New poll finds only privileged people will vote for Labour - but why?

...and yet another post from you slagging off Labour...... its tedious.

This IPSOS poll shows many things, that the Tory vote has collapsed & that Reform are losing support fast... what happened to their 35% lead??? but Labour, having fallen so far, is still holding up.

But what do you highlight? yet more division, its what the 'right do, so no surprise i suppose.

I note you do not highlight that despite Starmers obvious problems, the poll you link too still shows Starmer is considered the most capable PM.... a bit embarrassing & 😆

Another problem, in my opinion, is that there seams to be an increasing number of adults who do not work. They don’t pay into the system yet do benefit quite well. Plenty of people avoid paying their share of taxes either through being wealthy enough to pay accountants to hide money or through not working and receiving benefits which pay for everything.
I think Labour need to concentrate on the working population. Those who have to work to pay their bills.
I don’t think any party represents the working person anymore.

The trouble is most people are not economically educated enough to know how their vote will affect them as an individual, as a community, as a country.
Just look at BREXIT.
Serious question: if you vote for Reform, why are you not demanding an answer to where the promised £350 million PER WEEK going onto the NHS is?
They said they would pour millions into the NHS if we voted for BREXIT, where is that money? Why are we still waiting for appointments and operations etc etc?
How can you vote for the same person who spectacularly failed you?
What are the serious contenders to Labour?
As for the words privilege, comfortably off- far too subject to even discuss.
I don’t consider a university educated person privileged at all.
Everyone thinks they deserve good fortune. Everyone believes they work harder for what they have than everyone else, even those who don’t work!
Lots of people don’t want other groups to receive benefits, yet they have not got the intelligence to work out the logical conclusion as to what stopping these groups from receiving benefits will look like. Prime example ‘ Don’t have children unless you can afford them.’ Women stop having children. ‘Oh who will wipe my backside in the care home now there aren’t enough staff?’

I always said (living in a brexit heartland) that a good number of people were on the fence in the lead up to the vote but what ultimately made the remainers lose was their narrative that all people considering voting leave were horrid nasty racists and totally disregarding the issues people said they felt membership had on their lives and communities. I have friends who made the most of what our membership had to offer working and residing in the EU or doing quite well employing cheap EU labour and they couldn’t understand why anyone would vote leave and were shocked when I said I think there would be the strong chance of an overall leave vote, I had to point out that all the overwhelming benefits they experienced in membership were not felt shared by most of the population in the UK

This in spades.

Because I try not to turn everything into an argument and just listen - as I said I wasn’t trying to persuade them not to vote for whoever they want to. Also am in these situations with people for another reason, so don’t want to start a huge debate.

You seem very argumentative.

Because those who are struggling or precarious may have had a poorer education and if you are poorly educated you vote for a party that appeals to the poorly educated; bite sized messaging ( like Trump), makes promises it knows it can’t deliver( £350 million for nhs), aligns itself to your values the pub, a pint, a fag ( even though he’s a public school educated entitled wanker.

I understand what you’re saying and I do get it. It would be a struggle for me as well if only one party approved abortions and the other wanted to repeal that protection for women; I’ve seen the cases and countries where women die without that care, and America is rapidly becoming one of them. I do try to understand that for single issue voters, it’s usually something they feel as strongly about as I feel about that.

From my POV, the problem is just that you rapidly get a decaying society if you vote in worthless arse hats who are horrible for the country but happen to agree with you on one big issue.

I think it’s very difficult when people talk about immigration and safety. I’d actually like to know the science on towns with asylum hotels - is it really much more unsafe or is this a perception thing? I admit, I don’t know the exact figures. Google didn’t seem overly helpful when I tried to look it up and 90% of the pages I found were just rhetoric about the issue and not actual facts. As for safety from sexual attacks, yes, they have shown that foreign nationals account for a disproportionate percentage of rape convictions in several European countries. I don’t know the actual reality - if there are really more attacks, or just more convictions because when a rape case is between two Britons, it’s always a he said/she said, and I think they can decline to prosecute if it’s unlikely to lead to a conviction.

