:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=826

Does Belief Touch Society? derives from a panel of 3,300 of the original 17,300 evangelicals who signed up to take part in further enquiries, of whom 1,151 participated in this first survey, which was conducted online around Easter 2011. Given the self-selecting nature of the micro-sample, and the methodology deployed for the 2010 study, there is a risk that the respondents to Does Belief Touch Society? may not be fully representative of the approximately two million evangelical Christians in the UK estimated by Tearfund in 2007. The Alliance concedes in the report (p. 3) that it has been unable to weight its findings and that younger people and ethnic minorities may be under-represented in the panel.

On the doctrine of the cross, 99% of evangelicals agreed or strongly agreed that the message of the cross had made a huge difference in their lives, 91% strongly agreed that Christ’s blood is the final and only effective sacrifice for human sin, 89% strongly agreed that Jesus Christ defeated the powers of evil through His death, and 84% strongly agreed that God Himself was suffering in Christ for humankind in the crucifixion. However, only 51% agreed that at the cross God poured out His holy anger upon His son, with 27% dissenting and 22% unsure.

On the Resurrection, 91% agreed or strongly agreed that Jesus rose from the tomb with a physical body, 91% agreed or strongly agreed that at the end all who have died will be raised to face judgment, 85% strongly agreed that after death Christian believers will enjoy everlasting life, 82% strongly agreed that belief in the Resurrection shaped the way they lived now, and 78% were very confident that they would enjoy everlasting life on their own death.

On Easter observance, 95% had worshipped on Easter Sunday but far fewer (65% overall and just 52% of under-35s) on Good Friday. 45% had attended a special church event in the week before Easter, and 41% took part in a public act of witness or evangelistic outreach over Easter. Under one-third had given up or taken up something during Lent, with women and younger people significantly more likely to do so.

In terms of civic participation, evangelicals were far more likely than the average citizen to be trustees of a charity, school governors, members of a political party, local councillors, and magistrates, but trade union membership was about the national norm.

On politics, 91% intended to or had voted in the 5 May 2011 elections and referendum (compared with a UK-wide turnout of 42%), with 38% in favour of and 39% opposed to the Alternative Vote. Evangelicals were equally divided about the military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, but 80% were emphatic in opposing the legal status of marriage being extended to same-sex partnerships.

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YouGov@Cambridge on Religion

Posted on September 17, 2011 by Clive D. Field

On 30 April last, we reported on the virtual launch of YouGov@Cambridge (a collaboration between pollsters YouGov and the University of Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies) and on the interim results from the first annual YouGov@Cambridge census of British life and attitudes. See:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=1223

Between 4 and 7 September, in advance of a two-day physical launch in Cambridge on 8-9 September, YouGov@Cambridge released final tables on the 2011 census, the fieldwork for which extended from 13 April to 20 May 2011 and involved online interviews with a representative sample of 64,303 adult Britons aged 18 and over (although most questions were put to sub-samples).

The new tables included the results for a module on religion, which had not featured in the interim release, and this post summarizes some of the main findings. For the full data, go to:

http://www.yougov.polis.cam.ac.uk/sites/yougov.polis.cam.ac.uk/files/Religion.pdf

