General election.

I can see the Labour party being a weakened down form of Conservatism which, in my opinion, will not change the way this country is run and I truly believe that we need a change.

I am a socialist but like many of my ilk I am not oblivious to the importance of private enterprise in a healthy economy.

We can't really argue rationally about this because we are talking about the future. 

The labour party are presenting themselves as 'a watered down form of conservatism' because the country is basically conservative.

However, this is an environment in which the Conservatives themselves are also a 'watered down form of conservatism' - that is, even if you could really call them conservative at all.

The gap between voters and the political class is already gaping open and it will remain gaping if the labour party present yet another period of 'watered down conservatism' after the decade or so the country has already endured.

However (again), I don't think that is what is going to happen because the labour party are just presenting a PR front. Starmer's program will be radical left and you will start by welcoming this, but i think your celebrations will be cut short by things starting to go rapidly sideways

a long winded way of saying i'm offering an opinion. In my defence I didn't offer a tedious 'explanation'

41 years ago

I was a five year old when that election took place.

I don't buy this oft trumpeted view that the nation is basically conservative, either in the small c sense or the party political one. I think the truth is much more nuanced than that.

Insofar as small c conservatism goes, there is a natural tendency for more people to become more resistant to change as they get older. So a majority of the older half of the country probably is small c conservative. But many of the younger half of the country are seriously pissed off with the way things are and as such are anything but small c conservatives. Taken as a whole there is in my view no clear  consensus in a small c conservative direction.

In the party political sense the situation is much more complex. Because how instinctively Conservative a majority of the country is very much depends upon the issues. A majority do tend to veer in a Tory friendly direction on some issues, eg patriotism, law and order, support for the armed forces, support for the monarchy, and also quite often on what can be called woke issues which is in part why the Tories are trying to use these as wedge issues.

Yet when it comes to economic issues majority opinion tends to be much further to the left, favouring public ownership of gas, electricity and water, higher taxes on the rich, more social housing, a better deal for private tenants, and things like that.

If I were to sum the country up concisely, it tends to be socially well to the right of centre and economically well to the left.

As for the issue of who will vote Tory, I am certain that they will do less disastrously than some of the polling suggests, though they are likely still to lose badly. For one thing there are a lot of don't knows and in the past - especially at times of acute Tory unpopularity as now - many of these prove to be so called "shy Tories" who turn out to vote Tory on the day. I also suspect that polling is flattering support for Reform at the moment because I think that many Tories when asked by pollsters are saying they will vote Reform to send a message to the party, but that some of these will on the day still vote Tory if by not doing so Labour might win instead.

Support for Labour is also soft, based on little more than them being the Not The Tories Party. So their poll lead is more vulnerable than it might appear. May demonstrated in 2017 how quickly a large poll lead can evaporate.