It's getting away from the topic at hand, but ...
If you wish to use your vote, in general you must use it to support the set of policies which leaves you least unhappy, accepting that you're taking something in the round.
You can hardly claim to be shocked that your public services aren't very good, or, if you work in them, that you're treated terribly at work, if you voted Conservative.
On those two points alone I am in complete agreement, however ...
Therefore, millions of voters at the very least see cuts to public sector pay as a price worth paying. To suggest people are ignorant of that is your right, but I'd suggest that most Conservative voters would tell you where to stick it.
The situation you present here is somewhat idealised and perhaps not entirely realistic. I would love to think that every voter will go away and digest the manifestos of all the various parties and then make their voting decisions based on how the various manifesto promises match up to their values, but I think that is descriptive mainly of the behaviour of "floating" voters and not of the majority. I would suggest that the majority of voters either have long-standing party allegiances, an interest in only a very narrow range of policies (e.g. immigration, law and order, education and so on) to the exclusion of all others, or are influenced by a desire to better their own individual situation. That is not to say that they are "ignorant" of the impact that their vote might have on public services but rather that they do not consider it in their deliberations, which was the point I was trying to make.
To put it another way, the railway has done a fairly good job (although not always!) of escaping the tyranny of a Conservative government hell bent on shrinking the state for some time. That has now almost come to an end.
Well we'll have to wait and see if the new model of governance brings about any changes, because the precise nature of the relationship between the Government and the railways under GBR is still not clear. I would certainly hope that it brings about some simplifications in the structure of the railway and it's institutions because the system we've been using for the last 25 years is flabby, inefficient and costly. Whatever the case, I don't think that you could call it
"shrinking the state" given that it is meant to be a privatised industry and the new model appears to promise more Government oversight rather than less. I would have hoped that the Government would have learned the lesson of the East Coast franchise and applied them to the network as a whole, but I'm not sure that's going to happen.