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Who would you vote for in a General Election? January 2021

Who would you vote for in a General Election?

  • Conservatives

    Votes: 21 12.7%
  • Labour

    Votes: 60 36.1%
  • Lib Dems

    Votes: 21 12.7%
  • Green

    Votes: 8 4.8%
  • UKIP

    Votes: 2 1.2%
  • Reform

    Votes: 9 5.4%
  • SNP

    Votes: 10 6.0%
  • Plaid Cymru

    Votes: 5 3.0%
  • DUP

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 9 5.4%
  • Abstain

    Votes: 21 12.7%

  • Total voters
    166
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Gloster

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I have long held the opinion that in a few hundred years the human race will be limited to a few tribes living in fortified villages. The rest will have been wiped out by a mixture of famine, flooding, global warming, disease, war fare, nuclear pollution and I know not what else. The root of it all would be too many people fighting over dwindling resources. The only thing that might save the planet would be a massive cull of the population due to something like a plague. Hmmm, I wonder...
 
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DynamicSpirit

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The Green New deal would be a disaster for the UK. It's red state socialism dressed up as a green policy. Since when has reforming banks got anything to do with climate change?

I'm a realist. Unless you want to live in a medieval style mud house, carbon emissions are necessary. It's impossible to make raw materials such as steal without carbon ( in the form of coal)
Without steel you can't construct buildings, cars or trains.

Then you have plastics which make up almost everything from food packaging, interiors, furniture, computers and chemicals. It's not practical to ditch them yet.

Without the two, fundamentally the economy will collapse, causing mass starvations and deaths.

I believe it's possible to reduce carbon emissions, but cutting them to zero is impossible without wholesale changes to lifestyles which would be untenable for most people.

I think that's pretty misleading because you're not taking account of technological improvements. The generally accepted goal is zero CO2 emissions by 2050. Obviously zero emissions is not possible today, but 2050 gives us 30 years to make infrastructure changes and develop new technologies as appropriate to make it possible to get to (roughly) zero emissions without having to sacrifice our standard of living too much. The point of the Green New Deal and similar approaches is (rather obviously) to prioritise making those changes as soon as possible so that we can get to near zero emissions.

Your point about things like plastics being made up of raw components is a bit of a red herring as far as climate change is concerned because CO2 emissions are caused by *burning* fossil fuels - they aren't caused by converting fossil fuels to useful things like plastics (except insofar as some of the fuels are burned for energy). Ditto steel production - yes, coal is used as a source of energy, but research is underway to find alternatives.

The existence of disposable plastics is of concern from a plastic pollution and biodiversity POV, but again the point of the green industrial revolution is to start developing alternative technologies as soon as we can so we can get on top of the problem. Like you I'd probably quibble with the details - some of how Labour proposed it at the last election seemed to be motivated by ideology rather than practicality - but I can't fault the principle of moving the economy much more in the direction of green technologies.
 

XAM2175

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If there was a new election, I'm sure Farage would register a new party vehicle for himself, though...
He's renamed the Brexit Party to "Reform UK", which is also an option in the poll. Apparently some people still think he's something other than a shameless charlatan.
 

backontrack

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He's renamed the Brexit Party to "Reform UK", which is also an option in the poll. Apparently some people still think he's something other than a shameless charlatan.
Ah yes, of course, cheers...I think he thinks he's our Trump.
 

SS4

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It doesn't matter thanks to FPTP. My heart would vote socialist but my head Labour
 

richw

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I live in a deprived area, yet the Tory woman (who has made numerous vile comments about the poor and food banks) still seems to get in by a country mile.
last time she scored 56% of the votes with labour and Lib Dem evenly splitting the remaining 44%.

ironically we’re probably one of the better off households in the area, yet I don’t understand why all the council estate benefit claimants proudly vote Tory.

at present I see no suitable party to get my vote. At the town council election we got all independents who are approachable, and help locals. all of them are well known locals, so pretty much the whole town is friends with one or the other
 

Class 466

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As ever, online polls often skew heavily towards Labour, honestly I expect all that would come out of another GE would be another Conservative led government.
 

takno

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As ever, online polls often skew heavily towards Labour, honestly I expect all that would come out of another GE would be another Conservative led government.
I don't think anybody is suggesting this poll is representative of wider society. The real opinion polls (which are generally not terribly unreliable) suggest that right now the most likely outcome would be a Labour government. Certainly if the Tories went into an election right now with Boris at the helm it's not clear that they could do anything to turn that around. What actually happens a couple of years down the line when the election is actually going to happen is a different question.
 

