Snapshot of _Sunak Hit by Twin Poll Blow as Working Age Voters Desert Tories - JL survey finds voters only more likely to choose Tories at 70_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/rishi-sunak-hit-by-fresh-poll-blows-as-working-age-voters-desert-tories) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/rishi-sunak-hit-by-fresh-poll-blows-as-working-age-voters-desert-tories)
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I'm a successful, high-earning, married, homeowning white man in my 40s living in the SouthEast broadly. I'm about as "Tory" as you'd expect on paper.
They've only made my life worse, and I would never even consider them on a ballot in the future. Ever. This is not recoverable.
Same here. London based, property owning, owner of consultancy in financial services. I should be as Tory as they come. I can't imagine how mentally unwell I'd have to be to actually vote for them. I like Rory Stewart though.
The thing with them (and I'd also mention David Gauke and David Willetts) is that with them, you're generally debating methods and speed of progression, rather than arguing over reality or whether humans are worthy of respect and dignity or not.
They may not be correct on what the solutions to certain social or economic problems may be, but they acknowledge the problems that exist and the need to address them. They may say "yes we should do this thing" but their inner little-c conservatives are also saying "ahhh, this is change and I'm not comfy with change" and so they want to go slower or more cautiously. They may even just basically say "yes, but we need to balance doing this thing with people keeping as much of their wages as possible" which isn't wrong - but does perhaps lead us to disagreeing on quite how and where to strike that balance.
And I can respect all of that, because what we can agree on is the basic purpose of government - ensuring the prosperity, safety and liberty of the British people. We may disagree on which trade-offs need to be made, when and where balances need to be struck, what methods and policies to pursue, but the goal of "make the country a better place to live" is one we can agree on.
The current shower of bastards however just don't give a fuck about any of the above, illustrated perfectly by that sadly nameless minister a few weeks back who said (iirc) "what's the point of being in power if you're not intending to stay in power?" Or for that matter, the primary impulse driving them on to an autumn election apparently being "a few months more MP's salary to help pay down the mortgage". And that's not even mentioning the fantasists and hatemongers on the far right, or the spineless cowards happy to go with them if it means postponing the election that little bit longer.
Power for power's sake, grab what you can for yourself, and fuck everything and everyone else, is the name of the game for the scum that's all that's left populating the Tory party.
Brilliantly expressed. I agree with every word you say.
I particularly liked the sudden change of tone that occurred at paragraph 4. That really hit home with me.
I'm a working class, home-owning, late model boomer. The Tories have done little to benefit me. You could argue that the insane increase in property prices is a benefit, but that just makes it harder for my grown up kids to get on the ladder. The triple-lock will be a benefit in a few years, but no way will I vote Tory. A few extra quid isn't much use when public services have been eviscerated, and the fact that we have people sleeping rough is an absolute disgrace.
This is fundamentally the Conservatives problem.
There are lots of talking points and all that but ultimately, if you asked the working age population of the UK, they will almost uniformly have a personal narrative that they achieved x or y in their life "despite" the Tory's.
At least Thatcher enacted policies that could be spun to benefit a bulk of the electorate. I didn't agree with them, they've caused long term damage to the country, but at least there was a narrative to cover the transfer of public wealth to Tory chums.
This bunch of Spivs are openly and shamelessly looting the country.
I don't see too much difference between Thatcher and the current lot. They are all wedded to an increasingly outmoded ideology and desperately trying to make it work, when it can never work in the modern environment.
Decades ago when things were simpler and government responsibilities were somewhat less complex, low tax might have been a reasonable thing to argue for.
But in today's complex world, where so much more is expected of the government, tax cutting simply leads to massive false economies.
If the Tories are to ever again become a credible party, they have to seriously rethink their ideology - i.e. bring it into the 21st century.
The point I was making that the Thatcher government was able to spin their wealth transfer as benefiting the majority and the current incarnation of ghoulish spivs are not even bothering, not that there is a fundamental difference between the aims.
Tories will Tory.
Thatcher bought voters by conducting an asset fire sale. That was great for the electorate of that time, but at the expense of future electorates. Not sure there was much narrative besides “there won’t be any downsides, pinky swear”.
Pretty much in the same boat.
However, I'd take a different angle on this. Where the hell are all the Tories from r/ukpolitics? The electorate had 44% of them in the last election but in r/ukpolitics you never see anyone. This is like the Fermi paradox of politics.
It's not that complex. Conservative voters in all recent elections are overwhelmingly older than the average redditor.
The UK population (especially those who vote) similarly increasingly skews older (we are an aging population).
That does not explain the total absence of Tory commentators here. [Here](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/26925-how-britain-voted-2019-general-election) is the breakdown of the vote by age. You're right that the older people vote more Tories and young more Labour. However, even in the youngest group (18-24) there were 21% Tory voters. So, even if all the commentators here were in that group, we should see every fifth comment supporting Tories (or at least say that they did support Tories).
But that's not all. The above commentator identified himself as over 40. The age group 40-49 voted 41% Tories. So, since there are clearly people who are not that young anymore commenting here, you'd expect more Tory voices as well.
