The Problem with England
 

Somebody explain to me why the English vote Conservative. I know they're cunts but there must be some other reason.

Here in the USA people do mainly because of racism and religious extremism. But how is it that a majority of UK voters would put in twice in a row for the austerity of the Tory party?

As I understand it, the Tories are heavily favored by the English and not so much by the Scots and Welsh. Which would mean that the English in particular are overwhelmingly pro Conservative.

Why would one of Europe's strongest Social Democracies so easily vote for such an awful platform?

nobody south of the border seems to give a shit (never mind know) we've been electing cons for nearly ten years now

ya i do realise the UK is a bigger world power but it HURTS me you guys don't care.

I would hazard its more or les the same reason in the UK as it is in the US. It is in canada anyway. I think.

I don't know why Canadians would vote conservative. When I look to places like Toronto and the politics at play there I feel like I'm looking at a version of the United States, but worse. When it comes to the UK I doubt that the main motivation for the English is racism from 300 years of institutional slavery combined with Evangelical Protestantism. That's a rather American mixture of crazy.

Obvs there's a conservative economic culture that many in England prescribe to. But it's also a Social Democracy with a strong public education system and universal health care. I've known many many Brits and Scots and TBH I've never met one that seemed keen on voting conservative. I simply don't get it. What were the top issues that contributed to people voting Tory this time?

^

it's pretty politically ignorant to believe that your entourage is statiscally representative.

and to answer your question, conservativism is not a racial issue. americans seem keen to make everything a racial issue, but the same problems exist everywhere.

Yes the only ones who vote conservative are racists. What on the hell.

If it meant keeping Cameron in power, then they likely rigged the election. Cameron is up to his ears in many things, one of which is covering the"Lolita Express" pedo nonsense that Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton are wrapped up in. That thread if pulled hard enough unfolds the whole satanic aspect of what these adrenochrome sucking psychopaths do away from public view with their ritualistic nonsense.


The western cabal of influence is being cornered out of the currency dominance they have enjoyed for at least a century now, if you start at the advent of the Federal Reserve. They are grasping to hold on to whatever power they can and do whatever they can to keep it that way: World Wars, Race Wars, Currency Wars, Weather Wars, rigging elections, you name it, they gotta do it.

Why do think they need to put a Clinton on one side and a Bush on the other? To make sure they keep a lid on the all their crimes they've been doing together for a couple decades now.

heh. I dunno, were those around in '92?

it's because in a world of totally overwhelming, unprecedented and frequently changing and improvised concepts like global capital drift, multinational trade agreements and private trade tribunals, conservative policies are pretty much the only accessible narrative available. want your elected representatives to stand up to multinationals and exercise their position of power to perform their basic duties? conservatives can just claim they are going to "shut down the economy" or be "bad for families" or "unsafe for investment" and conversation's over. and they're right, because under the rules established by neoconservative economics, any admitted doubt over business as usual or any attempt at structural reform would and/or could cause some degree of self-inflicted market crash. so the only non-conservative options are straddling between what's left of union support and neocon-lite, or calling everything into question and establishing new market rules that put people before profits but would still be considered radical, while relentlessly calling every neocon threat as the bluff it is until a market collapse does occur but then everyone's ok and everything's better because it collapsed. or something like that, no one really knows because all of this is new and being made up as it goes. so either spend hours a week keeping informed and attempting to fight that fight for the rest of your life with no guarantee of results, or just vote conservative.

or smoke weed and bate

I feel dreadful about the results, and quite a bit scared too. I hope I'm not unlucky, but another 5 years of Tory rule could really fuck my life up.

Wealthy people voted for the Tories out of self-interest. It's as simple as that. Everyone else is a target of right-wing propaganda by the British media. They set the terms of the debate, and Labour played along instead of presenting a different narrative to counter austerity.

American conservatism is what I was referencing. The biggest issues uniting today's conservative coalition are racism and evangelicalism. i"m not saying all people who call themselves conservative suffer from both. But the GOP in the US wouldn't control the Congress and all of the Southern States if it weren't for those two issues. The core voting block for the Republican party is white right wing christian men. There hardly any other demographic groups that favor republicans.

It's the Southern Strategy. Economic conservatives who don't aknowledge that are either deluded or just plain stupid. It's an integral part of the republican party's National program. Just like appeasing southern racists was for Democrats prior to the 1960s.

Without the backing of evangelicals and white racists the republican party would have a difficult time holding most of its seats in Congress. It's why the Democrats gradually lost power in the two decades following the Johnson administration. Republicans played to social conservatives and racists and those voters fled the democratic party.

but all of that is very specific to American politics.


