Political Attitudes

I feel I have only just written a post about how today's voters identify themselves on the political spectrum.  My central thrust of my argument was intended to be that major parties becoming too similar to one another over the two or three decades leading up to the 2008 financial crash has meant that identifying as belonging a particular side of the political spectrum is not as easy as it once was.  I didn't expect to write any more on the topic particularly soon, but then I came across the British Social Attitudes Survey.  The particular edition I read was a couple of years old, but it had some illustrations which actually served to back up my earlier points remarkably well.

The one I want to focus on is my assertion that the difference between the largest Left and Right Wing parties grew too small, disguising, for many younger voters, where on the political spectrum they actually lay.

So here we see that while almost all voters in the 1980s identified a clear difference between Conservative and Labour parties, this was eroded almost entirely by the dawn of the new millennium.  I would be interested to see what the view of the public is by the time of the 2015 election.  If I were to predict, I would say that a rise, perhaps to something approaching 1992 levels, in the proportion of people identifying a difference between them may occur.

This has a number of consequences.  I'm very interested in what it may mean for the many smaller parties which we now have.  Many will surely be drawn to the politics of Messrs Farage or Galloway.  Others will vote Green, but I suspect that a large number will cling to the familiarity of the two old behemoths of British politics.  As some distance is put between them, it will be interesting to see which way the confused Millennials will go.