My point though is that even when you have a a single issue and it’s a really important one, we should all be careful (me included!!) so that political parties don’t use your support as a bulwark that allows them to push through otherwise shite policies.

At the moment, I almost think Labour is a better example than Reform of this - they talked a good talk, they got the total mandate that they wanted, and then… they did nothing and killed the party with infighting. What a bunch of utterly selfish knobs.

The almost-certainly-trafficked workers where I live (northern suburb) and work (northern inner-city) are:

• Young brown men, probably from north and east Africa, riding electric bicycles with food delivery bags and covering their faces in all weathers.
• Similar at the hand car washes.
• East asian and south-east Asian women and men in nail salons, all wearing surgical masks, that take cash only and have frosted-effect film on the front windows so you can't see in.

That's why I'm talking about dark-skinned people: it's what I see near me. These people are exploited by criminals. It's a criminal offence to pay less than NMW. These people are imported like goods to work in conditions that we have rightly outlawed and they tolerate it because it is, or at least seemed like for a while, a better situation than the one they came from. Are you trying to claim that British people are competing for these illegal jobs?

Everyone else I can identify as foreign either runs a family business (the Polish shop I pass on my way to work, the Chinese and Indian takeaways), came here from the EU before Brexit, is a student, or is here to fill a skills gap. A foreigner without a visa and right-to-work cannot be lawfully employed here.

I don’t know why you are talking about dark skinned people. I haven’t said anything about anyone’s race. Black people are not the incoming demographic in the area I live in.

If you want me to specify it’s a little bit of everyone. Black people still a minority here though.

You can say oh it’s impossible. I don’t know how they do it or what their individual entry routes are. And not everyone is new. People have been moving to the U.K. for a long time. This hasn’t happened overnight.

But it’s clearly happened otherwise everyone wouldn’t be kicking off about it. And if you can’t see it. It’s probably because you don’t live and work where your lives intertwine. Doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened.

The lower your wage/ lower your job (awful phrase but its late and I cant think of a PC term - you know what I mean); the more likely you are to be working with / competing with immigrants for work

NHS consultants and university academics would both beg to differ. Our healthcare and higher education sectors both have large numbers of immigrant workers who are well-paid.

The visa system doesn't allow for immigrants to move here to work unless there's a shortage of staff with the relevant skllls. The notable exception is agricultural seasonal workers, because the work requires living on the farm in caravans and that's incompatible with social housing tenancy agreements, so it's impossible to get British workers to take those jobs.

Those dark-skinned young men you see riding electric bicycles for Deliveroo with their faces covered have been smuggled here by organised criminals and are working for less than NMW as fake "substitute couriers" using farmed accounts. Likewise, the dark-skinned young men working at impossibly-cheap hand car washes, which your local taxi driver uses near-daily and doesn't report to the police even as he prepares to vote Reform on Thursday in the hope of Farage deporting the very people who wash his car. British people, being entitled to means-tested benefits, aren't competing for these illegal "jobs" because we have the option of staying on benefits and holding out for legal ones.

I thought this was due to low income = lower educational level = more susceptible to Reform’s ‘politics’.

If you’re poor you are not just worrying about no holiday this year or cancelling a streaming service you are living cheek by jowl and compering for resources at the bottom of the pile. With money comes the luxury of being able to afford to vote with a more in their view refined conscience.

Its really simple and I dont get why people dont understand it or cant see it.

The lower your wage/ lower your job (awful phrase but its late and I cant think of a PC term - you know what I mean); the more likely you are to be working with / competing with immigrants for work and the more likely you are to live somewhere which looks completely different to what it did 20 - even 10 years ago.

Simultaneously; lower income people also have aspiration to be home owners and get on. And many of them are. Yet they get no help with that. Whilst you have people who are living in rental getting everything paid.