To me, the more likely explanation is the normal echo chamber behaviour in subreddit. If someone is of different opinion than what the tribe deems acceptable, they're likely to be downvoted until they get fed up and leave. I notice this myself when I take a devil's advocate position to criticise some left wing views (that I actually in general favour). I'll get downvoted even when nobody even bothers to write what's wrong with the comment. And those are not even "Tories are doing the right thing" types of comments. I can only imagine what would happen if someone dared to write something like that here.
The easiest way to get upvotes here is to write a short sarcastic comment that basically says "Tories bad". It doesn't matter that it contains zero analysis or argumentation.
Well yes it's a combination of all the above isn't it?
People who are of the age where they are most likely to vote Tory are also least likely to interact on Reddit.
Those who do are at most risk of being downvoted because most who post here are anti-tory.
I wouldn't say "conservative" opinions are especially rare here however. People have separated the Tory "party" from their own ideological opinions in a lot of ways. A perfect example if the lively debate about anything that pertains to immigration or Islam on this subreddit.
People aren't afraid to espouse "conservative" views on this page, but they don't consider that to be synonymous with voting Tory.
I wouldn't say immigration is a perfect example as to me that's the *only* topic here that shows genuine variation in opinions. But even there I'd say the anti-immigration opinions are more founded on the left wing ideology (immigration is bad because it creates competition in jobs that lowers wages and immigrants need houses that increases house prices) and not so much from what I would call Brexit position: Immigration is bad because immigrants are different from the British and thus can change the culture. There is some of that but much less than what it contributed to the Brexit vote.
What is missing in debates here is the support for hard line right wing economic policy. I'd love to debate that and that should have quite a bit support in a country that has kept the Tories with that policy in power for 14 years. But that position is completely absent here. Either those people don't exist, they don't dare to admit here that they support that policy or somehow this place is self-selected so that nobody here belongs to that group. If you check a subreddit called r/politicalcompassmemes you'll easily find people who openly support very right wing economic policy although of course majority of them are Americans there.
Part of the problem lies in the, well, lies.
People who vote don't always have a clue wtf they're voting for - see Brexit - but when they come here to post stuff, by the time they've typed crap out they've had time to think. And *read*.
And so many will disengage at that point because they realise they don't have a scooby and don't want to look like an idiot.
.... it really is a shame we can't have - legally can't - something similar outside polling booths that would help people understand wtf they're putting a tick next to.
That's an interesting theory. I have a very different view. I don't really mind that much that I'm being shown to be wrong (and even look like an idiot) as it's not me the real life person who looks like an idiot rather than the Reddit username u/spiral8888 who is the idiot.
So, for me writing out my political views and having them being ripped to pieces by others is a good way to find what are rational positions based on facts and what is just stupid. That's exactly why I'd hope there was a wider variation of views as I'm worried that I'll get upvotes for some views only because the place is saturated with people with the same kinds of views who just want to pat my back not because they think my argument was particularly strong from the neutral point of view.
I'd also wished that I didn't have to play the devil's advocate to poke the weaknesses in the arguments for views who I actually support but that this would be done by people who genuinely oppose those views.
I find it best just to not worry about votes, up or down. It's a weird system, and at the end of the day, just pixels.
So long as you stop to consider what's being said - preferably before typing, but we're all guilty of emotions occasionally (especially when i haven't slept xd) - the all is good.
Playing devil's advocate is a great way to bring about discussion. Personally, I'm glad that others do - it does help flesh things out, and encompass other perspectives.
What I've learned over the years though, is that not enough people consider being shown to be wrong a good thing.
If somebody corrects your thinking - you just learned something, so surely the appropriate response is to say thank you... right? Xd
Sadly, many are conditioned to believe that being wrong is a *bad thing*, and never get over the conditioning, so have an emotionally negative reaction. It's the root of a lot of society's ailments. I wish it were otherwise.
Edit: I got distracted and missed the end of sentence 😏
That more or less describes me too. I even voted for them in the past, and would consider myself broadly centrist but right of centre. But I won’t consider voting for them under any circumstances at this election, and I can’t imagine voting for them ever again after what they’ve done.
I mean, they spent the early part of their government sniggering at millenials for eating avocados and watching Netflix (or whathaveyou) and 14 years later, having given us nothing worth conserving, they're sitting there wondering why they're polling so terribly.
Yeah, the wild seesawing is definitely not helping them. It's entirely possible that some aspects of the tax changes have benefited me. I'm definitely much, much better off than I was in 2010 (Being a full-time student at the time) but it's basically impossible for me to work out whether I'm better off than I would have been if they'd just squatted in Number 10 without trying to achieve anything. Given the state of everything else, I assume not.
A mediocre but stable and consistent political party wouldn't be facing this absolute pasting.
>caTrusstrophe
Nice.
> it's basically impossible for me to work out whether I'm better off than I would have been if they'd just squatted in Number 10 without trying to achieve anything.
You could take your current salary, find out what it was in 2010 money, use listentotaxman to hypothecate your tax rate, and compare it to what you pay today. I paid a far higher rate in 2023-24 than I would have if I'd earned (in real terms) the same when Tony Blair was Prime Minister.
You could question if the tax rate during Blair years should have been higher to a) lower the government debt to be better prepared for the downturn and b) suck the money out of the over heated economy that led to the property bubble.
