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 ?

1. My morals
2. My values
3. My conscience

NHS

Energy prices.

We pay the highest electricity prices in the world. Why?

And much higher energy prices overall than the European average.

The Tories have been in government for 13 years and everything is broken.

We can't trust them to govern.

Morals

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

The main reason is that I'm not easily manipulated by the lorry loads of old poop the Tories pump out.

Looking at the state of our economy, the NHS, the environment, crime, education, defence, energy, food, everything I'm not jumping up and down about "small boats".

Primarily because that one is easily solved by providing safe routes to apply for asylum.

I don't think I have the fear that Tories like to play on.

There’s no need to sign your posts.

I don't vote for incompetent, greedy, corrupt, lying psychopaths who destroyed this country.

They are just scum.

Many things, but mostly that they lied about Gordon Brown etc, and then the idiot Cameron didn’t realise that if you ask a stupid question about the EC you get a stupid answer, Brexit!

I grew up in the South Wales valleys. I remember knocks at the door from people collecting food for the miners.

I remember what happened to the valleys after the pits were closed.

I remember, before Labour got in in 97 and introduced the minimum wage, people working for less than £1/hr.

And I've seen the damage done since the Tories got back in power. Cameron using his son to pretend to care about other people's children, his cowardice in running away even his Brexit gamble didn't pay off. Boris Johnson and, well, everything he did.

Labour are by no means perfect, but they are the better option.

verdantverdure
Energy prices
*We pay the highest electricity prices in the world. Why?

Germany and Ireland pay more (end-user prices) - link at the bottom of your graph - updated for Feb 2023;

www.energypriceindex.com/price-data

They don't give a shit about anything except staying in power. Boris Johnson. They lie. They're corrupt. They've been in power 13 years but take zero accountability for the state the country is in. I don't know why anyone does vote for them.

So so so many reasons, but at the heart of it, I want to help the many and not a tiny elite.

I was a young child (of a single parent) when I heard Michael Howard say that single parent families were the main cause of crime in the UK. I also remember Thatcher saying unmarried mothers and their children should be taken in by religious organisations instead of claiming benefits.
So, my deep, burning hatred for everything they stand for got an early start in my life.
Nothing they have said or done in the intervening 30-odd years has made me question my original opinion of them.

Worth noting that the EU has fixed wholesale prices across the EU to ensure providers can't hike the prices up anymore.

Thank goodness we're out of that nonsense, and our energy companies have the freedom to set their prices to ensure record profits without any meddling.

Hurrah for the Tories. Hurrah ! And Hurrah again !

I think the problem with the conservatives is that they are not in politics to help people but only to enrich themselves. Labour, the green party or lib Dem ,might be incompetent, misguided or have policies that I don't agree with but I do believe that they want to improve this country and help its people.

Maybe the conservatives weren't always like that but anyone who is still on the party doesn't have an ounce of moral fibre in their body. If they did they wouldn't still be a Tory.

there used to be a concept of "conservative with a small c", which when fed into the notion that the Tories were a "broad church" meant that overall, you'd get pretty middle of the road policies. Something for everyone.

However with the advent of single issues - because everything can be made into a single issue if you reduce it to clickbait - then the vista of a self serving machine for transferring money from the poor to the rich started to hove into view. And since the poor can be seduced into voting for it, it's not even evil. Especially when you have a system like FPTP which rejects nuance and balance.

Even on this site, in these forums, there are people who are trampling each other to remove their own rights because "- knows what a woman is", or some other clarion cry of the day.

As someone who knows very well how control and feedback work, especially when applied to large and chaotic systems, and overlaid onto the lessons of history, it's inevitable this state of affairs cannot continue to drift to the right. But the further it gets before the correction kicks in, the more violent and unpredictable that correction will be. And if that's the case, I hope I am cold in the ground before it happens.
Even in 1986, no one - no one - was even dreaming the Berlin Wall would fall 3 years later.

I noticed an interesting comment in the Telegraph online yesterday. Someone (with rather too much glee, I feel) noted that it had become impossible for the said Torygraph to back the Tories, as there wasn't a clear "Tory" any more. Just a series of in-fighting factions which make it impossible to back the winner. And you can feed the Hancockup message situation into that. A cynic might deduce the Torygraph deliberately chose to be the curator of that hornets nest, to allow them to try and be where the winners are in 2024. Or 2023 ...

Suella Braverman in particularly would stop me voting conservative. The language used in relation to migrants (who are actually people) is shameful. And then targeting civil servants is awful.

Their immigration policy, both historically and their more recent (horrifying) approach.

The handling of Brexit.

The handling of Covid.

Education policy - the rise in academies has done nothing to improve education standards and has cost a fortune, and the huge cut in funding to schools is decimating teaching standards.

Mishandling and underfunding the health service.

Cuts to early years support, Sure Start, etc.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act and their move to restrict or eliminate protest.

The cuts to local government funding.

Failure to meet its own housebuilding targets, failure to sort the cladding scandal.

Underpaying public sector workers.

On a broader more ideological scale, their idea on how to tackle the country's problems don't match up with my own.

All the problems this country has at the moment with the NHS Crisis, the Social Care Crisis, the Housing Crisis, sky high energy bill, inflation, shortages of basic everyday foods, Crimes having such a low conviction rate that many crimes are 97% legal now. The backlog in the court system, NHS Waiting Lists...

And what are the government putting all their time and energy into?

Taking away our right to vote and employing cruelty to refugees as an election gimmick.

It shows you their priorities very clearly.

Because I'm not a sucker.

They lie to their supporters repeatedly, and if I kept going back again and again after they told me more and more ridiculous lies I'd feel like a complete mug.

So...Self respect I guess.

Because they're self centred, narcissists. They couldn't organise a piss up in brewery and have done nothing but run this country into the ground in the last 13 years. Every good thing the Labour government before them did they've managed do dismantle. I've never know the NHS to be this bad not even under Maggie in the 80s!

*to