I'm sick of people from Northern England who voted tory complaining on the news

[ssd]

Suck it up. You voted for them. No one made you.

Everyone is entitled to have a moan, but seriously, WHY WHY WHY did you ever vote tory thinking they'd got your back?!?!

@Leflic , I explained. The failure to take the funding recommendation into account was crass. The Tories created a mayor who liased with local leaders and they were ignored.
Which is reminiscent of the contemptuous way the North was treated under Thatcher. When the North was decimated by Tory disregard.
But have fun in Tier 1 ignoring the rest of the country.

Overwhelmingly, the consensus was that they were more concerned about Labour's social views, than the economic policies of the Tories.

Exactly that.

And I am not sure many Labour people have heard this message despite it being articulated in many many ways, including through the votes in the election.

On the debating, an interesting thing is that all the shut down of debate comes from the Left at the moment

" I will not engage with that bigot / racist / insert -ist"

I have never heard anyone from the right refuse to debate and call for no-platforming etc.

Not coming back to your thread @ssd? No surprise really is it?

And that map really screwed your argument anyway.

I'm in Cheshire. Where I live, we voted to remain. We have had a Tory MP for eons. He is useless and toes the party line regardless of what the line is. I can't fathom why anyone would vote for him.

I usually vote Green Party. But last election I voted Labour. This was despite not being a fan of Corbyn.

If I want to moan about how Johnson and his cronies are destroying my country, I will do.

NB - not everyone in the north of England is working class. We don't all wear flat caps and breed whippets and pigeons either.

[quote Thisismylife1]@rwalker

But every government in every country isn’t doing a rubbish job. We’ve got one of the highest death rates per capita in the world. There have been fundamental mistakes and u turns throughout. The public inquiry into the handling is going to be staggering.

I’m no Corbyn fan but I’m struggling to see how anyone other than Boris could do worse. Although a Labour govt trying to introduce the furlough scheme would have been slaughtered as reckless with public money.[/quote]
Actually we're not the highest. There are eleven countries in the world who have had higher death rates per capita than us, three of whom are major developed economies.

We won't know which countries truly came worst out of this until it's all finished. New Zealand have been widely commended for cutting off their country completely (it helps when you are thousands of miles from even your nearest neighbour). Suppose a vaccine doesn't come though. NZ can't stay cut off forever.

Everyone laughed at Sweden but they've more or less gotten away with it, their death rate is far lower than that of many countries who did lock down. Never mind Spain which had an incredibly strict lockdown but still had/has a massive number of cases a bad second wave, and a death toll per capita which far outstrips ours.

If Gordon had won in 2010, we might have renewed the stocks of perishable PPE supplies. Then again, we might not. No one knows what would have been done differently. Had Corbyn won in 2019, I doubt we'd be in a much different place. Most of the decisions which affected preparation were made in the early years of the Cameron administration so they would already be a fait accompli. Would he have cancelled Cheltenham? Would he have locked down sooner? He doesn't appear to be too keen to follow the lockdown rules himself so he might have been too rebellious to "follow the science" any more than Boris did. Would he have managed to get the finance to cover this pandemic or would people have refused to lend to him, fearing that the gilts would be worthless? Would we have ended up in a fiscal crisis instead/as well as?

We will never know what might have been.

I'd put bets on preferring to spend the day with a random Yorkshire man who wears a cap and races pigeons than any of the wokey-woke liberal lefties from the city who have posted on this thread

@hamstersarse

I'd put bets on preferring to spend the day with a random Yorkshire man who wears a cap and races pigeons than any of the wokey-woke liberal lefties from the city who have posted on this thread

Me too I'd rather spend a day with my Yorkshire farming friends than bloody Grace Blakeley en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Blakeley

I'd put bets on preferring to spend the day with a random Yorkshire man who wears a cap and races pigeons than any of the wokey-woke liberal lefties from the city who have posted on this thread

Lol, me as well. Although I am a moderate lefty in my views, the self-righteous, judgemental posts on this thread won't succeed in winning back the voters who abandoned Labour at the last election.

[quote bellinisurge]@Leflic , I explained. The failure to take the funding recommendation into account was crass. The Tories created a mayor who liased with local leaders and they were ignored.
Which is reminiscent of the contemptuous way the North was treated under Thatcher. When the North was decimated by Tory disregard.
But have fun in Tier 1 ignoring the rest of the country. [/quote]
It was a cross post.
So money then.