  • 40% of adults professed no religion, 55% were Christian and 5% of other faiths – age made a major difference, with only 38% of the 18-34s being Christian and 53% having no religion, whereas for the over-55s the figures were 70% and 26% respectively 
  • 74% of respondents had been brought up in some religion (including 70% as Christians, implying a net 15% leakage from Christianity over time) and 25% not, the latter figure rising to 39% among the 18-34s 
  • 35% described themselves as very or fairly religious and 63% as not very or not at all religious – there were no big variations by demographics (even by age), but Londoners (41%) did stand out as being disproportionately religious, doubtless reflecting the concentration of ethnic minorities in the capital 
  • 34% believed in a personal God or gods (ranging from 28% among the 18-34s to 42% of over-55s), 10% in some higher spiritual power, 19% in neither, with 29% unsure or agnostic 
  • 11% of respondents claimed to attend a religious service once a month or more, 27% less often, and 59% never – non-attendance was higher among the young (62% for the 18-34s) than the old (54% for the over-55s) and among manual workers (62%) than non-manuals (56%), while London had the best figure for monthly or more attendance (16%) 
  • 16% claimed to pray daily, 12% several times a week, 4% once a week, 7% several times a month, 4% once a month, 24% less often, and 29% never – men (34%) were more likely not to pray at all than women (24%) 
  • 79% agreed and 11% disagreed that religion is a cause of much misery and conflict in the world today 
  • 72% agreed and 15% disagreed that religion is used as an excuse for bigotry and intolerance, with a high of 81% in Scotland where sectarianism has often been rife 
  • 35% agreed and 45% disagreed that religion is a force for good in the world, dissentients being more numerous among men (50%) than women (41%) 
  • 78% (82% of the over-55s) agreed and 12% disagreed that religion should be a private matter and had no place in politics 
  • 16% agreed and 70% disagreed that Christians and the Church should have more influence over politics in the country – only among the over-55s did the proportion in favour of the proposition scrape above one-fifth 
  • 61% agreed and 18% disagreed that organized religion is in terminal decline in the UK – the over-55s (67%) were most prone to agree and Londoners (21%) to disagree 
  • 40% agreed and 40% disagreed that the decline of organized religion had made Britain a worse place – the over-55s (54%) were twice as likely to agree as the 18-34s (27%) 
  • 51% (57% in Scotland) agreed and 32% (37% among men) disagreed that all religions are equally valid 
  • 34% agreed and 49% disagreed that some religions are better than others, men (39%), the over-55s (38%), and Londoners (38%) being disproportionately likely to agree 
  • 49% agreed and 29% disagreed that it is good for children to be brought up within a religion – among the 18-34s opinion divided at 36% each (whereas for the over-55s 64% agreed and 22% disagreed) 
  • 40% agreed (rising to 46% of men and 44% of 18-34s) and 39% disagreed that religion is incompatible with modern scientific knowledge 
  • 29% agreed and 54% disagreed that there are some things in life which only religion can explain, the over-55s (35%) placing more trust in religion than the 18-34s (24%)

All in all, these data point to a society in which religion is increasingly in retreat and nominal. With the principal exception of the older age groups, many of those who claim some religious allegiance fail to underpin it by a belief in God or to translate it into regular prayer or attendance at a place of worship. People in general are more inclined to see the negative than the positive aspects of religion, and they certainly want to keep it well out of the political arena.

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Religious Education and the English Baccalaureate

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The campaign (RE.ACT) to persuade the Coalition Government to change its mind about excluding GCSE Religious Education (RE) from the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) in secondary schools hotted up on 24 June with the simultaneous publication of two new surveys accompanied by rather alarmist press releases.

The first was a report by the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education (NATRE), based on an online (Survey Monkey) poll of RE teachers in 1,918 schools over a 10-day period commencing 22 May 2011. These schools represented 53% of the maintained secondary school sector in England.

The report was launched with a joint release by NATRE and the Religious Education Council of England and Wales with the key message that ‘Religious education in schools is being killed off’. Government’s ‘rapidly implemented plans to shake up the educational system are set to shake out RE. This may not be deliberate but is the inevitable unintended consequence of other actions.’

Informing these headlines was the fact that, according to the NATRE survey, 20% of schools were already failing to meet the legal requirement to provide RE for all pupils at Key Stage 4, with 24% expecting to fall short in 2011/12. Even at Key Stage 3 9% of schools did not meet the obligation. Neither were faith schools immune from non-compliance.

Moreover, 32% of schools had experienced a drop in GCSE entries for 2011/12 in the full RE course and 22% in the short course, the EBacc being the single commonest reason cited for the decline.  More than one-quarter of academy, community and grammar schools also anticipated specialist RE staff reductions for 2011/12.

The NATRE report is available at:

http://www.retoday.org.uk/media/display/NATRE_EBacc_Survey2_report_final.pdf

The second study was a ComRes poll, commissioned by Premier Christian Media Group (which has organized a petition of over 140,000 signatures to press for the inclusion of RE in the EBacc), and undertaken among an online sample of 2,005 Britons aged 18 and over on 10-12 June 2011.

