Who Will Claim The Decisive Working Vote?

The gregarious Grecian at Boaty & D has posted a customarily insightful article on the latest YouGov poll carried in the Telegraph the other day. Amongst the rest of his head-nodding wisdom were these sterling paras.

A second clue in the piece lies in the final paragraph, which says that the Tories are failing to convince the floaters of their ability in the key areas of health, education and crime.

In this, they are quite right in their fears. The Tories will be utterly useless on these, and most other areas, and almost certainly no different or better than Labour. Why would they be better? Their ideas are tame, they are substantively the same as Labour and their solutions are authoritarian, not libertarian.

All of JD's post is worth a good read, so please do go fill your boots, but the poll conclusions to which he specifically refers in that small grab are these.

The results also suggest that while marginal voters are increasingly disillusioned with Labour, they are not yet fully convinced by the Tories on many key issues: only 26 per cent think education would improve under a Conservative government. For the NHS the figure is 22 per cent, and only 19 per cent think that the Tories would cut crime.

Which clashes very starkly with the main findings of the poll, that being a huge increase in support for the Tories in northern marginal seats.

A support which, as pointed out in a different Telegraph article, is close to orgasmic for the Tories.

Working-class voters in [marginal] seats favour Gordon Brown's party by a margin of 40 to 38 per cent. In other words, Labour's lead among its core voters in battleground seats has shrunk to only two points. That is tantalising indeed, for it suggests that Mr Cameron is close to replicating Margaret Thatcher's greatest electoral trick: poaching the votes of people who were previously regarded as the Labour faithful.

All this, as JD has astutely highlighted, without the Tories managing to lift so much as a finger in pointing out their differences to Labour in key areas for the working man.

Quite simply, Labour are haemorrhaging votes in their core support without Cameron and his cohorts having to work for them. It's a bona fide anyone-but-Labour hate-fest amongst a working class electorate who have been taken for granted since they last rebelled in 1979.

It's worse than that, though. These Labour voters - you know, the working class ones with no say under Labour since they were excluded from decision-making in favour of latte-supping Guardianistas - seem very keen on giving a violently bloody nose to Labour ... and a blackened eye into the bargain.

Perhaps most worryingly for the party, the poll suggests that when voters realise that their vote could help determine the outcome of the election, they are even more likely to vote Tory. When marginal voters were reminded that their seat could decide the election, the Conservative lead rose to eight points: 43 per cent to 35 per cent.

When faced with the idea that the march towards eradicating their lifestyle entirely is a fait accompli, they will shrug their shoulders and hate the politicians for it. However, if notified that they have a choice, either keeping the beloved Labour party in power or kicking the bastards in the nuts for their arrogance, they have enthusiastically chosen, in this poll, the latter.

This may well be news to Gordon and his blinkered authoritarian front bench, but it ain't to me. I believe I've mentioned the rumblings quite a few times here. Like earlier this month, for example.

A massive tranche of the population, who have always been proud of being the backbone of the country, being told, in no uncertain terms, that their lives are a disgrace and their efforts unworthy because they live life in an unapproved manner, are not going to be seduced by a few quid back on tax. It just won't wash.

They will remember that this didn't happen under the Tories. Labour did it. And you can bet quite a tidy sum that they know who to blame.

Labour MPs can agonise all they like about income inequality, and even try to adjust it via the tax system, but it won't make any inroads into their disastrous poll results until they rectify the problems that their assault on the working man and civil liberties, in the guise of tackling 'health inequalities', have caused.

Best of luck with that, Labour. I believe you may be forced to have a tough talk with your fake charities and quangoes on the matter ... or you can carry on pretending that working people love the fact that you are destroying their lives, it's your choice. Do nothing and your vote will collapse still further and Cameron will merely be required to smile and polish his manicured nails to a more pristine shine.

Because if the vote to give the Tories a landslide is sitting there waiting for the definitive green light to go blue next year, the Conservatives don't seem keen to embrace it, as a former Tory MP, writing on Con Home, has noticed.

Quite simply, I am increasingly struck at how those who do not agree with the mantra of the politically correct elite controlling Britain and much of the media are today being silenced and shut out from the mainstream. I find, moreover, that when I raise these issues with perfectly normal, respectable and responsible citizens, that they agree with me - but feel silenced, substantially for fear of getting a black mark which might damage their careers (and certainly their eligibility to participate in any Government quangos!)

Again, go read the whole thing. Howard Flight's piece is brimming with common sense and would be welcomed by exactly the voters who could be relied on to usher in a huge Tory victory. The comments to the article also illustrate that grass roots Tories wouldn't have too many qualms either, so why the reticence? Why the stalling, and why the continual marginalisation of those who provide the spine of the country, in favour of politically correct cowardice?

The keys to Number 10 are, as should be fairly obvious, tantalisingly in the gift of the working classes of the country, yet both Labour and Conservative are refusing to take up their cause for fear of a backlash from the professionally righteous.

There are three potential outcomes, in my opinion:

1) The Tories could unveil a 'freedom charter' or some such, which will suck up the working vote and deliver a large majority which is unassailable for a generation.

2) Labour could pre-empt that and promise to deliver some relief for the voters they have increasingly demonised. They will escape electoral obsolescence but who can possibly believe they will deliver on such promises after their previous legal battles against their own manifesto pledges?

or 3) They will both continue listening to vested interests and paid lobbyists, thereby sticking two fingers up at the electorate, and the Tories will sneak it (perhaps with a damaging hung parliament) without addressing some deeply held objections to the political process.

If I were a betting man, I'd go for 3) with the Tories reluctant to hand back the freedoms denied by the control freaks we have been subjected to since 1997.

And if that is how it all pans out, may God rot all their career political souls.