plancashire wrote: 8 Feb 2026, 8:22pm
From what I have read the old way of dividing up voters by left-right or conservative-labour are no longer good predictors of current voting intentions or views on things like Europe. Age and level of education are better. Society seems to be changing.
The various and often binary divisions of people into type A or Type B voters is in fact an imposition upon them forced by particular political systems organised by, owned by and run for the usually two major competing aristocratic, oligarchic or other dominant groups determining the main socio-economic arrangements of a country.
One way to describe this simplistic division is: the red klowns and the blue klowns, red & blue seeming to be quite common as colour-emblems in two party systems. (There are, of course, other-such elsewhere: orange & green; black and red; etc..
Why the masses are content to accept this simplistic division and the associated loyalty to one or the other is a bit of mystery, especially in societies such as that of the UK or the US wherein everyone claims to be "an individual". It always amazes me that people vote not on the basis of any detailed analysis of policies or past behaviours of politicians but out of the simple sentiment that, "I always vote for The Red (Blue) Klowns". And this despite the fact that the policies and behaviours of the two lots of klowns, through their history, often exhibits vast changes in attitudes, beliefs, policies and behaviours.
My klown, right or wrong!
An example: the so-called Conservative Party has exhibited a vast range of different attitudes and policies over a century or two (and even over a few decades) from ossified reactionary bigotry to utterly revolutionary mad-new-ideas. Currently and for the past decade or three, they would be better described as Trotskyist since they want to change everything all the time, often in a violent and destructive way, conserving nothing beyond the power and privileges of their little class of chancers and private schoolboy chums.
As for New Labour ..... not keen on the interests of labourers at all, really. Bankers preferred.
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Personally I seem to harbour all sorts of political and socio-economic notions across the various binary spectrums. I think of myself as a conservative preferring traditional and well-tested behaviors yet quite keen to eradicate the bad behaviours of old in favour of better ones, sometimes of a communal nature bordering on communist.
And so forth.
I vote rarely. None of them seem to have policies or behaviours I find of any utility. When I do vote, its always been against the worst of them rather than for the best of them, since none of them are "best" for me (or anyone else other than their aristocratic owners) - well, not since Attlee.
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This latest argument about what the paedophile and his various pals did or didn't feel about Brexit ...... it seems like an argument about who is the goody and who is the baddy; and about how baddies weren't necessarily in favour of what some think of as a good thing (Brexit) because if they were that might make Brexit a baddy thing.
Strewth!
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
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