Here is an interesting analysis piece on the decline of the UK Conservative Party from another user at squabbles. It gives an analysis of factors contributing to their future prospects.

Note: I’m not the author of this piece and all credit goes to the original poster.

  • theinspectorst@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    It’s also about the (stupid yet deliberate) decision the Tories have made to pivot to culture wars politics.

    Left-right politics had historically displayed an age effect you describe - you get older, your income increases, you accumulate wealth and become a homeowner, etc, and so you start to care less about government spending and more about taxes. Even if that effect is weaker at the moment, it’s still there for many people.

    Cultural politics displays a generational cohort effect. You adopt a set of cultural values when you’re young - about race and immigration, LGBTQ+ people, your country’s place in the world, authority vs individualism, etc - and then you largely carry those values with you until you die.

    Tory politics used to be largely about the former, with a sprinkling of the latter. But under Boris, Truss, Sunak, Braverman, Mogg, Patel, Dorries etc - they’ve flipped that around. The Tories have defined themselves around the Boomer generation’s cultural values, but that means as people age they aren’t becoming more Tory.

    The great problem they’re going to face is that they’re putting so much effort into telling Millennials and Gen Z (and even to some extent Gen X) that our values are wrong and they are lined up against them, that as we start to account for a larger proportion of the electorate it’s going to be very hard for them to shake the stench, even if they drop the rhetoric. Being ‘not Tory’ is becoming shorthand for our generations’ political cultural values…