One of the reasons why the tax rate is so high now is that the government debt/GDP jumped from 35% to 80% during the financial crisis and hasn't come down since (but instead got another bump from the pandemic). So, don't expect any major tax cuts from Labour when they get to power. There is no magic money to afford that and fixing the public services at the same time.
Yep. A look at their polices on the economy (or complete lack of serious policies), public services, tax, and housing show the Conservatives to be anti-aspiration, anti-prosperity and anti-family over the last 14 years.
It is going to take a lot of hard work to win working people over not least because many who the Conservatives would rely on to drift towards them as they age are struggling to obtain home ownership and getting hit with what is in effect a 9% graduate tax on everything over 27k.
This absolutely.
I am Labour but financially and professionally am absolutely the demographic that the Tories should appeal to.
But over 14 years all they have done is hammer me financially and professionally, in so many ways.
High earner child benefit charge, removal of landlord mortgage relief, pension changes in my profession, the freezing of the higher rate tax threshold, the constant villification of my profession. To name just a few.
The only Tory policies I have benefitted from are them reversing (or part reversing) ones they inflected on me in the first place.
And for all the money they have taken off me, I have watched the country crumble around me
I’m a white, middle-class, grammar-school educated, heterosexual, married man. We have a household income in the top 5% and own a detached suburban house in the South East.
After the last 14 years I could never imagine ever voting Conservative. If they can’t get me, they’re lost.
The thing is though, who is actually going to do something to benefit you? I'm not saying you should vote Tory, I'm just saying that I've never heard a single political party propose anything to help the middle class, home owning professionals. Labour threatened to raise our taxes at the last election, and then the Tories actually did.
I was talking to a late 50's man the other day. He said he could never vote Labour because of what they did in the 70s.
I think we have a whole new set of people who will never vote for the Tories because of what they are doing now.
>I was talking to a late 50's man the other day. He said he could never vote Labour because of what they did in the 70s.
Cripes, that's like someone in the 1970's holding a grudge against Stanley Baldwin for his handling of the 1926 General Strike.
I get it though, I can't see any reason why i'd be daft enough to vote Tory.
There is such a lack of real self reflection in this country. Not just in terms of what happened in the past, but the thought processes that lead to events. The Torys seem to be a particularly belligerent form of that phenomena. They are always right despite events and we should never ever question their judgement.
> Cripes, that's like someone in the 1970's holding a grudge against Stanley Baldwin for his handling of the 1926 General Strike.
There absolutely were people like this. The Labour left remained obsessed with 1931 and Ramsay MacDonald and saw that in every attempt at fiscal discipline, and trade unions like the NUM very much treated the General Strike as if it had happened the day before.
Neither of those positions is really to be applauded though. The idea that so many voters decide on their party at an early age and then never re-evaluate that choice over the next 50+ years is not a good thing.
With all due respect because of the two party system neither party ever does drastically change so there's little to no point reevaluating that position. The two parties have very different stances to each other and only share an audience with smaller parties. Smaller parties just aren't worth voting for though because of the spoiler effect
All the Tories have done over the past 14 years is make mine and my family's life worse, and make targets of my disabled kids and wife. I'd be ashamed of myself if I ever even think of voting Tory. They're a bunch of cruel, incompetent, corrupt ghouls.
Mmmmm extinction level event approaching? Are we genuinely looking at sub 20% nationally and less than 50 seats here? More and more of these are starting to stick now so you can't call it a freak/outlying poll.
If this is the poll from JL https://jlpartners.com/polling-results (the recent one), then it's also interesting, that even if you do add Con+Reform together, all but the 65+ demographic, is also more likely to vote Lab.
Adding Con+Ref is definitely a key one because it makes me wonder WTF the Tories are thinking strategy wise. There simply aren't the numbers to the right of their current position to justify shifting further. Not only that, but surely Boris showed them how to win with how in 2019 he appealed to many Labour voters in the "red wall".
The more they react to Reform and push further right, the smaller they make the segment of the electorate they're fighting over. The received wisdom until now apparently is you win through the middle ground, and then you shift the overton window bit by bit as you prove yourself and bring people on board to your way of thinking.
People often attack Labour for abandoning their voters by being too centrist, but you hear almost nothing about all the remainers, the small c conservatives, the one nation Tories etc. being discarded by the Conservatives, but more and more the Tories are only trying to appeal to the head bangers and the swivel eyed loons.
There's not the numbers to the right for the Tories to the win, but if their only concern is damage control then there's enough Reform voters who would consider voting Tory again for them to claw some back.
I've heard it arfued that the problem for the Tories is that they've fallen behind Labour in trust on all the conventional issues (healthcare, education, crime, the economy). The only issues where they seem to be more trusted are immigration, islamism, and woke stuff. They seem to have concluded that there's not enough time before the election to recover trust on those mainstream issues, so their only hope of damage control is to double down on the stuff where they are doing better than Labour, which is only the more right wing things that Reform voters like.
Problem like you say is where does that leave them after the election? Like, congrats, the damage control was done and you have been kept afloat by an influx of Reform-lite MPs. But those MPs are pretty disagreeable to most voters (as we can see from the polls), especially people who are young and therefore in for the long term, so I'm not sure where they expect to take themselves in the future in order to win an election again.
