Ha ha ha! Toby Young sticks it to the Gurniad and Labour luvvies

[Wellwobbly]

There's a great example in the Guardian this morning of what Americans call "gee whiz" journalism, as in, a piece of news greeted as if it's jaw-droppingly sensational when, to the rest of us is, it's bleedin? obvious. I'm talking about John Harris's belated discovery that "the yoof" don't share the values of the liberal, Guardian-reading metropolitan elite. Incredible as it may seem, they're not pro-immigration, pro-welfare or pro-redistributive taxation. According to Ipsos MORI, only 20 per cent of 18-34-year-olds agree with the statement "the creation of the welfare state is one of Britain's proudest achievements". How dare they?!? Most amazingly of all ? to Harris, anyway ? is that Generation Y don't blame the "Con-Dem cuts" for youth unemployment. Haven't they been listening to Len McCluskey?
The most telling passage in the article comes at the end, when Harris meets a 27-year-old in Warrington who's just got a job after a bout of unemployment thanks to the government's Work Programme. Harris asks him whether he thinks his joblessness was his fault.
"Yeah," he says. "I do. I think I should have applied for more. I should have picked myself up in the morning, got out, come to a place like this ? tried more. When you're feeling down, you start blaming the world for your mistakes ? you feel the world owes you. And it doesn't. You owe the world: you have to motivate yourself, and get out there, and try."
Harris describes this reply as ? wait for it ? "heartbreaking". Yes, it breaks the Guardianista's heart that this young person doesn't think the world owes him a living. Instead of becoming welfare dependent, trapped for the rest of his life in poverty and despair ? as any self-respecting member of the proletariat should, doncha know ? he's actually gone out and found himself a job! Oh tempora! Oh mores! What's become of the client state? It's as if 13 years of New Labour never happened.
Harris blames "Thatcherism" for the proletariat's false consciousness ? and the fact that Labour hasn't been a proper socialist party since Tony Blair ditched Clause IV. The "up-by-your-boot-straps Conservatism of Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher" (yah, boo, sucks) went "largely unchallenged during the New Labour years" and is now accepted by millions of young people as "a simple matter of fact". Echoes here of red daiper baby Owen Jones, whom Harris singles out (alongside public schoolgirl Laurie Penny) as a beacon of hope amidst all the gloom. Owen thinks "the rightwing media" is to blame for brainwashing the lumpen proles. If only the poor sods read the Guardian or the Independent, then they'd know THE TRUTH which is that the millionaire-Tory-Bullingdon-Boys-ruling-class have a vested interest in keeping them down.
Hmmm. Call me a capitalist running dog, but I can think of another explanation for Generation Y's lack of enthusiasm for the values of John Harris, Owen Jones and public schoolgirl Laurie Penny.
Maybe ? just maybe ? the reason 18-34-year-olds aren't wild about the consequences of Labour's open-door immigration policy is because they noticed that nine out of ten jobs created under the last government went to foreign-born workers.
Maybe ? just maybe ? the young residents of towns like Warrington aren't in lockstep with John Harris and Owen Jones and public schoolgirl Laurie Penny when it comes to state hand-outs is because they've witnessed the appalling, destructive, calamitous impact of welfare dependency with their own eyes.
Maybe ? just maybe ? the reason more 18-24-year-olds say they're going to vote Conservative (31 per cent) than Labour (27 per cent) is because they recognise that Britain wasn't in a great place after 13 years of the other lot in power, that we need to get the deficit under control if we're to avoid joining Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy and (any day now) France in the bankruptcy club and that David Cameron and George Osborne's plan for digging us out of this hole is just a teensy weensy bit more credible than Ed Miliband and Ed Balls's.
No, silly me. It's because they've all been brainwashed by The Sun.

It is pathetic how much taxpayer money is wasted by these people and they get away with it while people are thrown out of their homes because they can't afford an extra £14 for the bedroom tax

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2325212/BBC-black-hole-Salford-swallows-cash--15k-Gary-Linekers-taxis-talent-commuting-jet.html

"there cant be any other business in the country that would allow that kind of abuse"

Exactly and this is all funded by the taxpayer which is why they can get away with. To the progressive, public money grows on trees.

Good point about the rates. Taxpayers are milked by the elite class and small businesses too.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2346234/Business-rates-shop-Rochdale-twice-Harrods-say-boutique-owners-forced-21-000-bill.html

The nation is working to keep these people in the style they have become accustomed to - expenses, taxis, salaries, golden goodbyes and bonuses, subsidised canteens and bars are no object to these people.

Some of them are on six figure salaries and gold-plated pensions, while a third of the hardworking public don't even have a pension.

Claig. What a lot of people think is if you are right of centre you are a racist or hate poor people .As you have demonstrated right of centre politics is about freedom ,allowing people to keep as much as their own money as possible and making sure bureaucrats and free loaders dont waste taxpayers money. What the left leaning free loaders and bureaucrats do is brainwash the "PROLETARIAT" in to believing the right want to impoverish them. The truth is its in the intrest of the left to keep the "PROLETARIAT" impoverished in money terms and education.

