Those
clever Tories have noticed that they didn’t do very well at attracting the
votes of young people in the election, so they’ve decided to do something about
it. In this case, ‘doing something’
means offering changes on issues such as tuition fees and housing. And they’re being utterly shameless about it;
they’re not even attempting to say that there’s anything wrong with the way
things are at present – indeed, they give every indication of believing that
current policies are the right ones.
They are making no attempt to explain why the changes they propose will
be better for the country as a whole, or how they fit with their other objectives
– I suspect that they are not really convinced themselves.
No,
this is all about targeting a specific section of the electorate (not even all
young people in fact) and offering direct bribes to persuade them to change
their voting patterns. Will it
work? I really don’t know, but I suspect
that it’s just too obvious and blatant to have quite the effect that they
want. Confirmation bias is as likely to
make people believe that they could have done these things all along if they’d
really wanted to, so that all that guff about austerity was the lie that many
knew it to be all along.
But
I shouldn’t really be that surprised at the nature of the pitch they are making. It is, after all, axiomatic to them that
individuals will always act in their own best financial interests rather than
thinking about any wider issues. From
that perspective, all they need to do is to explain to the target audience why
voting Tory will make them as individuals better off, and turn it into a simple
monetary transaction. They’ve become so
blinded by that belief that they really can’t see anything wrong with that approach. Perhaps it’s another form of what someone said about the
existing order containing the seeds of its own destruction. Self-destruction certainly seems to be
working its way up the Tory agenda these days.
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