Rubbish.

I can think of at least four friends who work in quasi public sector quango type jobs who expressly stated prior to the election something along the lines of – Gordon Brown terrible, Labour party terrible, but I’ve got a mortgage to pay and I think the Tories will abolish my job so Labour get my vote anyway.

This is in London, I guess you could multiply my exerience by the power 10 up in the north east.

I do wonder what such people make of me.

I’ve never worked in the public sector. I’ve never claimed £1 of benefits. (No kids, employed since 15, no student grant) and yet I have never felt that a bonfire of the public sector would benefit me, my family, my friends, or my country. Indeed I’ve never been tempted to vote anything but Labour or Green. (I never trusted the Lib Dems to actually stand for anything – sorry)

But then I don’t think these reporters really believe such claptrap. They know plenty of hard working private sector people who not only vote Left, but campaign for and even stand for Labour and the Greens. They also know plenty of public sector staff who support the right.

But it suits them to lie.

It suits them to lie and portray Labour as a party of the public sector and the feckless. And it suits them because the public sector and the feckless are a minority of voters.

Just as they cast Ken Livingston as a Mayor for inner London – and so convinced outer-london (except Newham and Haringey) to vote against Ken – so they want to do the same with national politics.

“trust me” isn’t generally the best of arguments

If most vote “selfishly” then the vast expansion of public sector workers will have helped Labour.
That expansion may or may not (may not) have been a good idea but inasmuch as there is a “payroll vote” it certainly did expand under Labour.

I should stress as well, I’m not an ethnic, religious or sexual minority. In case anyone thinks that matches another part of the left’s clientele.

cjcjc

Is there any evidence that people switch their voting intentions when they move from the public sector to the private sector – or vice versa?

I don’t know about the rest of the article, but Cheshire, being south of the Mersey, is not truly in the north – it is the northern county of the Midlands…

As for the clientele, despite Vulpus’ claims above, most public-service workers I know (and unsurprisingly, I know a few) voted Conservative or Liberal Democrat. But then again, why are we wasting are time debating the sort of stupid simplistic idea that certain people import from America (see the conspiracy theorists on voter registration over there for real stupidity).

The blunt truth is the Conservatives got more votes, from almost every demographic (except Scottish and Welsh), but Labour also got votes in notable numbers from every demographic. There are bankers who vote (and fund) Labour and Union officials who vote Conservative. Anyone playing the game of clientele is playing make believe in a world that complex.

The only clientele’s in this country are exploited by all parties in areas where many voters can be led by one person, in a quasi-feudal system. But that is different from the non-issue here, which is a right-wing nutjob (can we have two rightwings, so I can go in the one with the normal people?) fantasy.

The conservative PPC for my constituency – who lost by a decent margin, yay 🙂 – had this to say on the matter upon losing in York:

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/8162947.Susan_Wade_Weeks_apologises_for_Facebook_posting/

Gimps.

Watchman – “Anyone playing the game of clientele is playing make believe”

Agreed. from 1997 to 2010, as the public sector workforce grew, Labour’s vote fell.

Dave Osler: “craved neo-Thatcherism by the bucketload ”

What, exactly, is that intended to mean?

Applying the failed Medium Term Financial Strategy again?

Joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism again?

Pouring billions of taxpayers’ money into supporting the coal mining industry?

Before it was privatised in 1988, £3.4 billions of taxpayers’ money had been sunk in the Rover Group.

“During Margaret Thatcher’s premiership public spending grew in real terms by an average of 1.1% a year . . ”
http://www.ifs.org.uk/bns/05ebn2.pdf

@Bob B

I’m not saying people *did* crave neo-Thatcherism by the bucketload.

I’m saying that the Simon Heffers of this world think that to be the case.

Excellent piece.

For expressions such as “Thatcherism”, or variations thereon, to make any sense for non-partisan readers, there would have to have been a coherent, underlying ideology driving Thatcher’s governments and there wasn’t – see Simon Jenkins: Thatcher and Sons (Penguin 2006).

Just to take one outstanding example, Mrs Thatcher, on the advice of Alan Walters, her personal economic adviser, plainly had reservations about putting the Pound into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) but deferred to the majority view of the cabinet so John Major, as Chancellor, took the Pound into the ERM in October 1990 with disastrous consequences, as we now know. By December 1990, the cabinet had forced her resignation.

