Britain’s Choice: Polarisation or Cohesion

Abstract

Britain’s Choice, a report published by More in Common, develops a new segmentation of the British public based on their core beliefs, values and identities. Identifying seven segments, the report aims to better understand the British public, the goal being to work out how to build a more cohesive Britain—the choice facing Britain being a path to further division and polarisation or one to greater solidarity and shared values. The report strikes a broadly optimistic turn and highlights the shared values across the seven groups, but there are warning signs in the data that there are still many issues on which these groups could be divided, the overlap between them, for now, limiting the success of attempts to do so and throwing up a ‘kaleidoscopic’ pattern that changes from issue to issue.