AIBU to not understand why "normal" people vote Tory?

[olddogsnewtricks]

OK, so I'll probably get flamed for this but am genuinely interested! All the people I know who vote Tory are pretty well off so use private schools and healthcare. As a family we need the NHS and we need a good education system - and I can't see them getting any better under the Tories. Are these just not priorities for Tory voters or do they really believe they will improve even with a Conservative government?

Corbyn is just awful. I can't believe he is leader of the Labour Party. There are so many talented labour MPs who would do such a better job.

Labour though are totally lost. I saw a headline today that the shadow chancellor made a comment about people making £70k+ being rich. No they aren't rich making that in most parts of the country, especially if they are supporting their OH, DC or paying for childcare. Housing costs are insane in most parts even for a single person making £70k a year (who is probably working 60+ hours a week).

Still not voting Tory.

I think, but am not sure, that there are more families on lower wages, than there are over 70k.

So by rights they should vote anything but Tory.

I grew up on a council estate, then spent my early 20s there.
I worked hard, and eventually bought my own place away from there. I was the exception.
Pretty much NO-ONE on the estate worked at all. I lived in a block of 91 flats, when we had workmen in, they would comment that I was the only working tenant they had met.
People that say the scroungers don't exist are deluded. I lived it. I don't go to work to pay for people like that, I've worked for what I've got and I expect able bodied people to do the same. I vote Tory for that reason.
Before anyone starts bleating on about privilege and luck, I made my luck. I had the worst start and climbed out of it. It wasn't even that hard! Just a little determination.
A lot of the girls made a career out of popping out babies. That was made possible by the lax Labour government at the time. Fuck returning to that!
People need to take some bloody responsibility for themselves.
Plus Corbyn is a knob with no grasp on reality and really inappropriate views on terrorism.

Well that is interesting mrstrent. So you feel that the Tory cuts to the NHS, education, local services and the sick and disabled will somehow correct the attitudes and behaviours of these people in the estates?

Well that is interesting mrstrent. So you feel that the Tory cuts to the NHS, education, local services and the sick and disabled will somehow correct the attitudes and behaviours of these people in the estates?

It's the neoliberal philosophy. If you enable people to remain complacent and give them leg ups in every area of their life, there will be no incentive to improve their situations themselves.

There needs to be some support from the state, but nowhere near what we've got at the moment. The current systems allows people to exploit it, and as the population grows, so does the number of people exploiting the system, thus the budget black hole and unrecoupable debt.

MrsTrent, if you were born today, how do you think you'd fare? And why do you think it wasn't that hard? There was a safety net - you had a council home to live in and I assume your parents had benefits?

I was born to a single mother who was thrown out by her family when she was pregnant. She was 28 so hardly young. She worked but once she had me and my brother, she struggled to get decent work to cover childcare and living costs.

She then got suspected pnd after my sister was born - I suspect a combination of reasons triggered it. This spiralled in to alcoholism then she was finally diagnosed with bipolar.

Did she get any help from the state? She got minimal. She was unable to crawl out of her dark place because mental health provision was woeful. Even when she was still coping, she was struggling with work and childcare. Despite being educated. It was not easy.

The problem I have with the Tories, is that they'd see people like her as a scrounger. And by extension, they would see me as a scrounger.

As a child I ended up in care, living in foster homes. I was offered a council flat at 16 which terrified me. I was not equipped to be chucked out. Luckily my foster parents helped me and I went to university. Which is rare for a "care leaver".

Now I have my own family and home. I earn well as does my brother. My sister is trying but has repeated the mistakes my mother made and has mental health problems. Unfortunately the Tory government will see that they're not properly addressed.

I got my head down and worked but being relatively bright, it was easy to do well in school. Managed to get a decent graduate job as a trainee accountant. I don't see that being so easy now.

So, for me, a safety net is vital. People will say that labour didn't do x/y/z but at least they don't write off children like me. At least they're not like the Tories who cut welfare, which mainly hits mums and therefore their children. The Tories don't really care about child poverty. I remember as a child only having flour in the house. We just ate water pancakes. Or toothpaste.

To see people as scum or scroungers is really sad. Yes of course you get people taking advantage but why tar everyone with the same brush?

There's a good reason why the Tories are called the nasty party.

Labour and its supporters bang on about cuts to services.... they seem to think money grows trees, or big business and 'the rich' can provide an endless supply of money to public services. "Just tax them more or set a wage cap and the problem is solved". They don't seem to realise that you need a strong economy and having a punative tax corporate regime will lead to the big multinationals choosing not to work here, with the loss of jobs that entails, and by taxing the rich (who already pay 45%) excessively will just lead to them upping sticks and spending their incomes elsewhere whilst not contributing a penny in tax. This isn't to say more can't be done to make the tax system (especially for companies) fairer, but the Robin Hood politics of 'take from the rich to give to the poor' is not this simple solution that socialists believe it is.

thus the budget black hole and unrecoupable debt

The budget hole isn't caused by welfare being exploited a huge proportion of welfare goes on pensioners. And those who work.
So yes we spend on welfare but most of it is necessary. If we had better wages and lower housing costs then maybe we wouldn't need such welfare.

I wonder how much it would cost to build social housing and rent it cheaply instead of letting private developers build shed loads of flats for rich overseas investors, therefore massively distorting the market.

Also, we can't ignore that we have huge debt because we had to pump money into the system to prop up banks.

To run a country, I think you need debt. It's just that you have to pay it off. The problem comes when you think you need to make cuts which downgrades the economy and people can't afford to live. Literally do people expect people to just starve to death?