The press release accompanying the results was entitled ‘Teach young people about other religions or risk religious extremism, warns new public poll’. This was a reference to the findings that:

  • 81% of respondents believed that, without education, people become intolerant of different cultures and religions;
  • 77% were convinced that knowledge of different religions helped promote community cohesion;
  • 71% predicted that British society would become more divided, unless children and young people are taught about different cultures and religions; and
  • 57% envisaged such teaching would reduce extremism and fundamentalism in Britain

Additionally, 88% of the sample agreed that learning about different cultures and faiths in Britain and the rest of the world is important, and 84% that it contributed to an understanding of modern society. 68% judged that children and young people did not know enough about religions and cultures other than their own. 

The full computer tabulations for the ComRes poll, with a range of breaks (gender, age, social grade, region, employment sector, knowledge of world religions, level of RE at school), can be downloaded from:

http://www.comres.co.uk/premierextremismpoll24jun11.aspx

It could be argued that these high values in favour of RE are somewhat misleading in that, in the ComRes poll, RE was not in contention with other curriculum subjects. It is therefore instructive to examine the ComRes outcomes alongside a survey by YouGov among 1,374 Britons aged 18 and over, interviewed online on 15-16 June 2011.

Although this did not expressly mention the EBacc, it did ask which of twenty GCSE subjects should count towards the construction of school performance league tables. RE came only sixteenth in the rank order, scoring 21%, with just Latin, media studies, drama and dance below it.

The subjects topping the YouGov list were mathematics, English, science, modern languages, and history/geography – precisely the disciplines included in the EBacc. So perhaps public support for school RE is not quite so strong as the RE lobbyists would wish to be the case? The YouGov statistics can be found at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-yougov-gcses-240611.pdf

This YouGov poll was a replication of an earlier one, conducted on 11-12 January 2011, which ranked RE as the fifteenth most important GCSE subject in the construction of school league tables, with 22% support. See our coverage at:

http://www.brin.ac.uk/news/?p=833

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Turbulent Priest?

Posted on June 12, 2011 by Clive D. Field

The nation is split down the middle about whether senior clergy should comment on political issues, according to a new survey. This follows the Archbishop of Canterbury’s guest-editorship of last week’s issue of the left-leaning New Statesman magazine, which provided Rowan Williams with a platform to critique the Coalition Government’s policies.

The topic is one of several covered in YouGov’s latest weekly poll for The Sunday Times, in which a representative sample of 2,728 adult Britons aged 18 and over was interviewed online on 9 and 10 June 2011. The relevant data appear on page 9 of the tables at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-pol-st-results-10-120611.pdf

45% of respondents considered it right for senior clerics to intervene in political debates and 44% disagreed. There was a sharp split on party political lines. Whereas 69% of current Conservative voters opposed clerical intervention, 64% of Labour supporters endorsed it, with Liberal Democrats divided on 47% for each position. Age also made some difference, approval of senior clerical involvement in politics rising from 36% among the 18-24s to 49% among the over-40s.

More specifically, interviewees were asked what they thought about the Archbishop’s criticism of the Government for introducing ‘radical, long-term policies for which no one voted’ in the 2010 general election and which were instilling ‘fear’ with the public. 47% agreed with his assessment while 35% disagreed and 18% expressed no opinion.

On this question the party political gulf was even wider. 75% of current Conservative supporters disagreed with the Archbishop and 81% of Labour voters sided with him. Liberal Democrats divided 39% for and 45% against, notwithstanding that the Liberal Democrats are in coalition with the Conservatives in Government, and that the policies under criticism are (supposedly) jointly owned by them. Among those who voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 (three times as many who incline to the Liberal Democrats now) 56% agreed with Williams.

The other notable demographic was the above average support for the Archbishop’s views among residents of Northern England (56%) and Scotland (53%). This presumably manifests a perception that these parts of the nation are being particularly adversely affected by the Government policies which Williams was attacking.

For Conservatives, the Archbishop’s entry on the political stage (by no means his first – he recently voiced his discomfort about the killing by United States special forces of the unarmed Osama bin Laden) has doubtless brought back unwelcome memories of Robert Runcie’s clashes with Margaret Thatcher’s administration during the 1980s. For Labour supporters the appearance of Williams’s article in the New Statesman has provided them with an unexpected opportunity to land a punch on the Coalition Government.      

It would naturally be interesting to see how political opinion would play out were the boot to be on the other foot, an Archbishop of Canterbury criticizing the policies of a Labour Government!

