Why are we so different? Several surveys have shown that the British are the most pro-lockdown in the world. Ipsos Mori found at the end of April that only 23% of Brits said the economy and businesses should reopen even if the virus is not fully contained. This number is much lower than in other countries, all at varying stages and levels of intensity of the outbreak: just over a third of Americans, a majority of Italians, 58% of Chinese, and six in 10 Russians.
Nor has our appetite for lockdown diminished since then: the most recent YouGov survey finds that 77% of people would support lockdown being extended beyond this weekend. That’s much higher than any policy, including the most plentiful tax cuts and giveaways, that I polled while I was at Downing Street.
Fear of the virus certainly plays a role. Many are clearly concerned about going back to work or sending their child to school. Boris Johnson’s experience with the virus transformed perceptions of it. No longer was this the flu-like, largely mild illness that affected the elderly the worst, but an indiscriminate, silent assassin, able to hospitalise even our relatively healthy, middle-aged prime minister.
It is easy to dismiss the consequences of this in a world where we lurch from one big story to the next, but it had a deep psychological effect on the nation. The writer Matthew d’Ancona accurately described this as “a national psychodrama … the collective anxiety not of an electorate, but of a tribe under siege”.
Yet fear cannot entirely explain our exceptionalism. An international survey by Kekst CNC found that Americans are actually more concerned about the risk of the virus on their own health than the British.
Others have pointed to the strength of Britain’s business support measures and the resilience built into business in preparation for a no-deal Brexit as a possible explanation for a society keener to stay at home; but the extent of economic intervention has been greater still in European countries quite happy to shake off lockdown.
Two bigger, deeper phenomena may better explain things. The first is the central and distinctly emotional position of the NHS in the public’s mind. Britons are emotionally committed to the NHS in a way that other populations are not to their health systems. This helps explains why Downing Street made it such a central part of their communications strategy: “protect the NHS” polled as a much more powerful persuader than “save lives”. Before the pandemic, I wrote about focus groups I ran in Darlington with new Conservative voters. One man said the NHS is “in our blood”. Those three words are key to understanding the adherence to and continued support for the lockdown: this is closer to a religion than a health service.
Government messaging has been effective, but so has that of other nations. The government’s appeal to protect the NHS is chiming with something deeper, which is not echoed elsewhere. By staying at home, people believe they are protecting this emotional holy grail of British society, and the heroic nurses and doctors they applaud every week. Arguments to wholly abandon that for economic gain feel instinctively wrong.
There is another reason for the extent of support for lockdown in the UK, which might not have much to do with the policy at all. It may sound hard to believe for those locked into factionalism on social media, but our public is a great deal more united. People’s views on and around coronavirus are freer of the politics we see in other countries. Support for lockdown in the US is more fractured because it has become a partisan debate, with which camp you are in determining the extent of your enthusiasm – if you are a Republican, you feel obliged to want to see restrictions lifted, if you are a Democrat, you feel obliged to want to see restrictions stay in place.
European populist parties like the Sweden Democrats and Alternative für Deutschland, that have followers aplenty, have taken more extreme positions, meaning fewer overall support their government’s position.
Here, Conservative and Labour voters think alike on lockdown. We have an apolitical head of state, capable of speaking to all. We do not have a populist party with any significant reach. The Steve Bakers of this world, angrily typing diatribes against lockdown, have next to no cut-through in the wider population. Conspiracies are supported by a fraction at best. As a nation, we are more likely to listen and follow those in charge.
This perhaps is what may really be driving support for lockdown. Quite aside from the merits and demerits of the policy, the British people are more willing to listen, engage with and do what their government says in periods of national emergency like this. Put simply, if the government advises them to do something, they are more likely to do it.
It is this voluntary obedience, this active consent, that may make Johnson’s next move easier than some think. There is, of course, no appetite for a full-scale and immediate return to work, and shrill calls to do so will continue to fall flat – the fear of the virus and practical concerns about workplaces and schools are real.
But this willingness to follow the rules, to take government advice at face value, may well mean that – once announced – there will be more consent for and uptake of gradual changes to the rules than current polling suggests. Though on the surface our unique difference with other countries is support for lockdown, it might be that our real differentiator is our capacity to do what we are told.
• James Johnson is a former Downing Street pollster who worked under Theresa May and now runs JL Partners