What do you really, really want?

This Green and Surprisingly Pleasant Land - getting stuff done

Are people irremediably selfish and so blinded by self-interest that they fail to understand that getting everything they want is unrealistic?

As ever, when questions of this nature arise it makes sense to consult the wisdom of the Spice Girls who posed the seminal question – ‘what do you really, really want’

in Wanabee they examined this dilemma in the way they know best: ‘you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends’. With these words they tackle an often overlooked aspect of emotional attachments which is that the price of love also involves taking on the baggage of the lover’s friends.

In other words, to get one thing involves getting something you might not have bargained for.

Presumably by now you will have guessed where I am heading. Obviously it’s the post office, rarely out of the news these days.

The Royal Mail’s bosses have declared that the only way to get out of the financial hole which, of course is not their fault, and preserve the principle of universal delivery, is to drastically reduce their statutory responsibility to deliver letters on a daily basis. They have suggested reducing delivery to weekdays only or maybe just three days per week.

YouGov then asked people whether they would accept the Saturday service being discontinued. Surprisingly, because it was widely assumed that degradation of the service would be widely unpopular, 48 per cent of respondents said that they would accept this cut, while 42 per cent disagreed.

So, a great many people are realistic enough to accept inconvenience in the interests of keeping the service going. However such willingness has its limits. The classic example is housing where people tend to agree on the need to expand home building but are far less amenable to the notion that these homes should be built next door to where they live. This is a bigger ask which unsurprisingly is met with bigger resistance. That in turn makes it hideously difficult to achieve the widely supported objective of increasing the housing stock.

Other aspects of public policy, requiring public sacrifice, seem equally insurmountable. A good example is taxation. Of course increasing taxation is rarely popular but recent opinion polls have indicated that because people tend to be reasonable as many of them are prepared to accept higher levels of taxation if it means that social services will not be cut. This runs counter to a popular belief that tax cuts are a surefire election winner while higher levels of taxation pave the road to electoral defeat.

This is certainly an article of faith in the Conservative Party. But the party zealots seem not to have noticed that most folk are both taxpayers and users of social services, notably health care and education. So, they have self interest in preserving these services, even if it means higher taxes.

An even more challenging example for those who are fighting the good fight to degrade the environment comes from evidence that conservation measures are increasingly popular because people are rather concerned about their children growing up in a world with high levels of pollution. Yet there is often reluctance to pay the price for achieving change.

The backlash against the extension of London’s ultra-low emission zone is cited as evidence of this resistance. It gives those keen on fighting cultural wars an opportunity to vent. But once you dig deeper it becomes clear that objectives of the scheme are not unpopular. The problem is that people resent the cost burden falling on owners of elderly, more polluting vehicles, who tend to be least able to afford it. Trying to turn this issue into some kind of war on woke suggests an arrogant assumption that people are stupid. The basis of resistance to this change is not so much ideological as practical. If owners of older vehicles were able to buy newer, more energy efficient vehicles, it’s a fair bet that they would do so. In other words, the barrier to this innovation is hardly insurmountable and can be met by adding more carrots and less sticks.

That old saying about people doing the right thing after all other alternatives have been exhausted has a habit of being proved with great regularity.

Coming back to the Spice Girls, as we must, it means that the answer to the question of what do you really, really want is almost always that most things you want are only attainable with compromise. Politicians tend to think that people are unrealistic in seeking things they want when the truth is that most people are pragmatic, right up the point where what the government wants is plain unreasonable or proclaimed by Liz Truss, which, coming to think of it, is the same thing.