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Influence of the Bible

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Clive D. Field

In this special year of celebration (the quatercentenary of the Authorized or King James Version), a slim majority (54%) of Britons think the Bible is an important book, even though nearly seven in eight of them freely admit that they do not read it that often.

This is one of the principal findings from an opinion poll released on 13 May and carried out by ComRes for the Bible Society. Fieldwork was conducted online on 1-3 April 2011, among a representative sample of 2,379 adults aged 18 and over throughout Great Britain.

Asked how significant the Bible was to them personally, 8% said that it is a very important book, which they claimed to read often and which enriched their lives. The proportion was highest with 18-34s (14%), Londoners (17%), and those from the public sector (15%, virtually twice the figure for the private sector).

46% described it as an important book, which they read infrequently but which had some valuable things to say. The percentage rose steadily with age, from 29% among the 18-24s to 61% for the over-65s.

42% considered the Bible to be unimportant, not really affecting their lives, with a regional high of 55% in Wales and a low of 32% in London, albeit the over-65s (29%) recorded the smallest figure for any demographic sub-group.

4% branded the Bible a dangerous book which should be ignored, the 18-24s (12%) particularly taking this line.

Rather fewer than the 54% acknowledging the significance of the Bible felt that knowledge of it was important in appreciating specific aspects of daily life. 48% judged it relevant to an understanding of the visual arts, 46% to classic English literature, 45% to British history, 42% to everyday phrases, 29% to politics, and 24% to classical music. In other words, majorities of varying sizes consistently said that the Bible was not relevant in these contexts.

Actual knowledge of the Bible was measured by asking respondents to identify the source of five quotations, all of which came from the Bible. While 56% knew that ‘my brother’s keeper’ (Genesis 4:9) derived from the Bible, only 19% could identify it as the source of ‘the writing on the wall’ (Daniel 5:5-6), 10% ‘filthy lucre’ (1 Timothy 3:3), 9% ‘eat, drink and be merry’ (Luke 12:19), and 7% ‘a drop in the bucket’ (Isaiah 40:15).

Between one-fifth and one-half could not even guess the origin of each quotation, but others happily plumped for the offered options of Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, The Beatles or Tony Blair. Biblical literacy was especially low among the under-34s and manual workers, and high among the over-65s and AB social group.

The full data tables from the poll, disaggregated by gender, age, social grade, region and employment sector, are available at:

http://www.comres.co.uk/biblesocietyinfluenceofthebiblemay11.aspx

These results come as Bible Society in England and Wales and the Scottish Bible Society prepare to launch The People’s Bible.  This will be touring the UK between June and November, providing the opportunity to re-engage or engage with the Bible for the first time. See:

http://www.thepeoplesbible.org

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Doing God in Politics

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Clive D. Field

‘We don’t do God’ was a famous intervention by Alastair Campbell, press secretary to former Prime Minister Tony Blair, when trying to protect his boss from an interviewer’s questioning about Blair’s Christian beliefs.

That separation of religion and politics is apparently the way the electorate likes things to be, according to a newly-released YouGov survey for the Policy Exchange think-tank. Fieldwork was conducted online on 10-12 March 2011 among 2,407 adult Britons.

Asked which two or three from a list of eleven values they most wanted a political party to reflect, a mere 3% chose religious faith, which came bottom. No more than 5% in any demographic sub-group picked this option, this figure being recorded by Conservative voters in 2010 and residents of the Midlands and Wales.

Economic responsibility topped the scales at 59%, followed by fairness (50%), family values (32%), traditional values (29%), equality (21%), freedom (20%), patriotism (17%), tolerance and diversity (14%), community (12%), and environmentalism (11%).

The data table will be found at:

http://today.yougov.co.uk/sites/today.yougov.co.uk/files/yg-archives-fairness-policyexchange260411.pdf

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YouGov@Cambridge Launched

Posted on April 30, 2011 by Clive D. Field

Last Thursday (28 April) marked the virtual launch of YouGov@Cambridge, a new research forum representing a collaboration between online pollsters YouGov and the University of Cambridge’s Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS).

YouGov@Cambridge, directed by Dr Joel Faulkner Rogers, aims ‘to bring “headlights” to an increasingly complex world, where global trends are ever less about what superpowers and superbrands “do”, and ever more about “what the world thinks” – and how the two interact.’

