A further thought about the UKIP
Plenty of stuff I've seen recently talks about the UKIP and how most of their supporters aren't actually focussed on Europe. UKIP have successfully positioned themselves in the "Modern life is rubbish" slot, with Europe, gay marriage, political correctness gone mad, health & safety gone mad, immigration, and various other things that the Daily Mail vent about all lumped in together as "stuff which we should not put up with".
But I wonder what the thing which pushed most of them over the edge was. We've seen a massive surge in popularity over the last couple of years, and I wonder if it's poverty that's done it (plenty of studies show that poor people tend to be more small-c conservative, focussed on the in-group and generally selfish, for understandable reasons), or if this is happening because a bunch of previous Conservative supporters have simply given up on the Conservatives ever going back to being Their Kind of People (my understanding is that the first 15% of the UKIP in any area are Conservative supporters, and after that they're equally Conservative, Labour, and protest-voters-who-used-to-vote-Lib-Dem).
Of the latter, I strongly suspect that it will have been gay marriage that pushed them over the edge. It seems unlikely to have been fiscal policy/taxes, and I can't think what else they'd have been depending on the Conservatives doing that they haven't lived up to. Any thoughts?
Edit: Just to make it entirely clear, I am _not_ saying "All UKIP supporters hate gay people.", nor do I believe any such thing.
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But I wonder what the thing which pushed most of them over the edge was. We've seen a massive surge in popularity over the last couple of years, and I wonder if it's poverty that's done it (plenty of studies show that poor people tend to be more small-c conservative, focussed on the in-group and generally selfish, for understandable reasons), or if this is happening because a bunch of previous Conservative supporters have simply given up on the Conservatives ever going back to being Their Kind of People (my understanding is that the first 15% of the UKIP in any area are Conservative supporters, and after that they're equally Conservative, Labour, and protest-voters-who-used-to-vote-Lib-Dem).
Of the latter, I strongly suspect that it will have been gay marriage that pushed them over the edge. It seems unlikely to have been fiscal policy/taxes, and I can't think what else they'd have been depending on the Conservatives doing that they haven't lived up to. Any thoughts?
Edit: Just to make it entirely clear, I am _not_ saying "All UKIP supporters hate gay people.", nor do I believe any such thing.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are
comments there.