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>What is interesting in the UK is that it seems largely to be people voting against their own interests a lot of the time. Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular, I've found that people who say "they're voting against their own interests" tend to project their own solidly middle-class interests (access to abundant, cheap labour, better deals on fees to go to university, etc - completely valid self-interests to have!) onto working-class people who may be unaffected or even harmed by those interests (competing with that same labour pool for work, being outbid for housing from the rest of the population, being unable to afford to have a child). What this also misses is that people have self-interests besides straightforward economic metrics. Is it not a valid self interest for someone to want their home town to maintain a sense of local identity? For a community to not change beyond recognisability in a single lifetime? For a person to not feel like a foreigner in the only place they've ever been able to call home? These concerns aren't as strongly felt by the more well-to-do people, since they have the means to live a more cosmopolitan, travelled lifestyle, and give their lives "higher" aspirations and meaning, like academia, or activism. But for poorer people, their home, and local identity and sense of community, is all they have. Like you said, there's little sense of collectivism in the UK, and is it any wonder why when whole communities have been either displaced by market forces, or replaced demographically, in less than a single generation? |
I am so happy that it's me you're responding to.
My socio-economic status was "poor", "white-british" and from a very deprived area. My Mother continues in this social class though I (through accident of being interested in computers) have seemed to escape.
The reason I point out that "white-british" bit is because there's a lot of social programmes I was looked-over for simply because race was an important qualifier. As you might imagine that made me obscenely bitter about migration and non-native races; but that's something I haven gotten over as the years have gone by.
Cheap labour is not what I consider important at all, however if you vote for tax cuts because you think you'll be better off despite the tax cuts being mostly for the very wealthy: well that's less money for social services.
If you vote in favour of cutting benefits because you think that immigrants get too many benefits despite being on benefits yourself then that's directly against your own interest.
If you vote for a reduction in healthcare spending despite depending on it to live: you have voted against your own interest.
All of the above are some examples of what I mean, and I have tory-voting friends in these exact situations.