There is no shortage of people willing to tell you, with great confidence, precisely why your energy bill has risen. Some invoke Net Zero. Others point to small boats. A surprising number manage both in the same sentence, with the seamless logic of a man who has already reached his conclusion and is merely auditioning justifications.
We at The Rationals enjoy the rare distinction of being politically homeless — which is to say, no party particularly wants us, and we have returned the compliment in full. This leaves us, more by accident than by virtue, tolerably well-placed to ask a question without already knowing the answer we would prefer.
Most polling on such matters arrives with an invisible asterisk, commissioned by a think tank with a position to defend, a campaign with a result to validate, or a newspaper with a headline already written.
We have opted for something almost embarrassingly old-fashioned, asking people what they actually think, with no client to please and no prior conclusion to protect — and publishing the results whether they suit anyone’s prejudices, including our own.
This is not, we should stress, an attempt to adjudicate the matter from on high. We have included causes that will please readers of every persuasion and irritate most of them at least once — wholesale gas prices, Net Zero costs, immigration and population growth, energy company profits, and the general creak of Britain’s ageing infrastructure — on the reasonable grounds that reality, unlike a newspaper column, is rarely tidy enough to possess a single villain.
You may select as many causes as you like. You may also, of course, choose “don’t know,” an answer still considered acceptable in polite society, whatever Twitter or Tik Tok may suggest to the contrary.
You will see the results here first — as our readers always do. We shall pass them on to the media and political parties afterwards, for whatever good that may do. At least no one will be able to claim the numbers were cooked to fit a predetermined narrative.
A final word. There are only two of us behind this, with neither a polling firm’s budget nor a research department. A survey of this kind is only as good as the number of people willing to take part.
If you complete it — and especially if you share it to someone of different politics who would otherwise never see it — you will be performing the genuine, if unglamorous, work of making it honest rather than merely well-intentioned. We are grateful.
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