There’ll never be enough of that. Best come down South where the fun is.

I have never heard anyone from the right refuse to debate and call for no-platforming etc

Thatcher did it with the IRA. Johnson does it all the time, he attempted to prorogue parliament. If that’s not stifling debate I don’t know what is.

@Rosehip10

yes: currently, though Newcastle advertising showed Tier 3 yesterday, which was 'a mistake' apparantly!

If you voted tory you can't be surprised at this so YANBU in that sense. But how do you know the people you're referring to voted tory? Genuine question. Just I've never seen or heard any of the street interview etc where people from Northern areas are asked about covid and lockdown being asked how the voted.

There has been an upwelling of prejudice in deprived white communities for a while. The seeds were sown during the 80's and 90's and only really kept at bay during the Labour years. It's a prejudice borne out of hopelessness, lack of opportunity and ignorance. This was expressed by growth in BNP and UKIP support and as soon as the Tories moved to the right this was captured by them. That combined with people just wanting change and wrongly believing that Tory MPs would help them and ' get Brexit done' has lead us here.

The reality is that many of the old industrial and mining communities have just been left to decay. New Labour propped them up a bit with minimum wage, benefits, sure start and things like the Coalfields Regeneration Fund, but this didn't really result in anything permanent coming along that offered the security and pay of the old industries and mining. My home town (former mining area in the north) is just dying, it is getting demographically older and those that stay are just trapped in minimum wage, zero hours jobs watching their benefits getting chipped away by the Tories. They are angry but aren't engaged enough in politics or much else to actually think about who their friends really are here. They are just happy to have people to blame and the right points them to the left, the EU, foreigners and ethnic minorities. The right promises them easy answers to complex problems. I see the same thing in places that I have visited elsewhere such as the East Midlands in Bolsover, Shirebrook and similar.

Other countries look at how the UK has treated former mining communities in the 80's and onwards as a warning for their own mining areas. Germany is investing huge amounts in the Ruhr as part of the planned closure of the coal mining industry there to avoid what has happened in the UK.

[quote Purpledaisychain]@MadameBlobby

No one knew that they were voting for a government to lead us through a pandemic. How could we?

I voted labour, more out of loyalty than out of any love for Corbyn. As rubbish as Bojo is, I dont think he would have been any better. During the vote, we were stuck between a rock and a hard place in terms of the two party leaders.[/quote]
This!

There is absolutely nothing wrong with or to be ashamed about in voting for the Tories.
Conservative principles have enabled far more social mobility than suffocating socialist ones ever have - maybe these 'poor northerners' got utterly sick of the contempt the party they traditionally voted for treated them with & came to realise that fact?

You've got it all wrong OP.

Boris and co don't hate working Class Northerners. They have no regard for us. The Tories put themselves first but their policies are not actually spiteful. They see the working classes as worker bees that need some looking after and placating otherwise they won't work effectively and make money for the bosses. We are necessary to the Tories.

Left wing London socialists however can't bear Northern working classes. They actively despise us despite claiming to represent us. You only have to look at all the sneering comments on social media about gammon etc because people had to temerity to complain about the negative impact of large scale EU, mainly East European migration in their communities.

Where you couldn't get a job as the factory recruiting agency was run by a Polish woman who only employed Poles and put the phone down if anyone English rang up, where the already scarce council housing was occupied by Lithuanian families. Not to mention the Romanian pick pocket gangs and the propensity to drink driving and driving without insurance etc from nationals of countries where that is common behaviour.

Southerners have to understand the negative impact of EU migration which was not felt in rich Southern towns where the German doctors and Swiss biochemists live. And yet our concerns were not heard and we were called gammon and racist. So people knew that and voted Tory and for Boris accordingly.

@FreekStar

YANBU! People are thick! That's why they vote for a a party whose whole philosophy is based on making the rich richer and whose members are largely made up of the English privileged elite, despite they themselves being poor and under privileged. Their own mistaken beliefs that they are supreme beings compared to other nations and races seems to give them a false sense of affinity with the white tory men. They never think beyond the face of each party, so Jeremy Corbyn lost to Boris, despite the local Labour candidates in many areas being excellent, which at the end of the day is what you are voting for, count for nothing.

You know, this is actually kind of interesting, because properly speaking, conservatism isn't about that kind of neoliberal economics.

