Let it sink in. On every occasion since 1955, when the Conservative Party (with or without Scottish Unionists, Ulster Unionists, Liberal Unionists and National Liberals) has won a General Election, then it has done so with a lower percentage of the vote than on the occasion before.
Was this caused by comprehensive schools in 1955 or in 1959? Was this caused by a Leftist BBC in 1955 or in 1959? Was this caused by postal votes from Pakistan in 1955 or in 1959?
The next General Election will be held 60 years after that of 1955. Sixty years. Three generations.
Anyone who was 21 on that day will be 81, having lived an entire voting life in which the main thing going on was the slow but inexorable decline of the Conservative vote.
Anyone who was 21 on that day will be 81, having lived an entire voting life in which the main thing going on was the slow but inexorable decline of the Conservative vote.
Anyone born on the last day that that party won an overall majority, in 1992, already had the vote at the most recent General Election.
Anyone born on 3rd May 1997, the first full day of Tony Blair as Prime Minister, will have the vote on 7th May 2015, having never lived a single second under a Conservative majority government.
Anyone born on 3rd May 1997, the first full day of Tony Blair as Prime Minister, will have the vote on 7th May 2015, having never lived a single second under a Conservative majority government.
Britain has been going off the Conservatives since before almost all New Commonwealth immigration, and since before there even was a New Commonwealth, really.
Britain has been going off the Conservatives since before the 1960s Counterculture, and since well before it affected very many people.
Britain has been going off the Conservatives since long before Thatcherism.
Britain has been going off the Conservatives since a good decade before David Cameron, never mind George Osborne, was born.
Britain has been going off the Conservatives since before the 1960s Counterculture, and since well before it affected very many people.
Britain has been going off the Conservatives since long before Thatcherism.
Britain has been going off the Conservatives since a good decade before David Cameron, never mind George Osborne, was born.
That process is now almost complete.
The public been going off the Tories since they started surrendering to the Left in the 1950's (the Tories adoption of left-wing public spending programmes in 1958 caused Peter Thorneycroft resignation).
ReplyDeleteBut it hasn't been going off conservatism.
As Peter Hitchens has always said, a real conservative party (without the baggage associated with the Tories) would sweep Labour into the sea.
Polls show that he's right.
Whether we live in the North or in the South, Peter Kellner notes, most of us are against welfarism, for the death penalty, and for jailing more criminals, against immigration and for grammar schools.
There is an enormous Right-wing constituency out there.
It awaits the collapse of one of the parties to make way for someone to represent it.
Well, despite the best efforts of a besotted Fleet Street and BBC, it's not happening. There is no such thing as the Tories without the Tories. Never has been, never will be.
ReplyDeleteLabour membership might be nothing like it was, but the Labour vote is more solid than ever. Almost no-one in much of the country or born after a certain date would ever consider voting for anyone else. They Tories have got nothing like that.
ReplyDeleteI have been hanging around a posh university for donkey's years. In fact, I was royally entertained by some of its finest only on Friday night.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that I have noticed is that, just as even the most middle-class and even upper-middle-class people in the North are now at least as likely as not to be core Labour voters, so only about half even of the commercially educated six per cent of the young would now consider voting Conservative, or indeed any way except Labour.
It was just never occur to them. Consider how posh pop music now is, with 60 per cent of chart acts from Britain now privately schooled, and with few of the rest coming off horny-handed sons of the toil.
But try and imagine any of them voting Conservative, or indeed any way except Labour. It is a long way from Cliff Richard, and from any number of proto-Thatcherite tax exiles of the old Tory working class (or thereabouts), with David Bowie and Eric Clapton way out on the Far Right.
Comedy is the same. Never posher. But never more solidly Labour. It's generational: of people born after 1990, half of the privately educated minority and practically all of the state educated majority vote Labour because they just do.
"There's no such thing as tories without the Tories" is a circular argument; there would be such a thing, the day they ceased to exist.
ReplyDeleteAnd those ex Labour voters and ex members of both parties ( the apathetic majority, if you will) would never dream of voting Tory and see UKIP as a wasted vote, under our two-party system. So they don't vote at all.
But they certainly would, as they once did, if there was a party that reflected their sensible, pro-British views but didn't have the historical baggage of the Tories.
A fiercely anti-crime, pro-education, anti-EU, anti-welfarism, and unashamedly anti-PC party would, as the polls show, represent and capture far more votes than the current two parties.
Under our FTPT system, there isn't a gap in the market till one party collapses; that has happened all over Europe except here.
The Tories are the oldest party in the world and past their sell-by date.
Replace them, or we'll never have any hope.
Until such time as the policies that you described became those of the Labour Party, Labour voters would never vote for them, and even then they would not be voting for those policies, but simply for Labour, because that is just what they do. And they are now by far the largest bloc in British politics. You are wasting your time.
ReplyDeleteLabour is an empty shell-it has no "bloc" whatsoever (it once consistently got close to 50% of the vote, when the turnout was 83%; it now cannot get 35% of a pathetic turnout) and it owes what little is left of its vote to the continued existence of the Tories, forever associated with coal mine closures rather than conservatism.
ReplyDeleteIf the Tories "deprived them of an enemy" by splitting (and were replaced by a conservative formation) Labour would end up at the bottom of the sea.
Remember this; less than 1% of British people are now members of any of these three parties.
That is how bad it is.
Labour has no "bloc" whatsoever.
Who mentioned membership? And you don't need anything like 50 per cent of the vote to win.
ReplyDeleteSimply by being Labour (specific policies barely enter into it, in some cases not at all - the label alone does it, and nothing else ever can), Labour is now always guaranteed to win heavily in the North of England, in the West of Scotland for Westminster elections, in South Wales, in the urban centres elsewhere, among public sector workers, among the self-identifying working class (45 per cent of which used to be Tory, but no more), among people with any ethnic minority background, among Catholics as ever, among half or more of people born in the 1970s, among most people born in the 1980s, and among practically everyone born since 1990, even including around half of the privately schooled six per cent.
That is the point at which, almost entirely regardless of policy, Labour starts. No one else has anything remotely comparable.
There is, in particular, no core Conservative vote whatever. There used to be one. But it could now go absolutely anywhere. And it routinely does so.
"(specific policies barely enter into it, in some cases not at all - the label alone does it, and nothing else ever can"
ReplyDeleteWell, if you want to admit that politics has descended into purely irrational tribalism, that doesn't seem to me to be any cause for celebration.
There is an enormous constituency of people who no longer vote, or who protest-vote that certainly would go elsewhere.
If they had somewhere else to go with a realistic chance of winning.
That can only happen when the Tories go; many European parties, younger than they are, have collapsed and split. It's very nearly happened here before.
Indeed, when they work out that they can't win another election, it will happen. The only question is when, and what will replace it?
That is up to the people.
Not up to very many people, though. Who would want half of the remaining Conservative vote in 2015? Still, I suppose that someone would. They would be welcome to it.
ReplyDeleteWho said anything about half of the remaining conservative vote in 2015?
ReplyDeleteThe people whom a new party would attract would be the majority-much larger than the voting blocs of either party-who no longer vote for either of them.
In addition to many of those who now vote Labour.
Illiterate.
ReplyDelete