[dijit]

I love this comment!

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.

[FiniteField]

I think those are all good points, which is why I opened my comment with "Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular" since I didn't have much context about how you were using that phrase. I was more responding to the phrase itself since I've seen it used a lot of times to castigate people for trying to vote for things that might actually benefit them.

I'd imagine that most of poor and working class people "voting for" the policies you mentioned are victims of our terrible voting system, and doing so very begrudgingly because they believe that overall, that set of policies is the least-worst.

Out of genuine interest, when you say you say you have friends in these exact situations, do you actually have friends on benefits who are explicitly in favour of an across-the-board reduction in benefits in a way that would lower their own take-home? I'd be interested to know their reasoning for that. Or are they more in favour of a stricter set of requirements for immigrants to receive benefits?

Anyway, cheers to you for managing to get out of deprivation, definitely not easy.

[dijit]

I think I agree that the nuance is lost with our voting system.

It becomes about perspective at some point. The conservatives are seen as "tough on migration" but the mechanisms with which they are seen that way are actually "tough on lower classes". Thus when someone wants to vote against migration they wind up voting based on perspective.

It's also funny to consider the sorry state of the liberal democrats.

With the risk of your prior perspective of things being somewhat hardened; this is the reality of what happened:

* Lib Dems campaigned on a platform of an alternative voting mechanism and of freezing university caps.

* No clear majority in the GE

* Coalition government is floated, Conservative leader David Cameron says "join me and we will abide one of your major campaign pledges, you can pick which one".

* Lib dems join, pick alternative voting, as it has the best chance of doing the most good in the future.

* Conservatives employ the most underhanded tactics (using the same ad agency as Vote Leave fwiw) to undermine the referendum they hold. "This baby doesn't need an alternative voting system, they need a life support system" etc;

* Referendum fails

* Lib Dems come out as traitors for betraying their pledge to freeze university fees'.

* Nobody will seriously vote Lib Dem now because of this, instead preferring to vote for a party consistently embroiled in scandals after scandals.

Thus: we are perpetually stuck in a "lesser evil" voting system, and it's easy to completely decimate the other side by either eating a bacon sandwich wrong or making a choice that was intended to break this horrible situation.

Everyone loses, A/V is considered unpalatable due to the failed referendum.

[sjfjsjdjwvwvc]

Unrelated but nice to see that my tonedeaf and somewhat rude comment sparked such an interesting conversation. I think I learned something reading this comment chain, so thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Couldn’t respond to others in this comment chain for some reason but fwiw I think politics in my country (Germany) are equally insane at times if not more so…