DynamicSpirit

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From what I recall of other polls on railforums, people here do skew heavily towards both Labour and the LibDems. I'm not sure by how much, but I think I remember railforums polls having Labour on twice the Tories' support even while nationally the Tories are slightly ahead. But even so, the results of this poll are pretty remarkable: Even on railforums, I'd expect the Tories to be on 20-25%, not the 7% the poll is currently showing. Put together with current national polls, that does seem to confirm that a hypothetical general election today would probably not return a majority Tory Government. But as @takno says, the situation may well be very different in, maybe 3 to 3 and a half years time, when an election is most likely to take place.
 

Bevan Price

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From what I recall of other polls on railforums, people here do skew heavily towards both Labour and the LibDems. I'm not sure by how much, but I think I remember railforums polls having Labour on twice the Tories' support even while nationally the Tories are slightly ahead. But even so, the results of this poll are pretty remarkable: Even on railforums, I'd expect the Tories to be on 20-25%, not the 7% the poll is currently showing. Put together with current national polls, that does seem to confirm that a hypothetical general election today would probably not return a majority Tory Government. But as @takno says, the situation may well be very different in, maybe 3 to 3 and a half years time, when an election is most likely to take place.
Some of the more affluent tories are probably not interested in railways - they are probably more interested in reading about updating their extravagant 4 wheel drive monstrosities (a.k.a. converted bread vans with windows)
 

Sad Sprinter

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Would vote Labour for the change, but right now Labour is like locomotive hauled train. The loco-Starmer- seems to be in a good condition, but unfortuantley its the carriages its pulling that I'm worrying about.

Would probably be the Tories again, but it depends really who has the best levelling up plan.
 

yorkie

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From what I recall of other polls on railforums, people here do skew heavily towards both Labour and the LibDems. I'm not sure by how much, but I think I remember railforums polls having Labour on twice the Tories' support even while nationally the Tories are slightly ahead. But even so, the results of this poll are pretty remarkable: Even on railforums, I'd expect the Tories to be on 20-25%, not the 7% the poll is currently showing. Put together with current national polls, that does seem to confirm that a hypothetical general election today would probably not return a majority Tory Government. But as @takno says, the situation may well be very different in, maybe 3 to 3 and a half years time, when an election is most likely to take place.
This is true. I think that this forum is more "left" leaning than society in general, from a social point of view.

From a freedoms point of view, I think the forum is a little more libertarian than authoritarian leaning compared to the average, but overall our society is overall a libertarian one but the authoritarians are currently shouting the loudest and getting their way with a lot of things, which is really getting a lot of peoples backs up.
 

ainsworth74

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Even on railforums, I'd expect the Tories to be on 20-25%, not the 7% the poll is currently showing.

Compared to our poll before the 2019 General Election they're down by around 10%. Perhaps more eye catchingly is the collapse in support for the Lib Dems and the small (but significant) growth in Labour support.

 

Typhoon

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This is true. I think that this forum is more "left" leaning than society in general, from a social point of view.
I think there is also a reluctance to speak up for a party in power which is struggling. I don't know whether there was a similar poll on this forum during the dying days of the Brown government but in general I seem to remember that some Labour supporters were keeping their heads down. Anyone sticking up for our current PM and his motley crew is likely to be have opprobrium heaped upon them for both Covid and Brexit.
Compared to our poll before the 2019 General Election they're down by around 10%.
Possibly because, as with most things he touches, our PM has over promised and repeatedly undelivered. A comparison with 2017 might be interesting?

Edit: I've found a thread called 'Voting intentions (quick poll)'. 50% Labour, 20.9% Conservative, 16.5% LibDem, 3.2% Not Voting. Says something about how contributors have been disaffected by the main political parties (although both SNP and Plaid Cymru do better). Low numbers, but still interesting.
 
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ainsworth74

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Possibly because, as with most things he touches, our PM has over promised and repeatedly undelivered. A comparison with 2017 might be interesting?

Looks like we ended up with two. One from April and one from just before the election in June.