What I'm asking is why do the English so heavily favor the Tories right now. Are they just assholes who want to shit on the Scots, Irish, Welsh, etc. Are English voters just so apathetic that they don't care? (there isn't a single Tory MP from Scotland, for example). The American media does a horrible job covering foreign elections. I've yet to read a clear description of what's gone on this election cycle in the UK

I may not like the result but if you think that there are enough wealthy people to vote in a (sleight) majority Government then you need to acknowledge they must be doing a decent job - your assertion is that there is a majority of wealthy people, this fact in itself is a nonsense.

There are a few reasons:

Labour being Tory(Lite) option with a less credible leader/chancellor
Success of the SNP
Tory bribes for a) high earners and b) housing association residents
Press support for the narritive that Labour spent too much and caused a financial crash
Liberal Democrats being almost wiped out

Let me rephrase that: wealthy people voted Tory out of self-interest. Everyone else who voted Tory did so against their own interests because of all the right wing propaganda in the media. This includes the myth that Labour caused the financial crash, that austerity works (it doesn't), and that Scotland siphons money out of England.

I don't disagree with this although the trade unions should accept some blame for installing someone who could not win an election into the top job in the Labour Party. Not enough people had confidence in Ed Miliband.

its hilarious how leftism caused the recession in england but over here most people blame the republicans

but its bigger than that, and connected

also funny since america spent money and uk didnt, now uks economy is sluggish and they blame immigrants and labour for some reason instead of austerity

good to see uk having their own bush years after having to listen to fucking brits tell us how much more enlightened they were for eight goddamn years

ironic especially since blair's butt bumpin with gee dubya and going to iraq was the beginning of the end for labour

labour reminds me of democrat party pre obama, milquetoast centrists with zero charisma and no ideas

Yep, not many people could even imagine Ed as PM, but I actually warmed to him the more I saw him. Labour lost heavily to the SNP in Scotland, and there was a huge number of people who said they were undecided right till the day of the vote.

I think a lot of those people just decided "better the devil you know" and voted for the Tories on the day. Plus the Conservatives kept scaremongering, saying Labour would do a deal with the SNP. Miliband categorically ruled it out, but the Tories kept putting it into people's heads. And I think people were reluctant to get all excited about a potential Labour govt. and PM, after what happened with New Labour and Blair.

There's also the Murdoch factor, in that (at least right now) his newspapers, etc., are still powerful propaganda machines for the Right.

yeah the daily mail is a shameless propaganda rag

people have short memories. those not loyal to a party blame whomever is in power when the disaster happens. Reagan wouldn't have been president otherwise.

i think in the US there will be a longer than usual memory for who was to blame for the last recession. Not that it'll be terribly accurate, since many moderate dems supported the deregulation of the finance industry. But the recesion seems to have tainted the republican pro business economic cred. the country in general used to buy into the idea that conservative economics was good for the economy. that's gone now for everyone except the party faithful.

Yep, good to see the poor having to rely on food banks. Good to see a huge increase in homelessness. Good to see the NHS being dismantled and leaving the disabled even more vulnerable. Good to be an immigrant and suffer aggressions by xenophobic assholes who feel emboldened by public policy.

That's all really great, Trots. I knew you, as our resident marxist, wouldn't let us down.

yeah thats not what i was getting at, welcome to america you smug tossers

the whole time all of you contemptuous left wing assholes were bagging on the us as being backwards now the uk is indistinguishable

the reason people dont like the left is because you hold poor and uneducated with contempt, thats especially true of "labour" in the uk

maybe i should have said ironic instead of good, but still fuck you bunch of fucks

this is the britain where morrissey votes ukip

just as stupid and selfish and racist as the US

but then again its fucking england so it always was

You do realize that all the white, middle-class British kids you were talking to 10 years ago are unlikely to suffer the consequences of a Tory government, right?

I mean, I do understand being annoyed at the liberal middle class in England. I know better than you, trust me. At the end of the day, though, those aren't the people who will suffer the most under a conservative government. Depending on how they invest their money (if they can buy property to rent, for example), they might even be better off with the Tories.

I find the UK superior to America in a number of ways: we have the NHS; there's no real opposition to abortion; there are no religious extremists with political power; people can't own guns and are OK with that. But I think Americans are a lot more likely to be sophisticated when it comes to racism, xenophobia, sexism, etc. Here people seem to believe that only UKIPers ad Tories are bigots, leaving their own attitudes unexamined.

i really dont think youre understanding my ironic use of "its good theyre having their own bush years"

americans are less sophisticated abt racism let me tell you, even the racists dont know they are racist

you can fap away about bullshit like gun control but the corporations run parliament just like they do congress

I'm not sure you know how to do irony, tbh. Yeah, it might be ironic that smug white males from across the pond don't have the liberal country they once believed they had. But this is not about them.

Speaking as a Brazilian, it'd be terribly out of place if I said, "Haha! Americans are so smug when they talk about our social problems - it's good that they are getting their own taste of police brutality in Baltimore." But you know as well as anyone that the ones being smug aren't the same ones who are being killed for being black outdoors.