this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
54 points (100.0% liked)

UK Politics

73 readers
5 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] inspectorst@feddit.uk 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I think there are actually two distinct factors going on here.

The first is that the traditional rightward shift as you age has broken down among millennials, as you note.

The second - and I actually think this is as if not more important - is that the Tories have abandoned the field on left/right 'economic-based' politics anyway. Sunak presided over the highest tax burden in 70 years. The Tories' post-2016 pitch to the electorate has always been about cultural conservativism - Brexit, immigrants, toilets for trans people, etc - not right-wing economics. And unlike left/right issues, there was never a trend for people to become more culturally conservative as they age. People just form their cultural norms and values when they're young, and then carry these values with them through life, reacting against things that diverge from their norms.

By abandoning economics for culture wars, the Tories have built their electoral castle out of demographic sand. As the people who grew up in an overwhelming white and insular 1950s and 60s Britain give way to Millennials and Gen Zs who grew up in a ethnically diverse EU member state, the Tories have increasingly set themselves up in opposition to the cultural norms of the British electorate - and that is a stench it's going to be hard for them to shift.