Tories again had around 20% of the Forum vote on both so I'd definitely suggest that their support has legitimately fallen on the Forum at least. Labour results are more interesting. In the poll just before the election they stormed to 50% but in the April poll they were down around 23% which is a worse showing than they had in their 2019 Forum poll!! Lib Dems are kinda all over the place but their performance in the poll on this thread is their worst overall despite usually managing somewhere around 30% of the Forums support (apart from just before election 2017 when presumably Lib Dem members had lent their votes to Labour).
 

DynamicSpirit

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I think there is also a reluctance to speak up for a party in power which is struggling. I don't know whether there was a similar poll on this forum during the dying days of the Brown government but in general I seem to remember that some Labour supporters were keeping their heads down. Anyone sticking up for our current PM and his motley crew is likely to be have opprobrium heaped upon them for both Covid and Brexit.

While that's true, this particular poll is private, so presumably Conservative supporters can still vote in it, even if they might then be reluctant to publically post about their vote if they feel their views are unpopular.

Looks like we ended up with two. One from April and one from just before the election in June.

Tories again had around 20% of the Forum vote on both so I'd definitely suggest that their support has legitimately fallen on the Forum at least. Labour results are more interesting. In the poll just before the election they stormed to 50% but in the April poll they were down around 23% which is a worse showing than they had in their 2019 Forum poll!! Lib Dems are kinda all over the place but their performance in the poll on this thread is their worst overall despite usually managing somewhere around 30% of the Forums support (apart from just before election 2017 when presumably Lib Dem members had lent their votes to Labour).

Thanks for digging those out (and to @ainsworth74 for the 2019 poll).

That change between the two 2017 polls you've linked (Labour on 24% in April, 50% in June, amongst railforums people who voted in those polls) matches what happened to wider public opinion. In April 2017, the Tories were miles ahead of Labour in the national polls (something like 20%+ IIRC), and every indication was that they'd win an election by a landslide. That of course is precisely why Theresa May called the election. But then the Tories unexpectedly ran what most people seem to accept was an extraordinarily incompetent campaign, culminating in the disaster over their plans for paying for care for the elderly - and almost overnight the polls flipped to the two parties being roughly level - which is of course almost exactly the result the general election produced. FWIW I was in the Labour Party and canvassing during that election, and the weekend that the social care story broke, you could really sense people's attitudes on the doorstep suddenly changed just over a few days.

Also between April and June were the two awful terrorist attacks in Manchester and London. Without wanting to detract from the awfulness of the attacks - which you would hope would be beyond party politics, - the spinoff from those seemed to further hurt the Tories somewhat because it lead to a political narrative about the police cuts of the previous 7 years.
 
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Typhoon

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Looks like we ended up with two. One from April and one from just before the election in June.

Tories again had around 20% of the Forum vote on both so I'd definitely suggest that their support has legitimately fallen on the Forum at least. Labour results are more interesting. In the poll just before the election they stormed to 50% but in the April poll they were down around 23% which is a worse showing than they had in their 2019 Forum poll!! Lib Dems are kinda all over the place but their performance in the poll on this thread is their worst overall despite usually managing somewhere around 30% of the Forums support (apart from just before election 2017 when presumably Lib Dem members had lent their votes to Labour).
Sorry, having found the later one, I gave up when I came to the first - rather contradictory findings.

While that's true, this particular poll is private, so presumably Conservative supporters can still vote in it, even if they might then be reluctant to publically post about their vote if they feel their views are unpopular.
You are right but it requires someone to think that through, and click on the link. There might also be a reluctance to click on the link for fear of seeing the extremely poor results (which, of course, is self defeating); not exactly the same, but when a football team I support are three nil down at half time and they appear to be playing badly, I'm reluctant to check on the full time for fear it is worse. I would say that is pretty generous comparison with HMG and here there are a couple of ogs.
 

DynamicSpirit

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You are right but it requires someone to think that through, and click on the link. There might also be a reluctance to click on the link for fear of seeing the extremely poor results (which, of course, is self defeating); not exactly the same, but when a football team I support are three nil down at half time and they appear to be playing badly, I'm reluctant to check on the full time for fear it is worse. I would say that is pretty generous comparison with HMG and here there are a couple of ogs.

Yes, I can see that logic, and I can well believe that Conservative support is a bit higher than the poll shows, even amongst railforums users.
 

alex397

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I would most likely vote for Labour, largely because the Tories go against most things I believe in (especially this current cabinet). I’m not a huge fan of Labour, but frankly I’d prefer them in power than the current Tory party.

