To ask what stops you voting for the tories ?

[Icandothattoo]

For me
The unending shite that is brexit
Corruption and dishonesty, especially during the pandemic but not uniquely. And not just Johnson.
Making already deprived areas compete against each other for levelling up money whilst perfectly affluent tory voting areas are handed it on a plate (looking at Richmond N yorks Rishi ! ). Funny that 80% of constituencies getting levelling up funds are tory...
Whole culture war. Singling out certain minorities to attack for purely political gain. In the 80s single mums, 90s benefit claimants, 2000s refugees, immigrants. FWIW I'm fairly gender critical but disliked the way they toadied round Trump and his abhorrent opinions/followers who pretty much wrote the culture war playbook.
So what stops you from voting for them ?

So many reasons but the way they treated carers during covid times and to this day still blames carers for deaths in care homes. They are vile and will be out soon I hope

Even today, even today there is a massive demonstration with no sense of self whatsoever which encapsulates all things Tory and hence why they are quite unelectable at the moment

https://news.sky.com/video/prime-minister-rishi-sunak-says-its-on-me-personally-if-his-economic-policies-fail-12898299

No, Rishi you fucking Tory. If your economic policies fail, it's on all us poor sods who pay for it. With jobs, savings and ultimately lives. No matter how the economy does, you'll still have to pause for breath as you count your millions.

I do not remember these "great public services". Maybe in long distant past but not in the time I've been alive and aware of these things.

Labour have a record of boasting of increasing public spending. As if that is something to be proud of. Make the public services better. If it costs the public more money, OK, but a an excellent government would be able to stand up and say "we have streamlined and modified the public service, improving efficiency, public spending is down and public services are much better".

We currently have increased public spending, but dreadful public services due to waste and fraud and debt. I hesitate to call it financial mismanagement because it's not accidental.

7.4 million people are on an NHS waiting list.

This has never happened before.

In 2010 waiting lists were about 2 million.

Ergo the public service known as the NHS was better then.

Tony Blair was absolutely hammered in Parliament because in some parts of the country you could wait two days for a GP appontment and hospital waiting times were an average of 6 weeks.

In 2006 98% of visitors to A&E were seen within 4 hours.

In 2022 they set a target to try to get back up to to 76% being seen within 4 hours by 2024.

Here's an NHS England chart that illustrates how much better this public service used to be:

I do not think Labour will be able to get things back to how they used to be., there are a lot more old people today than there was 20 years ago.

Agree but that doesn't mean we cannot do better?

There are relatively simple things that could be done, increase pay for care workers, provide them with company vehicles, re instate nurse bursary, increase pay for NHS staff.

Pay for it with the billions saved by not being in the EU, which according to ReesMogg has saved the UK 129 billion!

Failing that, start taxing investment income same as earned income.

Let me remind you:

the minimum wage
Sure Start
smaller class sizes, huge investment in schools
the shortest hospital waiting lists for 40 years
11 years of uninterrupted economic growth

to name just a few of the benefits that helped the poorest in society. Not to mention peace in Northern Ireland, devolution and a constructive relationship with our European partners. All achieved by sensible social democratic policies that focused on delivery, not rhetoric.

You can’t make public services better without spending money on them, n exactly the same way that spending less can only make them worse. That applies particularly to the NHS where over 70% of costs are salaries.

Failure to invest in public health and public services costs more, far more in the long run.
Look at the millions now on long term sickness? poorly educated children, unable to provide the skills employers need? a transport network being temporarily patched up on a regular but costly way?

Tories seem to be, as my Gran would have said "Penny wise, pound foolish"

Conscience

I'm not a mug

A lifetime of corruption and greed. Thatcher through to Johnson.

The lying.

I'm bloody furious at how the Tories conned our parents and our grandparents into voting for the self harm that is Brexit.

The state of our country because of it, could make me weep quite frankly.

Matthew Syed today:

At the time of the Brexit vote, David Cameron was the leader of the Conservative party, and the party was pro-remain, they even printed a leaflet saying so which they sent to every person in the UK.

My parents voted for Brexit because top Tories Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jacob Rees-Mogg, and David Davis etc stood in front of that red bus and said Brexit would be good for Britain.

And their Tory MP said Brexit would be good for Britain.

Tory David Cameron called the referendum.

(There's no Brexit without that.)

David Cameron called it because of Tory infighting.

Because Tory Brexiteers like Daniel Hannan had visited so many constituencies and convinced Tory activists and Tory members that Brexit was the ideologically Tory way forward.

I don't think a party can be criticised for holding the referendum. There'd be a demand for it for quite a while. Labour had promised to hold one but then went back on their promise. It needed to happen.

No it didn't. Holding it was pandering to the 1% of fuckwits who desperately wanted one (plus Rupert Murdoch).

Not it didn't.
You might have wanted it to happen and that's a different thing.

I thought it was a stupid thing to do and still do. Referendums are a structure of lazy government and poor leadership.

The demand for the referendum was manufactured.

Until the second half of 2015 a pretty consistent 9% of the population or less thought it was an important issue.

It didn't make most people's top ten.

Support for Brexit was whipped up and it's been dying off ever since

What's the alternative? Not having a referendum and letting the resentment bubble away? If Labour had held a referendum in the mid 00s remain would probably have won as the economy was better and people were generally happier.

The economy hadn’t gone down the pan in 2016.

@Icandothattoo
To get a fully qualified answer, how many of mumsnetters, have studied the politics and perspectives in detail, vs what they read on the broadsheets etc

Have a binding referendum that required a super majority rather than an advisory one, a rule about lying and having a costed plan for leaving.

With a confirmatory referendum after two years to make sure the will of the people is still to Brexit now we actually know what Brexit means.

The trouble was nobody actually believed millions of people would be stupid enough to vote for it.

So the (Tory) government didn't plan for a Leave Campaign win.

I used to vote Tory because I saw them as the party that helped people help themselves. Supporting entrepreneurs and businesses to increase employment and increase everyone's standard of living.

And then this lot came in in 2010 and helped people like themselves rather than helping everyone. Othering people for their own agenda - Brexit and our recent foreign secretaries' policies. Increase in poverty because they help the rich get richer. A complete lack of integrity so you can't trust anything they say, even if it's core Tory policy because they'll gas light you the next day. Not in anyway understanding the lived reality of the average person - Rishi paying £3m in tax whilst Britain starves and freezes. I can't endorse this way of running the country. It's despicable, dehumanising and just plain wrong.

@Marmablade they are my 83 year old FIL reasons too- he also says they have actually disincentivised a great deal of business and entrepreneurialism apart from wholely domestic concerns with Brexit and pandered to the UKIP element purely for votes-- which he has no truck with. He's more of a Heseltine type if you know what I mean.

@Florenz in 2014 vast amounts of the population had the EU low down the list of things they were 'concerned' with- it only became an issue due to the rise of the ERG, the Tory's seeing rising support for UKIP and realising their vote might be split and hype in the right wing media. The majority of people at that point really didn't give a monkeys and if they did thought it would be a one way gain and believed the 'we hold all the cards' baloney they were fed.