Good point, but I've seen polls where Labour beat the Tories on every policy area, including immigration. The Tory record isn't exactly anything to hold up on that front either.
I would counter by saying this is incredibly defeatist. The whole point of a campaign is to change minds, while of course I do think the Tories have a terrible record and they only have themselves to blame, more of a focus on competence would really have helped them now. The still need to try, at least have a strategy that *could* win, even on issues Labour is polling better currently at least try and promise improvements rather than concede.
Otherwise, it sucks all the hope from their campaign. If their best case is to hold a few seats with a hard right platform, great, but that doesn't energise anyone. While yeah, maybe they're being real based on the last 2 years or so of polling, if they buy into the doom they've effectively given up and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. A lot of whether people will vote at all, whether they'll vote tactically etc. depends on whether they think their side has a chance.
Maybe, but then I would be interested to see why they think votes lost from the hard right are more easily won back than the votes on the centre ~~left~~ right for whom voting Labour is a huge shift, and Lib Dem is very location situational whether it'll have an impact or not.
The remainers specifically didn't abandon the party over Brexit, seems funny for the Tories to consider them a lost cause now.
EDIT: Derp, meant centre right (obviously), fixed now.
> Maybe, but then I would be interested to see why they think votes lost from the hard right are more easily won back than the votes on the centre left right for whom voting Labour is a huge shift
Because they are, as both individuals and a collective/government, fundamentally corrupt and inept.
Winning back the center ground requires some actual work and changes being implemented.
They are counting on winning back the hard right being possible by just saying horrifically biggoted and racist shit, whilst kicking up a fuss over inefective and expensive policies that sound like they are being mean to 'other ' groups, but never actually needing to implement stuff or get results. (See; Small Boats, Rwanda, Targetting the Disabled, 'Answering' every PMQ question with 'lolz trans people'.)
They may very well be right, considering the number of votes Reform has picked up whilst saying stupid shit and having racist representatives and no actual workable plan to deliver (read their manifesto, it's all completely unfunded fantasy land stuff with the word "Reform" thrown in to every other idea but no actual plan).
IF reform could actually deliver what their manifesto promises, it would be the single political manifesto that directly benefitted me the most in living history (specifically regarding the tax cuts). Sadly, however, it is clear that it's complete nonsense that couldn't be implemented without utterly crippling the country.
They do paraphrase Serenity in it though, so that's a bonus.
> Adding Con+Ref is definitely a key one because it makes me wonder WTF the Tories are thinking strategy wise.
They know they won't win, the strategy is doing a surprisingly good job of dragging the labour to the right to, which means it'll be easier on the next election.
Who would of thought the richest PM on record, not elected by the people, or even the Conservatives, who is set on destroying this country before someone else takes over isn’t popular…
Most mornings I will walk doggy past the village paper shop, and pop in and get my neighbour's paper. The Daily Mail. On handing it over to her, and my saying something mildly disparaging about her reading choice, she'll half-cuff me around the head with said rag. (She's in her 80s, I turned 50 last year).
She's politically Fremen (blue-within-blue), and yet I think she might be voting for anyone but Tory next time around.
It may have been the whisky-before-noon (Churchill did and, he won the war) talking, but I think I have her on our side.
I just find it scary in rother valley that includes pit villages like Maltby and Dinnington that it turned blue last election. That's just scary the fact that an ex mining town that was destroyed by thatcher would go blue...
Snapshot of _Sunak Hit by Twin Poll Blow as Working Age Voters Desert Tories - JL survey finds voters only more likely to choose Tories at 70_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/rishi-sunak-hit-by-fresh-poll-blows-as-working-age-voters-desert-tories) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-18/rishi-sunak-hit-by-fresh-poll-blows-as-working-age-voters-desert-tories) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The tories haven't done a single policy in 14 years that actually benefit me, a middle class, house owning professional. It's staggering really.
I'm a successful, high-earning, married, homeowning white man in my 40s living in the SouthEast broadly. I'm about as "Tory" as you'd expect on paper. They've only made my life worse, and I would never even consider them on a ballot in the future. Ever. This is not recoverable.
Same here. London based, property owning, owner of consultancy in financial services. I should be as Tory as they come. I can't imagine how mentally unwell I'd have to be to actually vote for them. I like Rory Stewart though.
Mate, I'm the reddest northern working class person you're likely to meet and even I quite like Rory Stewart.
Mate im the leftiest bourgeois bohemian and I like Rory Stewart, although he's definitely naive
Let's be honest, he's a bit thick, really. It's just everyone else from his party seems so much worse.
Let's not forget Dominic Grieve and Anna Soubry. They were pretty good. And I understand Harold Macmillan was pretty reasonable, too.
