I wonder if the problem that will eventually be their undoing is alienating a large proportion of younger voters who may not grow up and switch allegiance to the Tories as previous generations have done so? I seem to recall that polling after the last two General Elections indicated that a plurality of under-50s voted for parties other than the Tories whilst over-50s voted for the Tories (with the divide becoming more extreme the older or younger you looked i.e. in the over 70s it might be 75% Tory and in the 18-24s it might be 75% Labour). I wonder if that tipping point age has increased in recent years? Which might be a problem if more and more of todays 20 and 30 somethings don't switch allegiance
It's a question that I've wondered a lot about - as I'm at the stage in my life where you'd expect me to have started voting Tory by now - which I've never done - so I've pondered the reasons why people in my circumstances have generally switched from red to blue by now and why I've not (e.g. is it more about me and my circumstances or is it more about this generation of Tories - maybe I'd have been okay voting for a Tory leader who appeared fairly "stable" like Heath/ Major but I certainly couldn't vote for Johnson)
On the one hand, it looks easier for people under forty to vote Tory these days - the "Millennial" generation are much more financially switched on - they graduate in large numbers, with large numbers of debt too, so they need to get a good job, can't afford to doss around like Generation X, certainly don't have the safety nets that Baby Boomers had
I reckon that the under forties are much savvier financially than previous generations - they are more receptive to messages about £££ - they've also grown up at a time where popular culture is a celebration of wealth (rather than it being a dirty word).
Also, I think that the lack of safety net for them (compared to previous generations) will make the Millennials a more "selfish" generation (not their fault - what I mean is that, since nobody was paying their University costs for them, they won't feel they need to pay for future generations of teenagers - so more likely to vote Tory?
But, at the same time, there are two things that I think will mean people less likely to switch.
Firstly, my personal feeling is that social media will "trap" people into who they were as teenagers (more than happened with other generations). Back when I were a lad (!), you drifted into and out of trends, you fell in love with bands/ films/ ideas/ foods and then forgot about them. But let's say someone was born on 1 January 2000 - they got onto social media at fifteen (in 2015), so found themselves in the heady days of Corbynmania - you join lots of Corbyn-related groups on Facebook, your Twitter feed is full of Corbyn obsessives posting their righteous thoughts about Magic Granddad - it's great. You choose the media bias that you want to get, you only want news from the sources that confirm your bias, fair enough. By the time you are twenty one (in, erm, 2021), you'd normally have been expected to have moved on from the "Corbyn" phase of your life. But you're trapped down this rabbit hole with other "true believers". You don't dare post something about how reasonable the new LibDem leader sounded in his latest speech because your friend group won't tolerate that dissent. So I think that the constant reinforcement of the things that you signed up to will make it harder to shift position. And this is an era where your friends can see what media you've consumer - your Spotify playlist or the public pages you've commented on in Facebook or your Twitter "likes". You don't want to alienate people by being seen to change your mind, you also find it harder to form your own opinions since your media feeds are still telling you what you believed in when you signed up to them
The other thing relates to people buying newspapers. People used to get pretty much all of their information/news from one daily newspaper. If you were chummy with the people who owned a few newspapers then you could ensure good coverage. A convincing paper could persuade people to vote against their own interests. The under fifties don't buy so many newspapers these days, so it's a lot harder to get your message across as easily. Whilst some newspaper websites are very popular, they are no longer the only source of news for people (and people are much more likely to only look at the Showbiz/ Football bits of the website, rather than the days when you'd at least skim through each page of your newspaper). So it'll be tough to get a big/ simple/ blunt message across. Maybe the alternative is the shady kind of Facebook adverts that Cambridge Analytica/ Cummings/ Vote Leave etc were involved with - targeted adverts that only certain people saw - so you could send completely contradictory information out there to different people (e.g. adverts to "white" people promised that Brexit would stop immigration, adverts to "Indian" people promised that Brexit would allow the UK to increase the amount of immigration from the Subcontinent since we were no longer taking free movement of people from the EU - but only the targeted audience saw each message at the time). The Tories seem to be focussing more and more on the people who (still) buy newspapers - an increasingly old readership - which is leaving them more adrift from the thirty/forty-somethings who'd otherwise be considering voting Tory - most of the Tory appeal seems to be aiming for going for people who are 65 rather than 45 (and certainly not for people at 25) IMHO
After all what's the pitch to win them over? From the above quote it looks like we're getting dinged again to pick up the tab for older people (you stop paying NI once you reach State Pension age even if you continue to work). Benefits for working age people have been slashed to to bone whilst benefits for pensioners have been fairly well protected. We locked down because older people were dying in their thousands and young people, particularly school children, have born the brunt of that. Many young people feel locked out of the housing market unless they can rely on mum & dad to help them get their first foot on the ladder.*
This predicted NI increase would be incredibly regressive (NI paid by poor paid workers who earn too little to pay Income Tax, NI only 2% on earnings over forty something thousand, NI not paid by people over State Pension Age) - we'd be expecting today's poorly paid young people to pay disproportionately more so that the Baby Boomers can retain their expensive houses when they go into Care Homes - you'd have to try hard to think of a policy more likely to give the impression that the Tories are the party of wealthy older people and expect younger poorer people to pay more
I'm not sure I agree anymore. The Tory party seem to be doing everything they can to royally pee off the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish. They really don't seem to be an actual unionist party in the true sense of the word (wanting to preserve the union).
I don't know much about Wales but (as a Scot) the Tories seem to be doing rather well north of the border, by positioning themselves as the "anti-SNP" - it's not pretty but it's effective, it's squeezed a lot of the Unionist vote from other parties (twenty years ago the Tories were virtually extinct in Scotland, now they're beating Labour - unthinkable to my generation)
They're not popular with the majority of Scots, sure, but politics is often about getting 30% of people to love you rather than 51% of people to like you - the SNP love the Tories in the way that the DUP love Sein Fein - it helps shore up your core supporters to show your opponents as the diametric opposite
Does putting a giant flag there remind people what Westminster does? I doubt it!
Another example - for some offices in Wales and Scotland they spent tens of thousands of pounds adding "UK government" branding but they decided not to bother in England. Sure not much in terms of government budgets - but I can't help but question why they did it in Wales and Scotland but not England, and regardless of politics - wouldn't it have been nice to have seen that money maybe be spent on the local communities to those offices instead!
Actually it doesn't - a giant union flag says nothing about what the building is used for. The news did that. But a much simpler, cheaper and less antagonistic sign on the building saying HMRC would tell people what the building is used for.
It's amusing to see Welsh nationalists arguing about the "waste of public money" to put up something that's "irrelevant" to the vast majority of people in Cardiff - pure "gesture politics" etc
Whereas ensuring that everything is bi-lingual (in a city where very few people speak Welsh as a first language) is presumably none of the above things...