I tend to agree more with Lib Dem or Green policies myself, but I know they have little chance of gaining any power.

For me it’s between voting for Labour mostly (but not completely) to get the Tories out, and voting for parties I agree with more but realising they will have little impact.

With the Green Party, there does seem to be a pro-HS1 faction within, which hopefully will become a more prominent view in the party. They are seemingly largely against it at the moment.
 
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takno

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I would most likely vote for Labour, largely because the Tories go against most things I believe in (especially this current cabinet). I’m not a huge fan of Labour, but frankly I’d prefer them in power than the current Tory party.

I tend to agree with Lib Dem or Green policies myself, but I know they have little chance of gaining any power.

For me it’s between voting for Labour mostly (but not completely) to get the Tories out, and voting for parties I agree with more but realising they will have little impact.

With the Green Party, there does seem to be a pro-HS1 faction within, which hopefully will become a more prominent view in the party. They are seemingly largely against it at the moment.
I think for me the issue with the Green Party is that they are trying to trade off concern about the climate crisis to make themselves seem more relevant. When it comes down to policies however they seem more concerned with, to me, much less important issues like bio-diversity, protection of ancient woodland, plastics, identity politics, and occasional outbursts of communism.
 

Butts

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Surprised the Politburo / Central Committee has not insisted upon a Communist option to be listed above :E

Scottish Conservative for me but they've got no chance in Falkirk !!
 

NorthKent1989

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They’re all morally bankrupt and unelectable though I’m rather surprised to hear that the Lib Dem’s have been rather anti hard Lockdown, but more in favour of sensible measures.

The Tories and Labour will never ever get my vote, the sooner they’re binned the better.

I would vote for a party that is centre right with some centre left Views as well, by nature I’m libertarian and at the moment all the major parties are authoritarian
 

Senex

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I shan't be voting. There's no point in voting for anything other than Tory or Labour with FPTP. Tories are out of the question for me under any circumstances, and so is a Labour Party that has bought into Brexit and formally shared ownership of the mess we're in.
 

takno

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I shan't be voting. There's no point in voting for anything other than Tory or Labour with FPTP. Tories are out of the question for me under any circumstances, and so is a Labour Party that has bought into Brexit and formally shared ownership of the mess we're in.
The Labour Party haven't bought into Brexit. The previous leader was a bit of a fan of it, but even his most ardent supporters in the base disagreed with him on it. Starmer spent 2 years as Brexit tiptoeing a fine line between trying to actually avoid a catastrophic Brexit and avoiding being fired by Corbyn.

By the time Starmer took over as leader we were out of the EU, and negotiating ineptly for our oven-ready deal. Literally the only thing Labour have done since Corbyn left which could be interpreted as buying into Brexit was voting not to leave with no deal at all. Nobody thinks the current situation is good or that the deal on the table was anything other than appalling. It was just better than the alternative.
 

Senex

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The Labour Party haven't bought into Brexit. The previous leader was a bit of a fan of it, but even his most ardent supporters in the base disagreed with him on it. Starmer spent 2 years as Brexit tiptoeing a fine line between trying to actually avoid a catastrophic Brexit and avoiding being fired by Corbyn.

By the time Starmer took over as leader we were out of the EU, and negotiating ineptly for our oven-ready deal. Literally the only thing Labour have done since Corbyn left which could be interpreted as buying into Brexit was voting not to leave with no deal at all. Nobody thinks the current situation is good or that the deal on the table was anything other than appalling. It was just better than the alternative.
Np, they didn't vote not to leave with no deal at all — they could have managed to allow the deal to go through without supporting it just by abstaining. They chose positively to support Johnson's deal, so every Labout MP who voted for it now owns it just as much as every Tory MP who voted for it.
 

takno

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Np, they didn't vote not to leave with no deal at all — they could have managed to allow the deal to go through without supporting it just by abstaining. They chose positively to support Johnson's deal, so every Labout MP who voted for it now owns it just as much as every Tory MP who voted for it.
They positively voted for it because there was always the chance that the ERG would have voted against it otherwise - the fact that they didn't rebel could well have been driven by the knowledge that Labour was voting for it and therefore there was no point. Labour were very clear in the speeches they made on the matter that they thought it was a terrible deal, and were only voting for it because, with 3 days to go and no chance of forcing the government to beg for an extension, it was that or no deal.

This whole "you voted for it so you must own it" meme is really insanely childish.
 
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