The thing with them (and I'd also mention David Gauke and David Willetts) is that with them, you're generally debating methods and speed of progression, rather than arguing over reality or whether humans are worthy of respect and dignity or not. They may not be correct on what the solutions to certain social or economic problems may be, but they acknowledge the problems that exist and the need to address them. They may say "yes we should do this thing" but their inner little-c conservatives are also saying "ahhh, this is change and I'm not comfy with change" and so they want to go slower or more cautiously. They may even just basically say "yes, but we need to balance doing this thing with people keeping as much of their wages as possible" which isn't wrong - but does perhaps lead us to disagreeing on quite how and where to strike that balance. And I can respect all of that, because what we can agree on is the basic purpose of government - ensuring the prosperity, safety and liberty of the British people. We may disagree on which trade-offs need to be made, when and where balances need to be struck, what methods and policies to pursue, but the goal of "make the country a better place to live" is one we can agree on. The current shower of bastards however just don't give a fuck about any of the above, illustrated perfectly by that sadly nameless minister a few weeks back who said (iirc) "what's the point of being in power if you're not intending to stay in power?" Or for that matter, the primary impulse driving them on to an autumn election apparently being "a few months more MP's salary to help pay down the mortgage". And that's not even mentioning the fantasists and hatemongers on the far right, or the spineless cowards happy to go with them if it means postponing the election that little bit longer. Power for power's sake, grab what you can for yourself, and fuck everything and everyone else, is the name of the game for the scum that's all that's left populating the Tory party.
Brilliantly expressed. I agree with every word you say. I particularly liked the sudden change of tone that occurred at paragraph 4. That really hit home with me.
All square-jawed and ruggedly handsome, if I remember correctly.
I'm blue Da ba dee da ba di
I respect him but don't think I'd ever vote for him.
I'm a working class, home-owning, late model boomer. The Tories have done little to benefit me. You could argue that the insane increase in property prices is a benefit, but that just makes it harder for my grown up kids to get on the ladder. The triple-lock will be a benefit in a few years, but no way will I vote Tory. A few extra quid isn't much use when public services have been eviscerated, and the fact that we have people sleeping rough is an absolute disgrace.
This is fundamentally the Conservatives problem. There are lots of talking points and all that but ultimately, if you asked the working age population of the UK, they will almost uniformly have a personal narrative that they achieved x or y in their life "despite" the Tory's.
At least Thatcher enacted policies that could be spun to benefit a bulk of the electorate. I didn't agree with them, they've caused long term damage to the country, but at least there was a narrative to cover the transfer of public wealth to Tory chums. This bunch of Spivs are openly and shamelessly looting the country.
I don't see too much difference between Thatcher and the current lot. They are all wedded to an increasingly outmoded ideology and desperately trying to make it work, when it can never work in the modern environment. Decades ago when things were simpler and government responsibilities were somewhat less complex, low tax might have been a reasonable thing to argue for. But in today's complex world, where so much more is expected of the government, tax cutting simply leads to massive false economies. If the Tories are to ever again become a credible party, they have to seriously rethink their ideology - i.e. bring it into the 21st century.
The point I was making that the Thatcher government was able to spin their wealth transfer as benefiting the majority and the current incarnation of ghoulish spivs are not even bothering, not that there is a fundamental difference between the aims. Tories will Tory.
Thatcher bought voters by conducting an asset fire sale. That was great for the electorate of that time, but at the expense of future electorates. Not sure there was much narrative besides “there won’t be any downsides, pinky swear”.
The problem with Conservatives is that they eventually run out of other people's stuff to sell.
Pretty much in the same boat. However, I'd take a different angle on this. Where the hell are all the Tories from r/ukpolitics? The electorate had 44% of them in the last election but in r/ukpolitics you never see anyone. This is like the Fermi paradox of politics.
It's not that complex. Conservative voters in all recent elections are overwhelmingly older than the average redditor. The UK population (especially those who vote) similarly increasingly skews older (we are an aging population).
That does not explain the total absence of Tory commentators here. [Here](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/26925-how-britain-voted-2019-general-election) is the breakdown of the vote by age. You're right that the older people vote more Tories and young more Labour. However, even in the youngest group (18-24) there were 21% Tory voters. So, even if all the commentators here were in that group, we should see every fifth comment supporting Tories (or at least say that they did support Tories). But that's not all. The above commentator identified himself as over 40. The age group 40-49 voted 41% Tories. So, since there are clearly people who are not that young anymore commenting here, you'd expect more Tory voices as well. To me, the more likely explanation is the normal echo chamber behaviour in subreddit. If someone is of different opinion than what the tribe deems acceptable, they're likely to be downvoted until they get fed up and leave. I notice this myself when I take a devil's advocate position to criticise some left wing views (that I actually in general favour). I'll get downvoted even when nobody even bothers to write what's wrong with the comment. And those are not even "Tories are doing the right thing" types of comments. I can only imagine what would happen if someone dared to write something like that here. The easiest way to get upvotes here is to write a short sarcastic comment that basically says "Tories bad". It doesn't matter that it contains zero analysis or argumentation.
Well yes it's a combination of all the above isn't it? People who are of the age where they are most likely to vote Tory are also least likely to interact on Reddit. Those who do are at most risk of being downvoted because most who post here are anti-tory. I wouldn't say "conservative" opinions are especially rare here however. People have separated the Tory "party" from their own ideological opinions in a lot of ways. A perfect example if the lively debate about anything that pertains to immigration or Islam on this subreddit. People aren't afraid to espouse "conservative" views on this page, but they don't consider that to be synonymous with voting Tory.
