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Michael Wild's avatar

This was political analysis as it should be done. Raising above the soap-opera of day to day political theatre and drawing attention to important long term trends with heaps of reporting of actual facts albeit the facts come from a social survey.

Looking at US and UK politics from afar (Australia) it seems that the conservatives are making the same mistake of paying lots of attention to their loud and passionate extreme members and forgotten that these valued supporters may be a very long way from the swinging voters in the middle who actually decide elections. I know the British Labour made the same mistake with Corbyn and his acolytes but they appear to have learned their lesson from a terrible electoral defeat. Somehow this realization doesn’t seem to be dawning on the culture warriors of the right.

Finally I think there is no question of the Conservatives winning over young voters by ditching Brexit. This will take a generation or to put it crudely the wholesale exiting of large numbers of conservative party members (ie not just the MPs) aged over 60 from the electoral rolls.

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Alex Potts's avatar

Thank you for including your technical note, explaining what the BSA's left-right indicator is made up of. I'll be honest, I don't think these are good questions, they feel like they were drawn up by a left-winger who fails the ideological Turing test (that is, a left-winger who doesn't understand how right-wingers think). The questions seemingly measure up sincere left-wing beliefs against a left-winger's straw-man version of what right-wingers believe - no surprise then that the BSA consistently finds British voters leaning well to the left (as in, less than 50 on a 0-to-100 scale), even as they elect endless Conservative governments.

I would prefer to have seen, as well as the statements listed, some "pro-right" statements. For example:

"Individuals spend their money more wisely than governments"

"Reducing taxes promotes economic growth"

"Big businesses are wealth creators"

Then we might have had a more accurate picture of British voters' economic leaning. As it is, the study asks "is inequality good?", find that Brits don't think it is, and concludes that we're a nation of socialists, even though conservatives don't think that inequality is a good thing either.

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