To feel angry at Tory voters?

[Dottodo]

DF has always voted Tory. He’s very anti immigration and we will never see each other’s POV.
DHs friends are all Tory voters and hate being with them as they are all racist, xenophobic & misogynistic.
Other Tory voters I know through work or extended family members are also xenophobic and casually racist.
I’ve spoken to friends about this and they agree that the Tory voters they personally know are also racist and xenophobic.
Why is this?
Me and DH lived abroad and as we've lived as ‘foreigners’, we don’t share their views.

I did this US for a year. Brilliant as I didn’t pay US fees at all, just a swap

You can still have great schemes

now you sound like an old codger whinging about why people need all those TV channels because back in the good old days they made do with BBC 1 and 2.

Thank you (I have a sense of humour). I'll stand by my point though, I used those two countries as examples, there were lots of different counties offering degree exchanges.

1. London to Manchester might be shorter than Paris to Lyon but that's not an argument for not building the line, that's an argument for extending it north of Wigan. However it does shrink journey times between London and Scotland which is a long distance and the journey times between London and Edinburgh/Glasgow will drop below four hours which is considered to be a key threshold for modal shift from airlines. Look at the effect Eurostar had upon aviation. www.oag.com/blog/high-speed-rail-vs-air-eurostar-at-25-the-story-so-far

As for commuter lines, you realise that the WCML between London, Birmingham and Scotland is one? Moving the intercity services from the WCML to HS2 will provide plenty of extra paths for both stopping services and freight.

In any case, hasn't Transport for London just seen a massive investment in the form of Crossrail? Given that commuter markets haven't yet recovered from the pandemic (unlike long-distance and leisure travel which is booming) I think that the South East has had enough for the time being. The commuter lines aren't actually that congested at the moment, whereas the long-distance mainlines are full.

The government is also looking at improving connections across the North, using a new line crossing the Pennines. The main line nearest me is receiving investment, likewise the Cornish Main Line has had improvements to increase frequencies and resilience. The South Wales Valleys are getting electrified, as is much of Scotland. HS2 is not the only bit of the railway to get some capital investment.

As for the price tag, I'd like to know where you got your figure. The latest estimate is between £72bn and £98bn at 2019 prices (though construction projects are all inflating at the moment). Some people are claiming that the Oakervee review put a figure of £106bn but they have (wilfully) misread the report.

Not that it's a Tory project anyway, it was launched under the Brown government and has cross-party support.

I've just wondered whether I needed to give myself a reality check in thinking that it ought to be normal for a young person to spend a period living, working, and studying overseas. Obviously DS is at an advantage in that the idea can even be contemplated without winning a major scholarship. (one child, ancient parents)

Rough and ready poll, if you are willing to say, how many of the people still on this thread have
a) moved abroad for longer than six months
b) moved more than 250 miles from home in the UK for work, or love, or education, or just a change
c) live within 20 miles of where they were born.

I bet everyone has taken the skid.

The rail journey across the Pennines is tortuous. Thanks very much for your crisp debrief @DdraigGoch . That's the clearest explanation I've heard, and goes a long way to justifying the spend, and I have two friends (techies though) who have not explained the upsides so coherently.

You won't get double-deck trains on existing lines in the UK. They won't fit.

They'll fit on HS2 though...

Take a look on Google Street View at HS1. When that was under construction it would have been the same. Now though, everything has settled in and the cuttings/embankments have grassed over.

@lot123 but why should young people settle for something that's less good than what their parents had? Why shouldn't they be angry that it was thrown away? It's pathetic to say 'well, you can have this, it'll have to be good enough because in the good old days we walked to school in all weathers, uphill both ways...'

Brexit has cost the UK many many good things and I just wish Brexiters would won that.

You won't get double-deck trains on existing lines in the UK. They won't fit.

I was wondering that, is it track width or height? They don't seem that much higher, they have a kind of mezzanine structure.

I do own, and lament, what was thrown away. But I also feel that we dodged a bullet not joining the euro, and I still (instinctively) feel the EU is too big and divergent to operate effectively as a unit. As a slippy free trade zone, with freedom of labour and capital, and aligned (not necessarily exactly) trading standards (nothing dangerous, but upper and lower range limits) it should have been possible to provide a full conformance certification at a premium price, and a working towards certification accreditation.

I think it is interesting, hopefully informative, anecdata to say that the road network now in northern Spain, where we've holidayed recently, is fabulous (much improved since I last visited in 1992) and to say that a lot of EU funds have made this possible. I have not seen anything similar in the UK's infrastructure, despite the UK being the EU's second largest contributor while we were members.