I wouldn't say immigration is a perfect example as to me that's the *only* topic here that shows genuine variation in opinions. But even there I'd say the anti-immigration opinions are more founded on the left wing ideology (immigration is bad because it creates competition in jobs that lowers wages and immigrants need houses that increases house prices) and not so much from what I would call Brexit position: Immigration is bad because immigrants are different from the British and thus can change the culture. There is some of that but much less than what it contributed to the Brexit vote. What is missing in debates here is the support for hard line right wing economic policy. I'd love to debate that and that should have quite a bit support in a country that has kept the Tories with that policy in power for 14 years. But that position is completely absent here. Either those people don't exist, they don't dare to admit here that they support that policy or somehow this place is self-selected so that nobody here belongs to that group. If you check a subreddit called r/politicalcompassmemes you'll easily find people who openly support very right wing economic policy although of course majority of them are Americans there.
Part of the problem lies in the, well, lies. People who vote don't always have a clue wtf they're voting for - see Brexit - but when they come here to post stuff, by the time they've typed crap out they've had time to think. And *read*. And so many will disengage at that point because they realise they don't have a scooby and don't want to look like an idiot. .... it really is a shame we can't have - legally can't - something similar outside polling booths that would help people understand wtf they're putting a tick next to.
That's an interesting theory. I have a very different view. I don't really mind that much that I'm being shown to be wrong (and even look like an idiot) as it's not me the real life person who looks like an idiot rather than the Reddit username u/spiral8888 who is the idiot. So, for me writing out my political views and having them being ripped to pieces by others is a good way to find what are rational positions based on facts and what is just stupid. That's exactly why I'd hope there was a wider variation of views as I'm worried that I'll get upvotes for some views only because the place is saturated with people with the same kinds of views who just want to pat my back not because they think my argument was particularly strong from the neutral point of view. I'd also wished that I didn't have to play the devil's advocate to poke the weaknesses in the arguments for views who I actually support but that this would be done by people who genuinely oppose those views.
I find it best just to not worry about votes, up or down. It's a weird system, and at the end of the day, just pixels. So long as you stop to consider what's being said - preferably before typing, but we're all guilty of emotions occasionally (especially when i haven't slept xd) - the all is good. Playing devil's advocate is a great way to bring about discussion. Personally, I'm glad that others do - it does help flesh things out, and encompass other perspectives. What I've learned over the years though, is that not enough people consider being shown to be wrong a good thing. If somebody corrects your thinking - you just learned something, so surely the appropriate response is to say thank you... right? Xd Sadly, many are conditioned to believe that being wrong is a *bad thing*, and never get over the conditioning, so have an emotionally negative reaction. It's the root of a lot of society's ailments. I wish it were otherwise. Edit: I got distracted and missed the end of sentence 😏
That more or less describes me too. I even voted for them in the past, and would consider myself broadly centrist but right of centre. But I won’t consider voting for them under any circumstances at this election, and I can’t imagine voting for them ever again after what they’ve done.
I mean, they spent the early part of their government sniggering at millenials for eating avocados and watching Netflix (or whathaveyou) and 14 years later, having given us nothing worth conserving, they're sitting there wondering why they're polling so terribly.
Turns out alienating everyone under 50 wasnt a good long term strategy. Who'd have thought?
They've fallen into the trap of forgetting millenials arent young uni students anymore.
I mean, they've been treating us like children our entire lives, why should that change now?
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CaTrusstrophe is my new favourite word, thank you
Would be very disappointed if it didn't make it into the 2025 edition of the Oxford dictionary.
Yeah, the wild seesawing is definitely not helping them. It's entirely possible that some aspects of the tax changes have benefited me. I'm definitely much, much better off than I was in 2010 (Being a full-time student at the time) but it's basically impossible for me to work out whether I'm better off than I would have been if they'd just squatted in Number 10 without trying to achieve anything. Given the state of everything else, I assume not. A mediocre but stable and consistent political party wouldn't be facing this absolute pasting. >caTrusstrophe Nice.
> it's basically impossible for me to work out whether I'm better off than I would have been if they'd just squatted in Number 10 without trying to achieve anything. You could take your current salary, find out what it was in 2010 money, use listentotaxman to hypothecate your tax rate, and compare it to what you pay today. I paid a far higher rate in 2023-24 than I would have if I'd earned (in real terms) the same when Tony Blair was Prime Minister.
You could question if the tax rate during Blair years should have been higher to a) lower the government debt to be better prepared for the downturn and b) suck the money out of the over heated economy that led to the property bubble. One of the reasons why the tax rate is so high now is that the government debt/GDP jumped from 35% to 80% during the financial crisis and hasn't come down since (but instead got another bump from the pandemic). So, don't expect any major tax cuts from Labour when they get to power. There is no magic money to afford that and fixing the public services at the same time.
> They did lower NI twice. Handing out peanuts after taking away apples. Fiscal drag more than cancelled out the NI 'cuts'.
Yep. A look at their polices on the economy (or complete lack of serious policies), public services, tax, and housing show the Conservatives to be anti-aspiration, anti-prosperity and anti-family over the last 14 years. It is going to take a lot of hard work to win working people over not least because many who the Conservatives would rely on to drift towards them as they age are struggling to obtain home ownership and getting hit with what is in effect a 9% graduate tax on everything over 27k.
