To feel increasingly alienated by Tory voters?

[BarmyBrunhilde]

I am in despair as to where our country is at. With the cost of living crisis looming (and already beginning), this winter is going to be brutal and likely life ending for so many in the UK, and the current aspiring leadership of the Tory party seem to be more interested in litigating culture wars and appeasing NIMBY pensioners in the Home countries than actually addressing any of the serious problems in the UK.

I've never been a Tory voter, but I've always been able to get along with people who have different views (provided they aren't racist/homophobic etc). But how anyone could see all the misery and deprivation on the horizon, look at the prospective leaders and frontbenchers with their complete lack of sultions, and continue with supporting them is genuinely beyond me. I find myself slowly being consumed by bitterness and rage against people for their views, and it frightens me. Am I alone in this?

Mick Lynch voted leave and he isn't a Tory !

I don't know why they just don't reduce VAT back down to 17.5% ? It was hiked up to 20% ( 11 long years ago) , after the World wide banking crisis which was apparently all Labours fault that would put 2.5% back into eveyone's pockets on a whole host of things.

I think TV adverts are quite a good sociological barometer of where the Country is at fiscally speaking.
Lots of equity release schemes, aimed at those who are equity rich in terms of property, yet relatively cash poor, who want to help offspring out who are burdened with Uni debts and high rents.
Lots of adverts for various supermarkets trying to draw in the more cash strapped 'cost of living crisis' shopper, haven't seen a Tesco 'Best' range advert for a while ?
Then you have the playing on peoples fear adverts, so if you don't get a state of the art alarm, the minute you step outside of your front door, those Bi-fold doors are toast and you will be robbed !
The best has to be the 'if you die, don't burden your family with expensive funeral costs' just do the £1000 for a box of ashes scheme, anything else is quite frankly a bit showy offy and selfish.

Completely agree

The whole reason why Labour now support brexit is because so many Labour supporters voted for it!

Brexit seems to have caused much more problems for Labour than it has for the Tories. It seems like the most vehement Brexiteers and the most ardent Remainers were Labour voters whereas Tories were more ambivalent about it all. Labour are going to have a hard job in squaring the circle when the most vocal part of their support is screaming about how terrible Brexit is when Labour needs to regain the "red wall" which is full of former Labour voters who voted Boris to "get Brexit done" and because he wasn't Corbyn.

I agree flo you see the polls and the sheer numbers of brexit supporters in the Labour Party/voters, unions etc. No one wants to talk about those voters. Corbyn was the original brexiteer! But knew to keep quiet.
At least the Tories delivered for their brexit supporters

The whole "we don't have democracy because most people didn't vote Tory" argument is ridiculous. Even more people didn't vote Labour. Even more than that didn't vote Libdem. Labour need to stop making excuses and start winning elections, and if they don't win, accept that people weren't buying what they were selling, and adapt accordingly, instead of blaming everyone else except for themselves.

Careful there. The Guardian has misrepresented the IPPR by reporting that "austerity is behind 130,000 deaths" as though it is a proven fact.

Firstly, Channel 4 fact check states:

"...the IPPR don’t attribute the figure directly to austerity (although some outlets reported it as such)."

• *They further state:

"However, the authors note that “prevention services and public health has been severely impacted” by the policy.

But again, this is not the same as proving cause and effect — and the IPPR authors don’t claim to have done so."

Therefore, the Guardian were clearly deliberately misleading their readers.

Secondly, the IPPR were estimating deaths rather than dealing with actual deaths. Health scientists note other explanations are also available to explain deaths.

Here's the link to Channel 4 fact check which the paragraph I used came from and they also fact check other claims of this nature including Jeremy Corbyn sharing a video about it:

www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-did-austerity-kill-120000-people

The whole reason why Labour now support brexit is because so many Labour supporters voted for it!

Do they 'support' it or do they accept it is now 'done' as in the UK has left the EU ? Because even if they did or didn't support it, that is where where we are now, we have left the EU.

@awonderfuladventure I only read the Telegraph from your media list, and yes, I completely understand its political stance. But it provides a platform for large numbers of interesting thinkers to roll out their ideas in public. The Guardian does likewise from another political standpoint. I will make up my own mind, having read both perspectives, where my view lies, And I also read the Times, NYT, and occasionally bits of the FTT, the Economist and the Western Morning News. I am a social liberal, who doesn't believe in free lunches or free rides.

It’s not as simple as that. It’s that a Labour MP needs far more votes to get elected than a Tory one. A Green MP needs miles more votes. SNP MPs appear to be the easiest of all to elect. That isn’t right

@BirmaBrite most of Labour's policy history since the 1970s was based on opposition to the EU.

This explains the problem with the electoral system a bit.

At least the Tories delivered for their brexit supporters

I think you are being a teeny bit premature, the Tories have delivered Brexit, that much is true, have they 'delivered' the Brexit that they promised, that is beneficial to all those who voted for it, remains to be seen. They made a lot of promises that are yet to materialise. They still might I suppose ?

Dido Harding, John Penrose's wife, was in charge of a racecourse before she was given a £37 billion pound contract to run test and trace, which was a spectacular failure

But before that, she ran TalkTalk which is still a substantial complex multinational utility company. Not brilliantly mind.

Fair enough, but as you say not well and not a background that set her up for Test and Trace, so the outcome was not surprising. She’ll have been richer though.

Well Jacob Rees Mogg thinks we might see benefits in 50 years.

But the system is what it is. It's up to the parties to appeal to enough people in enough areas to win. There's no point piling up votes in safe seats when winning by 1 vote gets you 1 seat in the commons, and winning by 100000 votes gets you the same 1 seat in the commons. A party needs to have broad appeal to a wide range of people in order to get into government, which is how it should be. If it was just a sheer nationwide popular vote there'd be no reason for the government to do anything outside of a few major cities.

So after 12 years of Tory rule, people who can, are leaving the country to escape? Is that what you're saying?

@XingMing most of Labour's policy history since the 1970s was based on opposition to the EU.

That's an interesting statement, did they hate it because the Tories were very much for it then ?

What are you on about?
Within any one constituency, the winner needs a specific number to win, irrespective of party. A Labour MP in Hammersmith and Fulham won’t for example need more than a Tory one.

Different constituency’s have different numbers of people it’s true, but within each one it’s level pegging in terms of who wins. Blue won’t get votes in on fewer minimum votes than Red.

@Florenz But the system is what it is

Which is fine if you are talking about a countries democratic system, but not if you are talking about its healthcare system ?

The reason Labour appears to "need more votes to get elected" is because of the areas where they win so heavily. If fewer people in those areas voted Labour, but they still got enough votes to win the seat, it would mean Labour "needed less votes to get elected". Which is of course ridiculous.

No @BirmaBrite they objected to joining the EEc, as it was, because of the union bloc vote. The unions were reluctant to see their influence diluted, so it took until the 2000s to win them round. It was part of the reason that Corbyn couldn't give a straight answer yes to the Remainers in 2019. His political career had been founded on opposing the EU.

The Tories were, between the 1970s and 1992 (when we failed to failed to ballot the public on the Single Europe Act, under Major) very much in favour of free trade and free movement... travelling towards political and currency union was regarded as a step too far. Then Gordon Brown ruled out joining the Euro in about 1998.