In all the time of the labour government I don't remember big business leaving the uk.

Now we have Brexit on the horizon and they are....

I don't think the labour government is the issue here.

The cycle appears to be that labour in power spend money the govt don't have and they grow the deficit. Tory then have the unpopular task of cutting debt when in power - its a very vicious circle and frankly Labour need to pack it in on state funding.

I grew up as a farmers' daughter and I've married a farmer, we live rurally and I work as a rural surveyor. As far as we are concerned voting anything other than Tory would be turkeys voting for Christmas. The agricultural policy for both Libs and labour looks as though it has been scribed by a four year old.

Agriculture is a huge industry in this country so the arrogance of two parties to not come up with a decent policy is just mindless.

Raising wages won't solve the benefits spending. The fact is, lots simply don't want to work or do more than the token number of hours needed to net the most money from the state. People either have a work ethic or they don't.

Gone are the days for many where a coupe ensured they were stable, able to financially support a child etc before going ahead because now they don't need to as they can make really poor choices knowing someone else will pay. For some, more thought goes their next meal or night out than it does financial planning or having children.

For that reason alone, many won't vote labour. The effects of tax credits will be seen for generations until they are scrapped and the system gets tougher.

That is interesting frilly. I've wondered lately after the brexit vote, are farmers concerned about losing state subsidies? Is it something they will be lobbying for?

Also, we can't ignore that we have huge debt because we had to pump money into the system to prop up banks.

False, most of that has already been paid back, we have so much debt because Labour where running a deficit of ~80% of GDP which made any slight correction in the world wide economy have an effect.

Labour and their supporters ignored many economists and the Kenynsian approach that they all of sudden spouted the day after the Coalition came into power!

There are a lot of voters who lived through the 13 years of labour and have saw the initial creep of privatisation of the NHS under there watch and saw the problems caused by the deregulation of banks.

Now we have Brexit on the horizon and they are....

I don't think the labour government is the issue here.

Well JC has been anti EU all his career and is going to be pretty tough on big buisness, so they are an issue as well

The cycle appears to be that labour in power spend money the govt don't have and they grow the deficit. Tory then have the unpopular task of cutting debt when in power - its a very vicious circle and frankly Labour need to pack it in on state funding

Or the cycle can be seen as the Tories cut services so that they are crumbling and labour has to bring it back up again.

Labour chose to spend a lot on education and health when they won in 1997. Also the Tories also ran a deficit - they hit a surplus for a couple of years but the deficit rose in their time then fell again. The same happened during labour's reign.

So the Tories choose to make cuts which screws over a large proportion of society and labour chooses to spend which makes life fairer for more.

People either have a work ethic or they don't

So what good is a work ethic if you can only earn less than the minimum wage?

What exactly do you propose should happen if wages continue to fall, welfare is continued to be cut and living costs go up? You get to the point where people starve. Children starve.

Then what.

Businesses do leave. You don't notice it because there are fewer larger companies. They just transfer production elsewhere. Slowly. It doesn't make the news. I think in work benefits are an issue in the aim of helping people - but logistical nightmare.

Well JC has been anti EU all his career and is going to be pretty tough on big buisness, so they are an issue as well

JC isn't in power. My point was that people claim that labour means high taxes etc which scares big business away. This didn't happen during the Blair/Brown government. So the argument doesn't stack up.

The Tories spend a lot of time blaming too much regulation (the EU) high taxes (Labour) but they've had plenty of opportunities to run things their way. And funnily enough it doesn't work.

I don't think any party has it right but I don't think writing off a whole swathe of a population and labelling them is the answer either.

Businesses do leave. You don't notice it because there are fewer larger companies. They just transfer production elsewhere

There wasn't a massive flight as we are seeing now. Because of Brexit.

Labour and their supporters ignored many economists and the Kenynsian approach that they all of sudden spouted the day after the Coalition came into power!

The Keynesian approach (of successive I labour and conservative governments) was what caused stagflation in the 1970s and interest rates to ultimately rise to 15%.

That is interesting frilly. I've wondered lately after the brexit vote, are farmers concerned about losing state subsidies? Is it something they will be lobbying for?

The subsidy system shouldn't be needed, and I think a lot of farmers interestingly did vote to leave the EU(not me) because they wanted to see the shift to looking after our own commodities.

We rely on subsidies because commodity prices are so poor. We are governed by a lot of laborious, difficult EU regulation which makes practical farming difficult. Whilst EU policy is based on some very important fundamentals (such as protecting our countryside from harmful chemistry) the way it needs legislating should be decided by U.K. Policy in this country. Farming policy does need reform and conservatives have always represented the industry well. Looking at Corbyn's last cabinet, is agricultural minister was a vegetarian green who strongly opposed conventional agriculture. As an island nation will a very real need to rely on our own agriculture, it was an arrogant decision for him to take.

In my extended family of thirty people we have two full time workers. If that was society in micro it can be seen how that would be difficult to support that number of people with food etc.

Cuts to education? Well I'd be happy to cut free school meals to infants for all, and I'm slightly non plussed by the large IT hardware that seemed to go into schools. I don't think it adds all that much.

I'm slightly non plussed by the large IT hardware that seemed to go into schools

How old are you? IT makes things more efficient and we are in a digital age.....

I'm afraid businesses did leave in the area I worked in the Blair brown era, lots if them, due to economic reasons.

Coconutella what a great slogan...

Robin Hood politics of 'take from the rich to give to the poor'

They are just not used in the classrooms to represent value for money for me.
Nice, but not as necessary.