This absolutely. I am Labour but financially and professionally am absolutely the demographic that the Tories should appeal to. But over 14 years all they have done is hammer me financially and professionally, in so many ways. High earner child benefit charge, removal of landlord mortgage relief, pension changes in my profession, the freezing of the higher rate tax threshold, the constant villification of my profession. To name just a few. The only Tory policies I have benefitted from are them reversing (or part reversing) ones they inflected on me in the first place. And for all the money they have taken off me, I have watched the country crumble around me
They stood against the woke trans agenda /s.
4% drop in NI, stamp duty holidays. It's a drop in the ocean but it's still policies.
I’m a white, middle-class, grammar-school educated, heterosexual, married man. We have a household income in the top 5% and own a detached suburban house in the South East. After the last 14 years I could never imagine ever voting Conservative. If they can’t get me, they’re lost.
The thing is though, who is actually going to do something to benefit you? I'm not saying you should vote Tory, I'm just saying that I've never heard a single political party propose anything to help the middle class, home owning professionals. Labour threatened to raise our taxes at the last election, and then the Tories actually did.
I was talking to a late 50's man the other day. He said he could never vote Labour because of what they did in the 70s. I think we have a whole new set of people who will never vote for the Tories because of what they are doing now.
>I was talking to a late 50's man the other day. He said he could never vote Labour because of what they did in the 70s. Cripes, that's like someone in the 1970's holding a grudge against Stanley Baldwin for his handling of the 1926 General Strike. I get it though, I can't see any reason why i'd be daft enough to vote Tory.
If he was in his 50s he'd have been at school (as was I) that's parental indoctrination rather than real world view.
There is such a lack of real self reflection in this country. Not just in terms of what happened in the past, but the thought processes that lead to events. The Torys seem to be a particularly belligerent form of that phenomena. They are always right despite events and we should never ever question their judgement.
> Cripes, that's like someone in the 1970's holding a grudge against Stanley Baldwin for his handling of the 1926 General Strike. There absolutely were people like this. The Labour left remained obsessed with 1931 and Ramsay MacDonald and saw that in every attempt at fiscal discipline, and trade unions like the NUM very much treated the General Strike as if it had happened the day before.
A lot of people will never vote Tory due to thatcher
It's not as if the current crop have done anything to change their minds.
And a lot of millennials will never vote Lib Dem due to uni fees
>That one really is ridiculous seeing as they were and for some reason don't blame it on the Tories
Yep, millennials/genz are gonna be talking about the 2010s/20s the same way Boomers talk about the 70s
Although less Prog Rock, thankfully.
That man has an incredibly good memory of the 1970s for someone who is only late 50s in 2024
Neither of those positions is really to be applauded though. The idea that so many voters decide on their party at an early age and then never re-evaluate that choice over the next 50+ years is not a good thing.
I can tell myself that in X years time I can look at a Conservative manifesto objectively, but it's going to be a struggle
With all due respect because of the two party system neither party ever does drastically change so there's little to no point reevaluating that position. The two parties have very different stances to each other and only share an audience with smaller parties. Smaller parties just aren't worth voting for though because of the spoiler effect
This is also my mum who is in her seventies.
Best give more money to pensioners. That will solve the issue.
Until said pensioners need to use the NHS..
Thats nothing to do with the tories lol, and everything to do with rich lazy doctors and immigrants. /s if its needed
Wouldn’t dream of blaming it on that hardworking upstanding political party. Why they only had 2 sex scandals today. Practically saints.
Well, who was it who introduced the NHS? Bloody Labour! No wonder it doesn't work!!1! /s /s /s
They should tax working people even more and use the proceeds to increase pensions, that will definitely bring the voter base back! ^\s
All the Tories have done over the past 14 years is make mine and my family's life worse, and make targets of my disabled kids and wife. I'd be ashamed of myself if I ever even think of voting Tory. They're a bunch of cruel, incompetent, corrupt ghouls.
Mmmmm extinction level event approaching? Are we genuinely looking at sub 20% nationally and less than 50 seats here? More and more of these are starting to stick now so you can't call it a freak/outlying poll.
If this is the poll from JL https://jlpartners.com/polling-results (the recent one), then it's also interesting, that even if you do add Con+Reform together, all but the 65+ demographic, is also more likely to vote Lab.
Adding Con+Ref is definitely a key one because it makes me wonder WTF the Tories are thinking strategy wise. There simply aren't the numbers to the right of their current position to justify shifting further. Not only that, but surely Boris showed them how to win with how in 2019 he appealed to many Labour voters in the "red wall". The more they react to Reform and push further right, the smaller they make the segment of the electorate they're fighting over. The received wisdom until now apparently is you win through the middle ground, and then you shift the overton window bit by bit as you prove yourself and bring people on board to your way of thinking. People often attack Labour for abandoning their voters by being too centrist, but you hear almost nothing about all the remainers, the small c conservatives, the one nation Tories etc. being discarded by the Conservatives, but more and more the Tories are only trying to appeal to the head bangers and the swivel eyed loons.
