to be genuinely confused as to why anybody who isn't rich would vote tory?

[StuckinTheMiddlewithYou]

Seriously, I don't get it. Unless you're earning at least £40K, why would you?

Enlighten me!

Well, my FIL was a very involved Tory both locally and nationally. He believed that all but the very severely disabled should be off their bum providing for themselves.

But then, he had no concept of poverty and what relentless years of it can do to the mindset. I think this inability to empathise with 'the poor' is very common in Tory circles (I seem to know a lot ). It's just not as simple as asking, 'Why don't you up and move 90miles for that job?'

To the Op's question, perhaps it's because there isn't a box on the ballot paper which you can mark, saying 'None of The Above'.
I remember a remark made by a commentator at the time of the election. Results were in and no-one was an out right winner. He said, 'perhaps it's the publics way of telling the parties, there's a plague on all your houses'.

Arissa, you make a good point, the fact that you can't register a protest vote is why you should always go and vote anyway and just spoil your ballot; spoiled ballots have to be counted and recorded, nobody counts the number of registered voters who just don't turn up.

I get pretty annoyed with people citing stuff like "the Tories will but the benefits system right, they'll stop waste in the health service" as a reason to vote for them. Presumably these self same Tory voters - the majority of whom are not "rich" - will quite happily take advantage of free, universal healthcare and the welfare state when the need arises. People in this country have so little knowledge of their political history. There is not a Tory government in history that would have created the NHS or the welfare state, had the Labour Party not existed. Such provisions are completely contrary to Tory ideology. And NewfuckingLab have unfortunately gifted Cameron et al a financial crisis and culture of panic that allows them to make massive cuts that are more about ideology than economics. They don't want to just clean up the benefits system and the NHS: they want to do away with them.

It's pretty clear from a lot of the pro Tory posts how politics has gone in this country, the way of the "single issue" mentality. People get obsessed about an issue that particularly bothers them - grammar schools, immigrants etc - and then vote for the party that addresses that single issue in a way that satisfies them, regardless of all the other policies and the impact they will have on wider society, and who they intend to screw with those policies.

I'm saying this as someone who did get on their bike and who lives a fairly comfortable life in a 50% tax paying household. I should be a natural Tory, but I'm basically just not that selfish.

Or stupid, Toad.

The Tories teaching people how to be self reliant? Yeah right. I remember Thatcher. The first thing she did was to create tax cuts for the top 1% of the country and swipe benefits. They don't, how shall we say using the old adage, give people fish to eat and they certainly do not teach the people how to fish.

And as for letting people buy council houses - isn't that just grand? We now have a dire shortage of social housing and a whole load of landlords making massive amounts of money from local councils. This obsession with buying one's home serves nobody well.

And NiceGuy2, I didn't say blame those corporations who don't pay their tax - I said they should pay their tax and we'd be in a lot healthier position.

People seem to forget this is a global crisis, not just because of New Labour (for which I have a lot of scorn) but I hate to see so much ignorance and swallowing of yet more bullshit from the politicians.

Just as an experiment, I would like all those who vote Tory to live on a sink estate for two years, on the kind of income those people live - the working poor as well as those on benefits - and see how self reliant and how much they are able to "fulfil their dreams." They'll soon realise the reality of a poverty trap.

I work with people from sink estates and I don't believe it's the tories that got them there. It has far more to do with left wing drivel about choice and not needing a partner and the total destruction of society by left wing, liberal thinking during the 1970s. Children do need fathers, women do need partners, men and women need to work. Society has completely lost its moral values and without them it is ruined.

I'm not talking here about middle class choice shared by my SILS and based on their mother's school teacher type left wing feminism, of "having a right to education and it not having to be linked with work", of living alternative lifestyles and chosing not to marry or take the names of partners they have been with for many years, one of whom is a uni professor and the other an exhibited artist.

I'm talking about teenagers on estates, avoiding gun and knife crime and gangs, who live in families where there are half a dozen children with different fathers or who were sent to an aunt in the UK from overseas so the aunt's family could claim benefits or who occasionally let on that they had a tough night the night before and missed the telly because mum was in the front room giving blow jobs to clients!! Not the world that many on Mnet are too aware of methinks and not the world that many of you would expect a middle class tory voter like me to know about but it is exactly why I am tory. I do agree, however, that council housing should never have been sold and that a great deal more should have been done to drive up the standards of education and the competence of the teaching profession.

onceamai how do you propose to force women to remain married/in couples?

