Professor David Betts
speaker
94 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 30 Jan
Professor David Betts’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
With respect to the division between elite and mass, I think that's pretty apparent.
And just depending how you look at it, I mean, it's apparent in the way that people discuss national politics.
the frequency with which people invoke the idea of elite betrayal, the frequency with which you see political commentary, which is neither left nor right, actually.
This is across the political spectrum where people talk about broken Britain, not as a thesis statement, but as a premise that is just widely assumed to be true, that the country is...
uh is broken in uh
a range of very obvious manners.
But I suppose for myself, the one that is most measurable and kind of has the most scholarly respectability, I guess, because it's been consistently measured, is what polling tells us about levels of trust and about people's sense of
but specifically in their trust in government and trust in political officials.
So there is in the UK something called the British Social Attitude Survey.
It's been running for many years.
It asks the same questions consistently.
And that, from the perspective of someone who is measuring the health and cohesiveness of a given society, is a highly alarming document.
It's like looking at an EKG where the –
where the line is descending towards zero very, very deliberately.
So currently, just about 9% of people in the country profess to believe politicians are honest and work in the national interest.
There are other even more alarming indicators.
Something like 60%, roughly 60% of Britons between the ages of 18 and 34 now agree with the statement that
some form of violence is permissible to achieve social change.
17% think actual physical violence is okay to do that.
That's not a healthy sign by any measure.
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