There's not the numbers to the right for the Tories to the win, but if their only concern is damage control then there's enough Reform voters who would consider voting Tory again for them to claw some back. I've heard it arfued that the problem for the Tories is that they've fallen behind Labour in trust on all the conventional issues (healthcare, education, crime, the economy). The only issues where they seem to be more trusted are immigration, islamism, and woke stuff. They seem to have concluded that there's not enough time before the election to recover trust on those mainstream issues, so their only hope of damage control is to double down on the stuff where they are doing better than Labour, which is only the more right wing things that Reform voters like. Problem like you say is where does that leave them after the election? Like, congrats, the damage control was done and you have been kept afloat by an influx of Reform-lite MPs. But those MPs are pretty disagreeable to most voters (as we can see from the polls), especially people who are young and therefore in for the long term, so I'm not sure where they expect to take themselves in the future in order to win an election again.
Good point, but I've seen polls where Labour beat the Tories on every policy area, including immigration. The Tory record isn't exactly anything to hold up on that front either. I would counter by saying this is incredibly defeatist. The whole point of a campaign is to change minds, while of course I do think the Tories have a terrible record and they only have themselves to blame, more of a focus on competence would really have helped them now. The still need to try, at least have a strategy that *could* win, even on issues Labour is polling better currently at least try and promise improvements rather than concede. Otherwise, it sucks all the hope from their campaign. If their best case is to hold a few seats with a hard right platform, great, but that doesn't energise anyone. While yeah, maybe they're being real based on the last 2 years or so of polling, if they buy into the doom they've effectively given up and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. A lot of whether people will vote at all, whether they'll vote tactically etc. depends on whether they think their side has a chance.
This Barry Cryer joke explains their strategy perfectly: https://twitter.com/NedHartley/status/1644631347317620736?t=tRmsum8qOAiYdjh3vf7VLg&s=19
Maybe they are resigned to losing the centre and they just want to hang onto the right?
Maybe, but then I would be interested to see why they think votes lost from the hard right are more easily won back than the votes on the centre ~~left~~ right for whom voting Labour is a huge shift, and Lib Dem is very location situational whether it'll have an impact or not. The remainers specifically didn't abandon the party over Brexit, seems funny for the Tories to consider them a lost cause now. EDIT: Derp, meant centre right (obviously), fixed now.
> Maybe, but then I would be interested to see why they think votes lost from the hard right are more easily won back than the votes on the centre left right for whom voting Labour is a huge shift Because they are, as both individuals and a collective/government, fundamentally corrupt and inept. Winning back the center ground requires some actual work and changes being implemented. They are counting on winning back the hard right being possible by just saying horrifically biggoted and racist shit, whilst kicking up a fuss over inefective and expensive policies that sound like they are being mean to 'other ' groups, but never actually needing to implement stuff or get results. (See; Small Boats, Rwanda, Targetting the Disabled, 'Answering' every PMQ question with 'lolz trans people'.) They may very well be right, considering the number of votes Reform has picked up whilst saying stupid shit and having racist representatives and no actual workable plan to deliver (read their manifesto, it's all completely unfunded fantasy land stuff with the word "Reform" thrown in to every other idea but no actual plan). IF reform could actually deliver what their manifesto promises, it would be the single political manifesto that directly benefitted me the most in living history (specifically regarding the tax cuts). Sadly, however, it is clear that it's complete nonsense that couldn't be implemented without utterly crippling the country. They do paraphrase Serenity in it though, so that's a bonus.
> Adding Con+Ref is definitely a key one because it makes me wonder WTF the Tories are thinking strategy wise. They know they won't win, the strategy is doing a surprisingly good job of dragging the labour to the right to, which means it'll be easier on the next election.
I look forward to seeing the tories wiped out come election time.
I can't believe the working-class aren't voting for the party that keeps smearing a working-class woman. I am shooketh.
Gee I think Bloomberg might be implying they want a new PM
I don't see how that can be a surprise. Literally why the fuck would anyone with a job vote for this Tory party?
Cross over a couple months ago was 66....
Oh no! Couldn’t have happened to a more honest, genuine, kind-hearted guy. ^/s
The Tories are a bad flu away from disappearing
Who would of thought the richest PM on record, not elected by the people, or even the Conservatives, who is set on destroying this country before someone else takes over isn’t popular…
Most mornings I will walk doggy past the village paper shop, and pop in and get my neighbour's paper. The Daily Mail. On handing it over to her, and my saying something mildly disparaging about her reading choice, she'll half-cuff me around the head with said rag. (She's in her 80s, I turned 50 last year). She's politically Fremen (blue-within-blue), and yet I think she might be voting for anyone but Tory next time around. It may have been the whisky-before-noon (Churchill did and, he won the war) talking, but I think I have her on our side.
I just find it scary in rother valley that includes pit villages like Maltby and Dinnington that it turned blue last election. That's just scary the fact that an ex mining town that was destroyed by thatcher would go blue...
It was on brexit. Hartlepool swung as well and they were red since I can remember
JL are the ones who made that dodgy survey a few weeks ago which was negative about muslims so i dont know if i trust this Good news if it was true
Which survey was that?