Wednesday 5 July 2017

The Tories have positioned themselves over a demographic trapdoor


David Cameron was a purveyor of fanatically right-wing policies like austerity dogma, endless handouts to corporations and the mega-rich, destruction of workers' rights and privatisation mania, but he managed to sweeten the bitter poison pill a bit with some slick presentation, some socially liberal policies (like gay marriage), and a bit of centrist posturing.

Theresa May saw no need to appeal to moderates or the centre-right because she was absolutely certain that chasing the UKIP vote with an extreme-right makeover would win her a massive landslide victory.

She imagined that all she needed to do was devise government policy as if she were writing editorials for the Daily Express (regular outbursts of anti-immigrant rhetoric, threats against the EU, endlessly banging on about scrapping our human rights and clamping down on Internet freedom, bringing back educational apartheid based on selection at the age of 11, badmouthing public services and public sector workers, promising yet more tax-cuts for the corporations and the mega-rich, and constant jingoistic Brexit flag-waving) and the voters would flock to the polls to hand her a super-majority so big she could run the UK as a de facto dictatorship.

The fightback against Theresa May's brand of fanatically right-wing ultra-nationalism wasn't entirely successful because she successfully absorbed a great big chunk of the UKIP vote by waving the Brexit flag she'd opportunistically stolen from the Brexiters that she had opposed during the EU referendum debate (more out of self-serving opportunism than any real political conviction).

Am awful lot of sleepwalking Brexiters simply followed the Brexit flag without even thinking about who was holding it, but there simply weren't enough of them to prevent a massive shock to a complacent political establishment as Theresa May threw her parliamentary majority away in a modern morality tale about vanity and hubris.

The reason for this shock is a huge demographic imbalance between the under-50s who voted strongly in favour of Labour's transformative manifesto, and the over-60s who voted en masse in favour of Theresa May's disgusting prescription of more austerity dogma, more wage repression for people who actually work, more asset-stripping of the UK, more education cuts, and more attacks on our freedoms and civil rights.

Source: James Kanagasooriam
There are many reasons behind this incredible demographic shift, not least the incredible social media virality of unashamedly left-wing independent media sites in comparison to the pro-establishment mainstream media.

It's no coincidence that those most likely to vote for Theresa May's brand of fanatically right-wing ultra-nationalism were also the demographic most likely to have no access to independent media, and who relied almost exclusively on the mainstream media for their political news and views.

The Tories and the political pundit class believed that Theresa May was right and that a thumping Tory-kip victory was inevitable, but when the results came in they reacted with shock and horror because for the first time in decades the English people hadn't voted the way they had been instructed to by the biased mainstream media propaganda merchants and their Tory lords and masters.

Research by Michael Ashcroft revealed a number of very interesting things about the huge generational disparity. The under-50s are very much more likely to believe that social liberalism, feminism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism are positive things than the over-60s.

Meanwhile the only demographic in which over 42% of respondents see unrestrained capitalism as a good thing are the over-64s (presumably because they're retired and they're happy as long as it's other people facing the low wages, job insecurity, and exploitative employment contracts associated with unrestrained capitalism).

There is a massive generational divide in Britain and the Tories' desperate lurch to the extreme-right under Theresa May has admittedly increased Tory appeal amongst the older generations, but it's created a demographic time-bomb by completely trashing Tory support amongst the under-40s.

It's absolutely clear that if the views of the retired matched the views of the working-age population then the Tories would have been annihilated in Theresa May's vanity election, but the problem for the Tories is that they don't have anything whatever to offer the younger generations.

Theresa May's stilted post-election repetition of the same old idiot fodder excuses for austerity dogma makes it absolutely clear that her script writers are totally out of ideas.

Not only are the tories completely out of ideas, but they must also fear that if they did actually have any new ideas, any moved to win back the younger generations with some socially liberal policies and a shift away from the fanatical hard-right territory they currently occupy could cause the fickle blue-kip demographic to abandon the Tory party as rapidly as they rushed to support it in Theresa May's vanity election.


By defining themselves as a bunch of fanatically hard-right ultra-nationalists the Tories have seriously damaged their political brand and positioned themselves over a demographic trapdoor.

Either they try to edge themselves off the trapdoor by abandoning the extreme-right territory and risk losing the fickle blue-kip vote, or they stay where they are and fall through the demographic trapdoor as their over-60 supporter base dies off and the under-40 demographic is bolstered with ever more young people who object to the Tories' hard-right policy of trashing their future in order to lavish ever more handouts on their mega-rich mates as strongly as they object to their extreme-right ultra-nationalist posturing in order to appeal to the blue-kip vote.

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