Exactly.

The majority of the country is right wing and John Harris found it heartbreaking to find out that the majority of the youth are too.

Our TV media is left wing, which is how the progressives are able to use propaganda to fool people that the following is true :
"What a lot of people think is if you are right of centre you are a racist or hate poor people"

Some people are overexcited. Young people have not all of a sudden become conservatives or Tory voters.

UKPollingReport discusses Toby Young's Guardian article:

Last year I wrote an article on How Not To Report Opinion Polls. It included advice on ignoring small cross breaks, margins of error and not cherry-picking. That is, if there is a long data series with lots of noise and random error, don?t pick out the one random outlier than supports your case and ignore the rest.

There is a classic example in the Guardian today. John Harris writes about polling of young people and says they are voting Tory. He writes: ?One recent YouGov poll put support for the Tories among the 18-24s at 31%, with Labour trailing at 27%. By way of a contrast, Tory support among those aged 40-59 was at 29%, with Labour on 40%. In other words, the time-worn wisdom about politics and the young may be in the process of being turned on its head.?

Well, yes, one recent YouGov poll showed that. This one. However, other YouGov poll this month have tended to show Labour leads amongst young people and the Conservatives doing better amongst older people, a far more normal pattern. The poll the Guardian linked to was not typical of recent polling. On average YouGov?s daily sample contains around about 150 people under 25, about a third of which say don?t know or that they wouldn?t vote. This means the daily voting break for under 25s is based on about a hundred people, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 10 points. In other words, if a party actually had a lead of around about 8 points amongst young people, then random error alone will spit out polls showing leads of between plus 28 and minus 12. You can?t just take one out of context that happens to show figures you like.

Taking an average across the whole of June so far YouGov?s crossbreak for under 25s has the Conservatives on 31%, Labour on 38% ? a significantly higher level of Labour support. Even that needs some caveating though. Opinion polls are weighted to be representative of the country as a whole, they are not necessary weighted so that the crossbreaks are internally representative. For example, overall there will be the correct number of people with a C2 social class, but there may be too few old people who are C2 and too few young people, or whatever. In theory this should even out over time, but there are no guarantees.

If you really want to know about the views of a particular sub-sample of the British population you need polling specificially aimed at them. Luckily enough, the Sun commissioned a specific YouGov poll of young people earlier this month, which was specificially weighted on things like education and employment status and level of educational qualification. It didn?t ask voting intention, but it did ask young people which party they thought best reflected their views ? the results were 23% Labour, 12% Conservative, 7% Lib Dem, 7% Green, 6% UKIP, 39% none or don?t know.

In short, all the other findings that John Harris writes about on social and economic issues are fine (and are largely drawn from MORI?s generational data based on very large aggregate samples), but the idea that the Conservatives are suddenly the leading party amongst young people is really not true.

ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/7708

Claig,

I note that you're as politically ignorant as ever. 'Progressive' isn't a word you can use in place of 'any group of people I don't like', and it doesn't mean 'the people in power'. In fact, if they're in power, it's more likely than not that they're not progressive, but conservative.

People go and educate yourself politically. Fox news and the Daily Mail are not credible news sources. They are entertainment sources.

The majority of the country is right wing and John Harris found it heartbreaking to find out that the majority of the youth are too.

Nope, sorry, simply not true.

The majority of the entire population might be conservative with a small c, but they are not right-wing, and the majority of youth have consistently, for decades, been to the left of most of the population.

I'm hoping one day you lot are forced onto disability benefits.
Then maybe the self congratulatory crowing and back slapping might mute.

Not everyone becomes reliant on the benefits system through choice.

Oh and I'm not a labour luvvie. I despise them, too.
Whilst you're all gum flapping about the scroungers being the root of all evil and responsible for the country's financial ruin the real causes are laughing at you.

In the meantime RIP to the over 11,000 who have died in the past 18 months after being found 'fit for work'.

Hope you're proud of your 'civilised society'. If you measure our country by the adage that you can tell how civilised a society is by the way it treats its most vulnerable then we don't have a civilised society at all, merely a fetid cess pit of greed.

"In fact, if they're in power, it's more likely than not that they're not progressive, but conservative."

But this gets to the heart of what a conservative is and why the Conservative party have lost so many votes to UKIP.

Are the "conservatives" in power Thatcherite conservatives or are they progressives who champion carbon taxes, catastrophic climate change, windfarms and the polar bear?

UKIP has scooped up tens of thousands of former Tory voters because they are more like the Thatcherite style of conservative. Some of the progressives in the Tory party even apparently called some of their constituency members "swivel-eyed loons". Soon some of them may even commit the sacrilege of calling Maggie a "swivel-eyed loon". This is not conservative behaviour, this is progressive behaviour of the worst kind.

"The majority of the entire population might be conservative with a small c, but they are not right-wing"

Yes, I agree. they are essentially economically liberal and don't want higher taxation, and they are sceptical on climate change and are not in favour of more windmills.

