To really resent living in a safe Tory seat?

[AngeloMysterioso]

My constituency has had the same Tory MP since it's inception 20 years ago- in the 2015 GE he won by a margin of over 8000 votes, 20.9k+ to 12.6k+ votes for the Labour runner up.

I mean I'm going to vote anyway, but part of me is wondering what is the fucking point??

Another Tory safe seat here. Been the same very wealthy individual in the seat for about 25 years. I have never voted for him. I really want to have proportional representation. I think politics would look pretty different if we did.

gilly

Good schools. Some nice bits to it. Some not nice bits to it. Vibrant and tolerant. Green bits. Not green bits. No grammars but that's a good thing as local state schools cater for the brightest as well. Some wealthy people. A lot of not wealthy people - and that's the main reason it's Labour IMO, though it has been Lib Dem.

Crime probably not great but again that's a poverty thing isn't it?

Lotis - then clearly they don't resent it enough. I found that I disliked living in a labour borough of London. High council taxes for crap services. So yep, I moved.

But I'm not saying moving is easy. I'm saying, if you live in a naice area, don't insult those who don't by "resenting" it. Esp if you moved there for opportunities that other parts of the country don't have!

I live in hampshire

Virtually all blue, just a part of portsmouth that isnt

I think it must be depressing to live in any safe seat if you have an alternative view, be it tory, labour, green etc

Why not move to a safe labour seat then if it's so terrible where you are? Move to where I grew up where folk vote Labour with their eyes closed (though not this time around!). Salford/Eccles. We have overcrowded inadequate schools, low levels of literacy, full to the brim A&E departments, waiting lists for GP surgeries and practically no NHS dentists available, littered parks, drug users outside my old primary school leaving their needles for kids to step over on the way home from school, unruly yobs out on our local park every night leaving their litter everywhere and last week ruined a remembrance garden fixed up by the Princes Trust. It is vile. I left here a long time ago and cannot return, here taking care of my mother while she is going through some medical tests. It has been like this since I was in school at least. Lots of can't work/won't work attitudes, the area is full of low skilled labour from Eastern Europe, not many jobs above minimum wage here. Seriously, we are on the door step of Manchester, there are plenty of jobs there, why not move here to be with the working classes if you hate so much being surrounded by Tory voters? Look up the local schools, would you put your child in them? I think not!!

Currently live in the safe Tory seat where I grew up. We all moved back (from a nice leafy labour safe seat incidentally) to care for my elderly parents. Last election the MP was returned with 52% of the vote (do I win Tory safe seat top trumps?!) with the next closest party at under 15%.

Is it a nice place to live? For some, yes. The idea that Tory safe seats are some middle class utopia though is a fallacy. In the most part it's a working agricultural community that stands to lose a lot from cuts to public services, especially for the elderly. In a neighbouring Tory constituency (with some areas in the 10% most deprived nationally) a large town has had its police funding cuts so drastically that they no longer have holding cells - anyone who is arrested has to be taken to the city half an hour away.

Living here I worry that if my parents were to have a stroke, heart attack or fall they wouldn't survive as we live so far from a hospital and ambulance services have been cut to the bone. As much as I have tried though, I would never be able to get them to move as their community here is so important to them.

Many people have moved to the area to commute to local cities and for them it's a great place to live (ourselves included). But a lack of inward investment (and also government investment in education, training and transport) means that for many here - as in most places around the county - the future is pretty bleak.

We are also in the North.

I don't resent at all the fact that the area I live in is nice.(not naice,ta very much..,)
It's a beautiful part of the country,I grew up here ( not my fault,that).
Because of that should I be happy that the political beliefs of the majority of voters do not agree with mine and that their agenda isn't what I think is best for the whole country? Majority as in winning in a first past the post situation ,by the way.
I don't know what it's like to live in a disadvantaged area - why does that mean I have to vote Tory?
What I resent,to be clear,is that my political views about how the country should be run aren't shared by my elected representative,and never will be.
I don't resent the fact that other political views exist and are represented in parliament,even if I disagree with them,but I resent the fact that due to our electoral system the views of voters are not represented fairly in Parliament. IMO.

tiggytape it's not daft, that's what should happen. Maybe people would get off their backsides and vote if a non-vote was deemed to be happy with the status quo. To me, that's what it implies after all.

I live in a Tory safe seat and it's frustrating that my vote doesn't count....but this year lots of local Tory voters on Facebook are very getting very upset that our local MP voted Brexit - we were very much a Remain constituency. The cuts to Education and the NHS have also annoyed them, we have had letters from our local schools detailing the impact of these cuts and begging us to write to our MP - but he's a lazy bugger who does nothing. For the first time, they have looked at our MP's voting record in Parliament and they don't like what they see - especially his views on Gay Rights and his support of Fox hunting.
I feel the tide is turning, keep voting, nothing changes unless we keep voting!

