For a long time I was unsure of why poorer people would vote for the conservatives and their policies, which seem to be quite counter to their well being and or long term prosperity. A number of board members have commented on this in a slightly different context in the US thread but I couldn’t quite crystallise the information.
I recently came across a passage in a book I’m reading (the first one I’ve read in a long, long time… “The Poverty Safari”) that potentially provides a simple (though not the only) explanation, at least one that I could grasp. Basically, it comes down to the perceived competition of perceived finite resources, such as benefits, access to basic amenities, education and health care.
The gist of it is as follows:
- There are many poor people and areas in the UK that are caught in a continuous cycle of poverty.
- Poverty creates an environment where there is broad disenfranchisement from the normal levers in society that could elevate the poor people from poverty.
- At some point, there an influx of other poor people (foreigners for example).
- In a relatively short period of time this leads to the perception that they have come in to take our resource - benefits, access to health care, education and so on…
- This perception quickly turns into political capital, ripe for misuse, i.e. messaging to the effect of, the NHS is at breaking point, benefits need to be cut, education is failing and so on. The narrative that it is these other people that have come in and are eating up our country’s resource is then easy to sell.
None of this of course gets tothe question of how to solve poverty. Neither the right nor the left have effectively dealt with institutionalised poverty.