The real low-information voter

It's university-educated liberals, not "gammons", who aren't clued up on current debates

One of the clips that comes up if you search for “Gammon” on X

Although the expression “low-information voter” has historically been used to refer to Brexiteers and Trump voters, I sometimes think it’s best applied to the “university-educated liberal” (UEL, for brevity purposes).

I reached this conclusion after repeatedly finding myself in a minority of journalists who oppose ULEZ and other anti-traffic schemes. I’m not suggesting my logic is infallible - well, I sometimes like to think it is - just that my opponents’, whom I mostly sparred online, seemed to be non-existent.

“But think of the children’s lungs!” was one of the most common lines I heard. That or “don’t you care about climate change?!” My arguments, on the other hand, didn’t make for sexy soundbites. I’ve put them in bullet points below - in case you want to skimread - as that’s how boring they are:

• “What about the fact that LTNs are creating more pollution by gridlocking London?”

• “Don’t you think LTNs are undemocratic, seeing as large numbers of them were introduced in lockdown when most voters couldn’t see their installation, never mind give consent to it?”

• “What about the fact that you have to drive a ULEZ-compliant car a certain amount of times before offsetting the energy costs of making it?”

• “What’s the point of buying a ULEZ-compliant car if the end goal is to ban cars, as increasing numbers of LTNs seem to suggest?”

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Especially when compared to moral hysteria - the ultimate trump card of UELs.

I’ve nothing against university education per se - I went to one of these institutions myself and am almost certainly in the same socioeconomic bracket as most UELs - but I tend to think degrees have become one of the worst indicators of intelligence. Generally they appear to train people to be all the things that aren’t desirable in society, making them conformist, illiberal and lacking the skills the economy demands. Over time I have noticed I get much more out of conversations with school of life/man-with-a-van types than the majority of UELs. The former seem to be better clued up current affairs, not least because they tend to bear the brunt of policies like ULEZ (more likely to get under the bonnet of a car than the desk-based UEL).

It strikes me that universities, paradoxically, make people less curious about the world around them and its complexities, not only because some policies don’t affect them, but also through lack of interest in the nitty gritty. My theory is that, emboldened by their degrees, UELs do not think they have much more to learn in life - at least, not anything that falls outside of the recommendations of Waterstones. Instead, the UEL’s default is to lean on the proclamations of high-status players within their in-group, such as Sadiq Khan, James O’Brien and Robert Peston, to get a flavour for what they should think. This is how we end up with apparently “clever” people hysterically warning about “children’s lungs”, lines fed to them by politicians, or deciding that JK Rowling is bad without really being able to explain why.

UELs permeate about every aspect of organisational life, from the Civil Service to the arts sector to financial services, so you have to ask whether this is part of why the economy is in such a mess. I suspect a lot of our current woes are the result of employees who’ve been trained in the “theoretical” - more used to chin-stroking seminars than how to unblock a drain - rather than practical skills, the very thing needed to spur Blighty on. As teenagers, I’ll bet most UELs would have scoffed at the thought of trading at a weekend market, or working on a farm, having been raised to think that these jobs are for mysterious “other people” while they self-actualise and move onto the Tony Blair Realm of Existence. Yet it’s these skills, like degrees the economy demands, that they really needed.

Not only is the educated liberal out of touch, but they are snotty along with it, sometimes not even realising this to be the case. They might even think they speak for the working-class, while deeming some of its representatives “gammon”. Entrenched snobbery is how we ended up with the line “they didn’t know what they were voting for” in the aftermath of Brexit. The coining of the term “low-information voter” ultimately implied that UELs were their “high-information” equivalents, put on earth to set Wetherspoons regulars straight. It reassures UELs to think that Brexit and Trump were simply the result of algorithms poisoning the minds of evil bald voters, and if they could only just correct the internet for next time, they’ll get the right outcome. This may be achieved through the Online Harms Bill or the intervention of a Marianna Spring documentary on disinformation.

Frankly, for all their education, I can’t help but think that the UEL is responsible for many of our country’s ills. You can have all the degrees possible, but nowt matters if you can’t master the basics - nor have awareness that you do not. Make no mistake, qualifications have fast become the sign of a low-information brain.