I don't know what it's like to live in a disadvantaged area - why does that mean I have to vote Tory?

It doesn't. But perhaps you should be very careful what you wish for. Jezza would love to "equalise" society. But that won't look like people think it will.

The argument,which Tory voters would make,would be
"You do not know what is like to live in an area like mine/ like where I grew up.poor schools,overstretched NHS,drug problems etc etc.This would all be fixed if we had a Tory government.Therefore you peeps who live in naice areas but don't agree with the Tories should vote for them anyway,because then things will be better for those of us in the other areas"

Those of you saying we shouldn't resent living in nice areas and should move if we don't like it - is that your point? That we only have the luxury of thinking voting non Tory would be a good thing because we live in nice areas and don't know what it's like elsewhere? ( by extension I guess you'd also have to say previous Tory governments have improved all those issues in traditional labour areas?)

Sionella,that assumes I think Jezza would be better! But what do you think society would look like under him?

I feel your pain, as we too live in a safe Tory seat. I despise the MP immensely and his election leaflet which dropped through our letter box recently showed how little he has actually done for the people of this area in all the years he has been 'representing' us. Ditto the leaflet for our Tory Councillor in the recent local elections - his leaflet was a work of fiction in that the things he claimed to have achieved had not been done by him at all - but by other non-elected members of the community.

I am currently undecided whether to a) spoil my ballot paper as a protest or b) vote for a party I don't really support in the hope that there is a slim chance the Tory candidate might be defeated.

I would hate to live in a Tory safe seat

Really? Would it impact on your life that much?

PLEASE KEEP VOTING - one of the biggest outcomes of the referendum was the focus on the absolute vote.

TM knows that the FPP system massively disadvantages the Labour Party as the seat allocations do not equally reperesent population numbers. That's one of the reasons she called an election.

However, people ARE now paying attention to the popular vote and it will be important in how secure she claims her mandate is, especially when it comes to Brexit.

The EU and opposition parties are no fools, even if she got a majority of over 100 seats it could still be with votes from less than 50% of voters, far less of the total population, and her opponents WILL continue to remind her of this.

So your vote DOES matter.

I too love in a safe Tory seat and know that we are unlikely to get the incumbent MP out (majority of 20k last time, over 65% of votes.... BUT... he is a rabid brexiteer and our constituency voted heavily to Remain), but at least I know that when it comes to analysing support in terms of absolute votes then my opinion WILL count.

Yours will too.

Reperesent and love? ((Shudders at iPhone typos)) sorry!

Sionella I'm sorry but saying that you could move house because you dislike the political party in power just reflects your privilege - most people don't have that luxury, they are tied to the area by financial constraints - their job, the cost of moving, childcare provided by families (although I'm not saying that free childcare is the only reason people want to live near to their families!).

I don't think people are saying that they resent living in the nice area as such - they resent the current political system, which stops their vote from having any effect.

FFS. I left my tory-voting hometown to go to a labour area because there are more jobs, better public services, and better transport links. It's not all tory=jobs.

Agree that the election system is flawed, but presumably you chose to live where you do and if you are the typical Mumsnetter who can afford to seek out the good areas with the best schools etc to live in they are always going to be disproportionately tory areas, except perhaps gentrified city areas.

Ha! I wish! I used to live in a constituency that frequently swung between Tory and Labour, but DP had a mortgage on his flat whereas I was renting so it made sense for me to move in with him. Now we're stuck here because we can't afford to move. The area I live in (NE London) is basically a train station, a supermarket and a bunch of takeaways, not exactly a leafy suburban utopia.

Our MP is Iain Duncan Smith, who lives on his FILs estate in a lovely little village in Buckinghamshire, naturally.

The current boundaries mean that Labour need fewer votes to win than the Tories.

That wasn't the case in 2015 - the tories got just under 37% of the vote for 51% of seats, whilst labour's 30% of the vote resulted in 36% of seats.

But that doesn't negate the fact that it is in neither labour nor the tories interests to bring about PR, even if it does increase MP accountability, lead to move votes mattering and reducing voter apathy.

How many of the PR complainers voted for PR in 2011? A total of 6m across the country, around 12% of the electorate. (Or using remainer maths, a lot less than 10%).
Only 42% of voters could be arsed to express a preference.

If we had PR, we would have loads of UKIP MPs.

Urgh.