Okay, so before I start, I’m not going to be using this as a platform to spread my own political views (at this moment in time) however I want to be able to post political content without it sounding too bias towards one party or the other if that makes sense.
So here we go, this is why I think that the results were the way they were.
So firstly you may be aware, even though Boris won a rather impressive “majority”, it doesn’t mean that the majority of the population, or at least the people who voted, actually voted for him. In fact they would have only won 288 seats under a proportional representative system, compared to 406 which they won under first past the post (basically “first past the post” is where the MP with the largest number of votes per area or constituency is elected, but they don’t need a majority). So that goes to show. Whereas smaller parties like the Greens and the Liberal Democrats won fewer seats in comparison to the number of overall votes. So this basically just shows how badly our politics is actually represented in parliament. However, considering that the conservatives still did get the highest number of votes compared to any other party (only they didn’t actually get a majority) why on earth did so many people vote for them?
Now some people, including Lily Allen believe it was due to “racism and misogyny running so deeply in our country”. Now is he a racist? Personally I wouldn’t say so however he has come out with some comments, of which some would call unforgivable whilst others would label as “banter”. Now I don’t know. As a journalist writing for mainstream newspapers like the telegraph you don’t just say these things, regardless on whether you mean it as a joke or not. As it is obvious some people will take offence. It is like with anything; if you know someone well knowing they won’t take offence, then it is ok to say something like that. But you don’t write something like that in a news paper millions of people are likely to read. So maybe he did it because he just wasn’t thinking straight, maybe because he didn’t care about any negative publicity it may lead to, or maybe he was sneaky and knew that inspite of the large amount of poor publicity he would get, a huge amount of the public would find his comments entertaining and agree with them. Now I still find the fact that so many people would have voted for him, based on their racism or dislike towards certain groups of people, considering the number of people I know who were disgusted by these comments. Nevertheless it could be true that people voted for him because of his attitude rather than inspite of it, when I consider the number of “borderline racist” comments that I do here. And that’s just the people who are open about it, and its quite possible that there’s a lot more people who have this attitude towards it secretly. So perhaps these comments did help him in the long run. As deep down people agree and I’m confident that there’s a few people out there who believe in his comments more than he does himself. However I still struggle to believe that he did get SO MANY votes for these reasons. There has always been racism going on in the UK, and I genuinely don’t know whether it’s actually got worse recently as I haven’t been around for long enough. But I just cant believe this has been the main reason.
Okay so another reason is obviously…. you wait for it…..yup here it is. Brexit (inserts laughing emoji which I can’t actually do because I am typing from a laptop). So I do think genuinely that an aweful lot of people who wanted to leave the EU would have been put off from voting from the labour party, even though the labour party is pretty split on Brexit. And infact many traditional supporters of Labour are pro remain, but many are pro leave. However Corbyn decided to take a “neutral stance” on Brexit when it finally came to it. So part of the results could be down to people, especially from up north, wanting to leave the EU and despite their previous support for Labour, they just didn’t believe that they would be able to take us out of the EU. This especially goes for the north east and some of the midlands, where the “leave vote” tended to dominate, however traditionally in lots of these areas people voted labour rather than conservative. However if you compare a map of the UK, showing the election results in 2017 compared to 2019, you will find that the clumps of red have shrunk in these areas, as some of the labour MPs have lost their seats in constituencies in these areas. Now this implies that people are literally voting to “get Brexit done”. This can also can be seen as the “Brexit party”, despite not getting many seats, they still got an impressive number of votes. Now this pretty much suggests that people living in these areas are fed up of their situation, seeing that back in the 80s many mines were closed in these areas, and very little industry up there has seemed to replace that. Now I personally don’t know how Brexit could make that situation any better or worse, being brutally honest I don’t understand the economic effects of Brexit, and in a matter of fact does anyone truly understand what is actually going to happen? Probably not. But I can understand how people crave change, and feel that staying in the EU will not achieve this, even though the same “tired old” party might.
Now I think the final possible reason that the tories did so well, is that people aren’t liking the Labour party. For many reasons… First some may be aware of past connections the leader has had/has with some terrorism organisations. and I think people are genuinely concerned about what he could have done if he had become prime minister. And to be fair, people have a good reason to be anxious. And the second issue is with the suspected antisemitism going on within his party. I think it is fair to say it has become a genuine issue by looking at the number of MPs who have shown concern including Luciana Berger stating that she had become ashamed of the party that she joined as a teenager and the 9 MPs who quit the party back in February. Where many sited Corbyns handling of antisemitism the reason for why they left. Now I know there’s not exactly millions and millions of Jews living here in the UK, but I think any Jewish person has the right to be extremely worried, like wise your average nice person who opposes all types of discrimination. So that could be part of the reason. If you are genuinely want everybody to be more equal, then surly you would strongly oppose any types of racism. So it is also quite possible that people who would have ppreviously voted labour, just couldn’t bring themselves to vote in this election. This is sort of proven by a slight drop in turnout compared to 2017, with just 67.3% which is about 1.5% less than previously. In fact, my Gran, having told me she’s been voting labour consistently all her life, didn’t vote in this general election.. Even though many times she was offered a postal vote to be arranged for her. And she says the Labour party now, isn’t the same party she knew it as, therefore she just couldn’t bring herself to vote labour. Or tory. However it is very likely other people who have been voting labour for a great deal of their lives have switched now to conservative, for this reason. Meanwhile a vote for any other party with this system, would easily be regarded as wasted.
So the final issue about Labour, is the rather ambitious, but controversial manifesto. So I personally strongly approve of it on a moral basis however it doesn’t mean that I believe it would work practically. Okay, so providing everyone with free broadband, spending immense amounts of money on the NHS and of course enabling people to have “4 day weeks” when currently it’s a 5 day week but we all know that realistically many people are working 6 or 7 days just to make a living! So it’s perfect morally, people have more time for themselves, the NHS won’t be fucked and lets face it, in the 21st century broadband is a necessesity. However the typical question asked by people who like to take the piss out of Labour is: “where will they get all the money from?”. And it is a very good question. Raising taxes for the “rich” and big businesses alike sounds like the obvious answer to me, however if the taxes are raised too much then these people will get pissed off and would be quite likely to leave the country. Which I believe is very sad. It just shows how humanity as a whole is greedy and selfish, or at least has these tendencies. It is extremely sad, but it is the world we are living in. So other ways of raising revenue is to get people to avoid tax dodging, which a huge number of large businesses do. Which I think this policy would be an excellent way of raising revenue and would definitely be worth a try. But even then, you don’t know how likely it would be for people to leave. So this kind of explains why people like myself don’t believe it would work.. I also believe that he (Corbyn) did admit that he wouldn’t JUST raise tax for the rich, but he would do so for other groups of people too. Quite possibly because he knew that. Therefore I think that people are worried that they won’t get their fair share of extra expenditure. Annd economically it won’t be affective as it will leave more people with less disposable income. So there’s less of the spend spend thing. So basically people don’t want communism. So that was a bit of a rant but I hope it explains why I don’t think that Labour are becoming mor unpopular. Because people aren’t liking their policies, as they either believe they’ll be ineffective, or unfair on themselves. Which I suppose there’s an element of selfishness to it, but also a huge element of fear.
So I am going to leave it at that. It was a bitt of a long rant, and I am very aware that I don’t have lots of knowledge on this and some of what I’m saying may be inaccurate. But it’s basically just my views on this…
Personally Political 