Maybe I'm too naive or too ready to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I don't feel like I can blame ordinary people for voting tory (or voting labour for that matter as a supposed lesser-of-two-evils). It seems too simple to reach for the dismissive insults, stupid, greedy, racist, insane, evil etc. and I prefer to look for alternative explanations. One I remember came up in an episode of Renegade Inc back in 2019, where in a discussion about the housing crisis campaigner Kate Swade made the point that voters' singular focus on property values was given its power by the context where social safety nets had been taken away and there was precious little else that people could rely on in old age or for other unavoidable costs:





Brett Christophers [00:25:32] I think one of the big problems when I look at the UK from sitting outside the UK is that so many people and institutions in the UK are heavily invested in the current system as it currently is. The Tory party will never do anything significant about land and land ownership for obvious reasons, which are to say, you know, not just the personal investment of people within the Tory party itself, but also just, you know, its main constituency. But, you know, it's tough for the Labour Party to really take on these questions as well because you begin to make noises about, you know, possibly land value taxation or things like that...

Kate Swade [00:26:08] Garden tax, garden tax...

Ross [00:26:09] The Daily Mail.

Brett Christophers [00:26:09] And you know you get hammered and there's a reality to the fact... if you look at, you know, voting patterns within the UK, property owners vote a lot more than renters and so people ask, for example, you know, why are Labour Party 10 points behind in the poll, well things like The Land for the Many Reports, probably didn't help, sad to say. If people feel that their own personal investments are in any way likely to be threatened, then they're not going to vote for a party that's taking things in that direction.

Kate Swade [00:26:38] Which is partly because people feel that they can't trust that their state pension will be there or their private pension will be there or that social care will step in when they need it. And it's not because we're a nation of like greedy, avaricious accumulators - although maybe some people are - it's because we have sort of systematically disinvested in the rest of the kind of common fabric that we need to keep us all afloat and so people are totally reliant on their houses as an investments to sort them out, to pay for their children's university fees, to think about their pensions and that's... again, it's like you can't blame capitalist entities for being capitalists in the capitalist system, you can't blame people for acting in that way, in the system that we're in. - https://renegadeinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/The-Great-British-Enclosure.pdf

It made me think that right to buy had set off a long term co-dependent relationship between the tory party and voters they had bought off by allowing them access to the 'property owning democracy'. With all their eggs in this one basket and the continued undermining of economic security and other state welfare provisions it has morphed from a Stockholm syndrome (voters buying into the ideology of their captors in the hope that they will get special treatment and a few crumbs) into a kind of suicide pact where they're all locked into the property bubble and see only disaster outside of it, probably correctly. This was especially clear during the 2015 and 2017 elections where the tories managed to win both times despite barely bothering to come up with any campaign promises, manifesto or wider vision. It's now just an unspoken assumption that the tories will take care of the property owners and protect them against all possible threats. I expect that only the bursting of this bubble and the ensuing chaos will shake tory voters out of their stupor and possibly enable saner govt policies in the future. Giving him credit for a change, Corbyn already came pretty close with the policies of the 2015 manifesto, indicating broad public support for some form of mild state socialism despite decades of indoctrination in TINA thatcherite market fundamentalism.

cheers,
I