Similarly, properly speaking, leftism isn't neoliberal economics joined to identity politics.

But at the moment, unless they are luck in their local MP, that's the choice voters face. There are few proper leftists left in the labour party, and few proper conservatives among the Tories.

But for a real conservative or leftist voter, an old school member from any party would likely be preferable to voting for the neoliberal machines or a neoliberal MP. If they had to make a choice, the one thing the Tories are less tainted by are identity politics, which are basically a way for neoliberals to pretend to be addressing social justice without addressing class, with a nice dose of race essentialism added into the bargain. So perhaps that gives them an edge. (You might take note, the Tories aren't particularly more white than Labour is.)

Lots of people talking about Thatcher and the miners, but it goes deeper than that. There are lots of Lancashire/Yorkshire textile mill towns that have drastically declined with no new industry to replace them. All the emphasis has been on the big cities like Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle. Smaller cities and towns have pretty much been ignored by both Tory and Labour governments. Not everyone from these smaller places can get an office job in a city centre office block!

@ssd why don’t you get a hobby? Instead of starting these threads every few weeks. Despite being told several times, over the many, many threads you’ve started on this and comments on other threads, you still believe ‘the north’ is a homogeneous group. Your stereotypes about ‘the north’ are disgustingly outdated and if they north’ was another country people would rightly be calling you out for xenophobia. At this point, what you probably think is an ‘interesting and thought provoking’ thread actually just makes you look like a twat.

There were a number of reasons why ‘The North’ voted Conservative and I’m rather incredulous that some are still questioning it:

Whether Mumsnetters like it or not, in 2016 the country voted and it voted for Brexit. Regardless of the size of the majority or whether it was a shot in the foot, the country voted Brexit.
For the following 3 years the public watched, both in Parliament and the courts, as individuals (mostly the Labour Party, but not all) and other groups tried to overthrow a democratic decision. Boris promised to deliver Brexit, Labour didn’t.

Also, as others have mentioned - Labour under Corbyn were not interested in the North, they took their votes for granted.

Finally, few voters wanted Corbyn. He was a liability and the Labour Party was too stupid/weak to get rid of him even though they could see the writing on the (red?) wall.

I haven’t voted Labour since they fucked the fire brigade over. I’m northern and working class and Labour do not speak for us anymore. There were parties to vote for other than Tory but voting for them would have meant Labour getting in. Corbyn is a smug tosser that I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw him. I voted Tory for the first time ever. I’m also not complaining about it.
I do feel like a lot of the newer Labour supporters are very up their own arse and incapable of having a rational discussion without resorting to calling people that disagree with them names. There seems to be a lot of Labour brainwashing at schools and universities too. It’s like some kind of self-righteous cult.

@MoonJelly

People all trot out the Corbyn bogeyman as a solid cast-iron reason for not voting Tory last time around. I didn't like him either and was delighted when he finally resigned, but I'm really not convinced that he would have been a worse alternative. I don't believe that, if he had been in power, we would have had the PPE and care homes mess-ups, let alone all the corrupt awarding of massive covid-related contracts to incompetent friends of government ministers and advisers. And that's before we even begin to consider the utter ridiculousness of the fact that we haven't been able to reach a sensible Brexit deal with the EU over four years after the referendum.

I'm not sure deep down it was really about thinking he was incompetent. People suspected both he and BJ might be incompetent in the job, but both were also unknowns. So it was possible to hope, in either case, they they might be ok.

I think there was something about JC that people didn't like, personality wise, he really rubbed them the wrong way. They knew BJ was kind of a twat - but he can be quite charming. I don't think anyone would every call JC charming. Maybe it's just that people knew BJ thinks he's probably betetr than most people, but JC seems kind of patronising.

If anything people are complaining that the Conservatives are too much like the Labour Party they were trying to avoid. We've had strict lockdowns, massive deficit spending, illegal immigrants put up in 4 star hotels, agreeing to Rashfords ridiculous voucher scheme in the first place. So far I've had what I expected from a Labour government.

For heaven's sake, in a national crisis more state heavy stuff was bound to happen. However, this localised tactic is not " be a bit more authoritarian in local areas where necessary ", it's " do this on the cheap, blame the people it's happening to" " don't upset the south ".
When London went into Tier 2, you'd think the apocalypse had been wrought upon them. None of these voices gave a shit when it happened to us in August.