"Hope you're proud of your 'civilised society'."
"I'm hoping one day you lot are forced onto disability benefits."

And I hope you are proud of yourself for such a disgusting statement; hoping that anyone becomes disabled.

No one has said that benefits for disabled people should be cut.

We want the taxi fares, the golden goodbyes, the salaries and perks of quangocrats and BBC bigwigs and NHS Trust bosses with their gagging clauses and rich landowners' taxpayer subsidies for erecting useless windfarms and all the other progressives dipping into the public purse to be cut.

If that happened, there would be more than enough money to go around and the economy would start booming again after that big burden had been lifted off the hardworking public's back.

"Whilst you're all gum flapping about the scroungers being the root of all evil"

No one has mentioned scroungers. All we have said is that the subsidised bars and canteens in the House of Commons should be scrapped, and they should pay their fair share to demonstrate how they are all in it together with everyone else.

No one is against benefits for the poor. We are against benefits for the rich, subsidised bars for the privileged and public bailouts for bankers.

We are against privatisation of profits and socialisation of losses. We are against ordinary people footing the bill for an elite class of quangocrats, bureaucrats and bigwigs who pay themselves huge salaries and have gold-plated pensions at the expense of ordinary workers who in large part don't even have pensions.

We are for accountability and transparency. We are for prosecutions of people in high positions of authority who preside over shocking scenes in our hospitals wghere ordinary people die of dehydration on our wards or die unnecessarily in our hospitals and where no one is adequately held to account.

We are for a better Britain, where there is real public service and where the public always comes first.

We are not anti the poor, we stand with the poor and demand a spotlight be turned on the rich elite who preside over the deterioration of our public services and our economy and our regulatory bodies and who are handsomely compensated for what is often incompetence.

We are for holding the elite to account, to make sure that they serve the public and serve the poor.

I feel depressed after reading this. You lot (except the two speaking sense ttosca and gobby) should be rounded up and thrown in the Thames. Would be interesting to watch the survival of the fittest then, huh?

Thankfully I live in Scotland where we are, generally, a left leaning nation which believes in social democracy. Mind you I say that as someone who works in the public sector, is in a union and is passionate about the rights of disabled people so the people I cross paths with tend to share my views!

We are against the knighthoods for "services to banking" that New Labour bestowed. We only want knighthoods for "services to the people".

We want knighthoods and honours and accolades for people like Julie Bailey who campaigned for years with Cure the NHS to expose the unnecessary deaths that occurred in Stafford., not knighthoods for bankers.

We want the scum who have sent her death threats and desecrated her mother's grave arrested and jailed for a very long time. We want a message sent that anyone who threatens or abuses her, abuses the entire population.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2348449/Julie-Bailey-The-whistleblower-exposed-Mid-Staffs-scandal-driven-home.html

all those things you want Claig are certainly not going to be to be supplied by UKIP or the right.

I will vote for any party that supplies them - I don't care if it is left, right or centre.

I am starting to think that UKIP might actually do a lot of it, because they are on the whole ordinary people who haven't got PPEs from top universities and who don't sit on quangos and aren't employed in charaitable trusts and social foundations and in third sector publicly funded roles.

Nigel Farage went to public school, did he not? He might not have a PPE, I dunno, but if he doesn't it's only because he was too thick to get one, the guffawing prating fuckwit.

And I hardly think that Tories having a 2% lead in one poll in one tiny country is evidence of the middle classes rising up as one against those nasty nasty socialists. Still, keep frotting yourself - it's pretty amusing.

"the guffawing prating fuckwit"

Are you referring to his facial expressions when he spots a pint of ale?

He went to Dulwich School, which is a private school, and didn't go to university as afar as I know. But most of the party's candidates did not go to public schools as far as I know.

I'm just referring to how he is, which is a twat.

I do agree that UK politics is overrun with posh boys in all parties - the ultimate expression of this being the Bullingdon lot currently taking their wrecking ball to every safety net in sight, for shits and giggles as far as I can make out. And Labour are precious little better, and the lib dems have no spine.

But I don't think the answer to this is to vote for a party that is racist, sexist and full of pie-in-the-sky policies that would never actually work, headed up by fool.

CLAIG. Once again people have assumed your thoughts on immigration,benefits and the N.H.S without reading what you are saying .That is because many of the posters on here have been brainwashed by the media to automatically discard thinking that is not from the mainstream politcal partys. Therefore unable to think about voting anyway different from the cradle to grave loyalty to thier chosen politcal party .It was very enlightening watching Question Time on thursday night from Newcastle, where it was evident that audience members under 30 were very dismissive of the labour repersentative and the economic nonsense coming from Balls and Milliband who with their face pulling have made Prime Ministers question time a joke. It is so childish i half expect Balls to start laughing and declare that your on "CANDID CAMERA" such is his Economic nonsense i dont think he actually believes it himself.

"such is his Economic nonsense i dont think he actually believes it himself"

If he does believe it , then he is madder than a march hare. I think he plays a good game, he plays a good act, but little of it is for real.