Although the formal launch event, the YouGov Global Perspectives Conference, will not take place until 7-9 September 2011, in London and Cambridge, YouGov@Cambridge has already begun to release interim results from new surveys, a substantial archive of which can be viewed at:

http://www.yougov.polis.cam.ac.uk/archive

Many of the data on the archive site derive from an online poll conducted among an unweighted sample of 19,104 Britons aged 18 and over between 13 and 22 April 2011, but most questions appear to have been put to sub-samples. The topics covered are wide-ranging, including various items of religious interest.

For instance, 77% of respondents thought that Britain had become less religious during the past thirty years, rising to 83% of men, 84% of the over-55s and 86% of Scots. Just 6% said that Britain had become more religious, with 9% seeing no difference and 8% expressing no opinion. 66% considered that the country had become less moral over the same period.

However, only 10% overall thought that shifts in attitudes towards religion had been the biggest single change since 1981, compared with 22% citing altered opinions of ethnic minorities, 19% of the environment, and 14% of women’s role in society. The principal exception was in Scotland, where (at 18%) religious change was in second place, after environment.

Looking ahead to events which might happen during the next forty years, a mere 1% anticipated that Jesus Christ would return to earth. Science fiction beliefs were slightly more popular, with 8% expecting evidence to be found of life elsewhere in the universe and 3% forecasting that contact would be made with aliens.

Curiously, despite the abolition in 2008 of the ancient common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales, 20% of adults stated that blasphemy is always morally wrong and an additional 26% usually so. The combined figure reached 60% for the over-55s. 28% found blasphemy to be morally acceptable, while 15% said that it depended upon the circumstances and 12% had no views.

An equally surprising 20% claimed that the Church of England was very important in defining Britishness and a further 29% said that it was fairly important in this respect. The aggregate of 49% was highest among women, the over-55s and in England (just 18% of Scots agreed that the Anglican establishment was a key facet of Britishness).

Among a list of ten potential embodiments of the British way of life, tolerance of all religious faiths came eighth (at 37%, rising to 47% in multicultural London) and St Paul’s Cathedral bottom (at 30%, predictably ranging from 10% of Scots to 45% of Londoners).

Staying with inter-faith matters, 71% of Britons agreed with the proposition that, after the 9/11 attacks, there is now a real clash of cultures between Islam and the West, which continues to cause trouble. This view was most strongly held by men (75%), the over-55s (82%) and residents of northern England (76%). 12% dismissed such a clash as a myth and 17% gave other or no answers.

Following on, 57% agreed that Islamic groups were more likely than other faiths to support violence on religious grounds, and this was especially true of men (66%) and the over-55s (69%). 15% disagreed and 19% were neutral. On the other hand, 68% accepted that all religious communities have some extremists who support violence against others, 15% dissenting.

Similarly, 62% identified Islamist extremism as a major international threat to Britain and a further 26% a minor threat. A mere 2% regarded it as no threat at all, including 5% of the 18-34s and 7% of Scots. 9% did not know what to think.

Doubtless from the same motivation, 46% were unwilling to contemplate an Afghan-Islamic state as a solution to the Afghanistan conflict, although the question-wording for this item might be described as somewhat leading. Just 18% backed the option, with 37% undecided.

In general, 77% contended that ‘religion was a private matter and had no place in politics’.

The YouGov@Cambridge archive site also contains data from a Royal Wedding poll, undertaken on 26 and 27 April 2011 among 2,666 adults aged 18 and over. This posed one question of interest to BRIN: should the monarch continue to be Supreme Governor of the Church of England?

47% argued that the monarch should remain as head of the Established Church, with 29% against and 25% undecided. There was a simple majority in favour of the status quo among all demographic sub-groups except for the Scots, who voted 35% to 30% for abolition of the Supreme Governorship.

This post is almost entirely derived from the full computer tabulations in the online archive. Some headlines, with commentary by YouGov, also appear in the Royal Wedding Special report, published on 28 April and available at:

http://www.yougov.polis.cam.ac.uk/sites/yougov.polis.cam.ac.uk/files/YouGov_Royal_Wedding_Dossier.pdf

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