The third, and not least important point. Is that when you really are on the breadline you just want things to be stable. Increasing wages, increasing benefits also causes inflation. And then you have council mergers across the country changing council tax too. Prices increasing all over the place. It’s chaos atm. Not necessarily labours fault any of these points. But as someone with a take home of 5.5k that’s 1k short of our costs atm I honestly do not know how people are surviving. They probably aren’t. So they have nothing to lose at this point.

yes you are absolutely right. It would take a ton of money though to 'catch up' to a place where everybody had their operations and nobody was waiting. Then assuming all those people went back to work and taxes started to rise then yes you would hope the money spent on the NHS would be paid by in taxes.

However how does a broke country fix it when they are struggling even to pay for the woeful system it is becoming now.

It's become a bit of a vicious circle hasn't it. We are too broke to fix the NHS to get people back to work because we keep having to pay them benefits.

If we spent more on preventative healthcare and treated conditions that stop people from working promptly, we could have a better NHS at lower net cost to the nation.

Having people on the sick awaiting treatment is expensive. So is leaving conditions untreated until they get to crisis point.

Yes I agree the state pension will need to be changed. They should start with the triple lock and just increase it by say inflation each year.
Then they should continue to increase pension age to about 70. This will have to be done over a time period.
By freezing personal allowances the state pension will soon be getting taxed and so eroded that way.
As the boomers die off, the draw on state pension will get smaller with each generation coming through as each generation gets smaller ie less kids being born.
If things are really bad they could freeze the state pension which means it will not increase each year and so by virtue of this will eventually become worthless.
However this gradual process will give people time to make alternative plans.

I may however be too optimistic. If politicians don't act and we do end up with markets unwilling to lend to the UK/IMF bailing us out, they may well bring in something more sudden and drastic.

I think the point though is that the UK can no longer afford the NHS and they certainly can afford 'better' if by that you mean a better system that is still free at point of use. That's why what we end up with will be 'worse' in so far as we have to pay at least something towards it.

I think people would have accepted labour not succeeding in all areas yet as you are correct they have only been in for 2 years. However in that time they have made things quite a bit worse. Our borrowing is higher, but we don't really have anything to show for it as it has gone on our increased welfare. By making decisions and then cancelling them they have shown themselves to be weak and unable to make difficult decisions. I actually think KS is probably a very decent man trying to do a difficult job but he just does not have the balls to run the country.

I'm voting Green 💚

Money paid to people to not work = bad and we shouldn't do it.

Which is why we should abolish the triple lock.

Actually that is why I am considering reform. The NHS does need changed and yes it is going to involve some pain but the current system is not working is it. We need a new system even if that involves us all paying a bit for it. I bet the number of missed appointments drops dramatically when people have to part with cash to see someone

I agree the NHS isn’t working but Reform won’t replace it with something better.

So at what point will the politicians actually sit up and say right listen up people. The UK is in deep shit. We are broke, in debt, growing inflation, poor growth, huge benefit bill and most of our 'wealth' is housing. Things have to change now.

We are but imo it needs cross party consensus because it will take years to fix & a lot of those fixes won’t be evident for years. A lot of the public don’t want that & want to see change now. People are angry that labour didn’t get the economy growing in a year despite years of little growth post financial crash. It’s ludicrous

Actually that is why I am considering reform. The NHS does need changed and yes it is going to involve some pain but the current system is not working is it. We need a new system even if that involves us all paying a bit for it. I bet the number of missed appointments drops dramatically when people have to part with cash to see someone

I agree the NHS isn’t working but Reform won’t replace it with something better.

So at what point will the politicians actually sit up and say right listen up people. The UK is in deep shit. We are broke, in debt, growing inflation, poor growth, huge benefit bill and most of our 'wealth' is housing. Things have to change now.

We are but imo it needs cross party consensus because it will take years to fix & a lot of those fixes won’t be evident for years. A lot of the public don’t want that & want to see change now. People are angry that labour didn’t get the economy growing in a year despite years of little growth post financial crash. It’s ludicrous

To be honest given the financial state of the UK we are all turkeys waiting to see which political party is going to shove us in the oven. We can bury our heads in the sand for a while longer no doubt but I am certainly trying to plan for what to do if the state pension is cut or phased out. Anyone reliant on benefits etc should be doing the same.