The reason that the structure of society has changed is because divorce is no longer something that will render you an outcast, because women have rights to their children on divorce, because women are allowed to control money. All of this means that women can leave situations where they are desperately unhappy, and take their children with them.

What would you change to make women stay?

And what do you propose to do about the men who leave their families?

Oncemai very good point about the destruction of the family and the low value placed on traditional family units.

Same question to you alouise.

The men should pay for their families through the tax system rather than being able to walk away knowing that the state will pick up the slack.

Do you think that will stop them walking away in the first place?

And what about the other question.

An element of family breakdown is inevitable, we're human and we make mistakes but the culture of "babyfathers" that has crept into elements of society is extremely damaging for everybody involved in that family dynamic.

You cannot stop family break up but by ensuring men who leave pay for their families you remove the burden on the state and the dependence on benefits that is so destructive for the family.

The child support should be deducted at source by hmrc and paid to the parent who stays with the children.

I'm not saying any woman should be forced to stay in a marriage I am simply observing that there are circumstances out there where all control and sensibility seems to have been lost and where it is normal for a woman to have half a dozen children with different fathers. If you think that is about staying with a partner or remaining married ISNT I think you are on a different planet. It certainly isn't what Marie Stopes intended to be the lot of women and their daughters who lacked choice due to unfortunate circumstances and were forced in circumstances even more unfortunate.

"it is normal for a woman to have half a dozen children with different fathers"

This is not normal in our society. A very small proportion of people are in a situation like that. Why focus so hard and propose policies based on what a statistically teensy proportion of the population are doing?

And it sounded very much to me that your vocal cry for a "return to traditional family values" was a cry for a reversal in society, to a time when families stayed together - but they stayed together because they had no choice.

ISNT I think if you look at the actual statistics on poverty they evidence the fact that fewer children brought up within stable partnerships live in poverty and have better educational outcomes. That does not mean that any woman or child should have to remain in an abusive or totally fractured relationship but it does mean that society needs to put a bit more emphasis on maintaining family life. That in my opinion means telling children the facts.

I recall being chair of governors of a large inner city failing school where the deputy head refused point blank to tell the children that cannabis should be avoided because it was illegal. In his opinion to do so was to tell the children their parents were doing something wrong. In my opinion it would have taught them it was illegal and could lead to a criminal record and blight their chances of being successful later on.

A typical example of how the liberal left had contributed to the destruction of society.

onceamai I am not on a different planet I just don't read the daily mail. I work with children in poverty in some of the most deprived areas of london and the vast vast majority of the families are ordinary decent people who are doing their best in tremendously difficult circumstances.

ISNT - it is a small proportion overall but it is very normal on some of the large inner city estates in London. I can't give too much info because I don't want to be identified but there is a culture out there that most MNetters will just not identify with and in London it may not be more than 1/2 a mile away from you.

Frankly I live with a foot in two worlds and in the nice shiny one the people I mix with look at me with utter incomprehension. In the dark and dismal one - the people who live there aspire to dealing because that's what they see as bringing riches.

"ISNT I think if you look at the actual statistics on poverty they evidence the fact that fewer children brought up within stable partnerships live in poverty and have better educational outcomes."

Total misinterpretation of the stats.

Children in poverty have lower outcomes than anyone else. That is because they are in poverty. Single parent families are most at risk of poverty, for obvious reasons. The low outcomes aren't because of the effect of relationships, they are because the children are terribly terribly poor.

Rather than harking back to some imaginary golden age where everybody got married and lived happily ever after, why not concentrate on raising families out of poverty - whatever their makeup.

Oh please leave the Daily Sodding Mail out if it, it's a weak and lazy argument bandied around when lefties start to lose arguments.

And by the way I don't read the Daily Mail!

Onceamai did you not just read what I wrote, I work with children and families in poverty in some of the poorest areas of london.

"there is a culture out there that most MNetters will just not identify with and in London it may not be more than 1/2 a mile away from you" Patronising.

Divorce and separation leads to poverty.

Right so there has been a call for families to stay together.

When I questioned how this was to work in practice, everyone decided that wasn't what they had meant at all. Yet that's a strong argument