@XingMing I do wonder how much of the UK's lack of benefit from EU membership has been about Conservative reluctance to accept anything with the EU branding on it. I still remember the winter floods when Cameron was in power - the EU offered flood relief money, the Tories turned it down. Toxic nationalism seems to be the bullet they have consistently used to shoot themselves in the foot.
We didn't need to have our current extreme hard Brexit. Westminster did that to us.

No, I agree we definitely didn't need the hardest possible version. I voted leave, just, but it never occurred to me that it would be treated as a suicide note.

why should young people settle for something that's less good than what their parents had?

Speaking only from my university experience, it's far better than I had. There was hardly any opportunities for a year abroad when I did my degree.

In fact, I recall thinking about turning down my offer for one of the more competitive RG universities for a fairly mediocre university that offered a year in the US as part of their course.

YABU. I know plenty of Tory voters who aren’t racist and plenty of labour voters who are.

(I compromised and volunteered for a year in a school in Chicago for underprivileged children. Even Conservative voters can have a sense of public service...).

That said, I still think the EU is too large and too disparate to reconcile all the tensions. North to south and east to west tensions/differences are going to be painful. I thought in 2016 and still think that northern and southern Europe are not going to reach close enough accommodations to satisfy the apolitical majorities.

But it’s a lot less good than it was three years ago and there’s no good reason for that.

We all presume a brighter future for our kids, but seriously, I am not sure that this is anything we should presume. I think (my child is a young adult) that we should be telling them not to assume the future is better. It will be different for sure.

EFTA would have included the four freedoms, but would have kept us out of the ECJ, CAP, CFP etc. It would also hare allowed us to pick and choose which regulations we actually want to apply - Norway has only adopted a sixth of them into law.

Cornwall had around £500 million from the EU for infrastructure if I’m remembering correctly, to give an example. And substantial amounts of EU money went into science and technical innovation projects that created good quality jobs. And there were smaller pots of money for all kinds of things. It was all there for the taking but aside from some specialised industries, little effort was made by the UK administration to signpost our businesses and institutions to these opportunities.

The conservative voters I know are not racist in the slightest, they have been called racist slurs by those vocal social media types as being race traitors though, which is kind of ironic.

What has been lost in the age of social media is nuance grey area of politics/policies, people used to scoff at the idea of slippery slope argument but you can see it at play in many different arears, mn has been posting echoes of '1930's' germany for over 12 years.

I want Labour to win the next election so that they can deal with the last 'not true labour' gov PFI hitting it's peak and highlighting the simplistic solution of 'underfunding' the NHS argument.

Political analysits are already discussing how the 'left' has been overtaken by a typical right wing neoliberal ideology, the fact that MN was full on fan girling for Corbyn who was a life long Eurosceptic and think that a left wing position is to support the neolib ideal is people who are just tribal, you can see it with how the 'working class who's parents where down the mines' scoff at the red wall that went con.

I do think it’s worth remembering that the likes of Johnson and Farage have done their very best to stoke division, as has much of the media. I remember when Farage was roaring about ‘they said you don’t know what you were voting for. They think you’re all stupid’, when actually nobody had said anything about being stupid. Caroline Lucas was on QT explaining that even she, a politician, didn’t have all the ramifications of the EU at her fingertips and that it wasn’t a slur to say people couldn’t have known about all the consequences. She was shouted down. But it was ludicrous to expect that detailed knowledge from the public. Nobody knew. Not Leavers nor Remainers. The likes of Farage are desperate for division.

MN was full on fan girling for Corbyn who was a life long Eurosceptic

You were on a different MN to me. It was - and to a degree still is - “Yeah but Corbyn”.

I think all the people going on about lack of students being able to study for a year abroad need to get a grip. Less than half of all UK kids even go to university in the first place, and only a small fraction of those that do have ever studied abroad for a year.

The simple fact is, that being in the EU did not benefit enough people in the UK. It benefitted the wealthy at the expense of the less wealthy, and the highly educated at the expense of the less educated. Which is why Brexit won.

The simple fact is that the Vote Leave campaign persuaded people that being in the EU didn’t benefit them. It benefitted many far more than they realised and we are beginning to see the consequences now.
it isn’t just a year abroad that people are talking about. It’s the ability to live and travel freely and far more people took advantage of that. Loads of people did. Remember Auf Wiedersehen Pet? But even if that weren’t the case the year abroad would still be a significant loss to some people, so why shouldn’t they talk about it? Why should people ‘get a grip’ and just shut up if something they believe in has gone for no apparent good reason?
Things like Erasmus greatly enriched home universities as well. It is really beneficial to have the presence and perspective of Erasmus students associating with home students in classes.

If there were clear and obvious benefits of being in the EU to all British people, the Vote Leave campaign wouldn't have worked.