Another example, Mrs T resisted the privatisation of the railways on the advice of Nichoals Ridley but John Major’s government went ahead anyway but after Ridley had died.

Gay people are also, according to the right, a part of Labour’s client state. What they mean by this is that Labour advanced a gay rights agenda in a way that the Tories bitterly opposed for years, thereby attracting gay voters. This is regarded by Tories as horribly demeaning to gay people. See, e.g., Nick Herbert, here:

http://conservativehome.blogs.com/thetorydiary/2010/02/the-left-does-not-own-the-gay-vote-says-nick-herbert.html

Sorry, this really is rubbish.

You accuse the Daily Mail of “making it up”. But you’re making it up too!

You completely disregard the effects of tribalism (“I always voted Labour”) and fears of “Tory cuts” that were spread by the mainstream media and websites, including LC. You ignore the possibility that someone dependent on government might vote tactically to prevent (or limit) a Tory victory – and in a marginal constituency, that would probably mean voting Labour. You dismiss these possibilities without any evidence beyond your own gut feelings.

And you’ve ignored the effect of protest votes: these are Labour/LibDem votes, cast by conservative voters as a protest against David Cameron’s left-liberal Tory party. How do you know that doesn’t account for a substantial proportion of the Labour votes? Some people that you’d call “right wing”, including myself, voted tactically against the Tories for this very reason. (And we were right to do so.)

Being a socialist does not mean that you are in tune with the will of the people. Most particularly, you can’t guess about the motives of 8.9 million voters.

Vladimir meet Occum; Occum, Vladimir.

Massive conspiracy of vote buying or some people just supporting a party which has been established for over 100 years?

I appreciate your point that not all those votes count as positive endorsement of Labour, but I expect that all nets out across the different parties with some Labourites voting not Labour in other seats.

My situation is the same as margin4error’s – and I know of other people in the same position.

Watchman
You are right , votes for liberal dems and the tories went across the board. It certainly wasn’t a conspiracy to gain votes. If so Labour would have won.

It is the Tories who use bribery.

They always promise to cut your taxes. No bigger bribe than that. Of course it is only the top 40% that will actually see real tax cuts. Also, they are always bribing business with promises of taking over more public services, and of more deregulation.

Brown shirts have an obsession about public services. They think that every one in the public service is a card carrying Trot. Have they met any policeman? Have they met judges? Do they think that the teachers of grammar schools and schools that want to be direct funded are left wing/ Do they think every doctor is a Labour supporter?

Have they met the vast majority of the armed forces? Do they think that all those Generals and vice air Marshals are left wing?

Tory trolls are so stupid, they read Littlejohn too much.

“I don’t know about the rest of the article, but Cheshire, being south of the Mersey, is not truly in the north – it is the northern county of the Midlands…”

In that one sentence you have shown yourself as an idiot if you think Cheshire is in the Midlands.

But then judging by you usual crayon scribblings on here it is not surprising.

It is a fact that if you look at an electoral map of the UK, then practically all of England is blue – there is a smear of red in the north east and some of the crappier parts of london, and a splodge of yellow in the south west.
That means that scotland and wales as the only parts of the country in which labour enjoy broad support. Coincidentally these areas are also the most sparsely populated, have the most per head of public money spent on them, and have the highest proportions of jobs in the public sector. They are also the areas with the highest preopotions of welfare claimants
The most obvious examples of the disparities are free university places in Scotland and free prescriptions in Wales. There are many other hidden subsidies whjich mean that the “economy” of wales would collapse without the huge amounts of english taxpayers money subsidy diverted there by Westminster. I won’t even mention Mr Mandelson and the Blackpool tower (or the Guacamole dip)

This thread follows on very well from the one about reaching out (aka the Daily Mail thread). The proposition that Labour has a client vote is a tidy simple package that fits the Daily Mail narrative. Any columnist can build 1,000 words around it.

The fact that the client vote does not exist is equally easily made. And very easily forgotten by those who read it.

@18 Sally raises the left equivalent of this argument: “It is the Tories who use bribery. // They always promise to cut your taxes. No bigger bribe than that.”

Look again at the Conservative manifesto for which 10.7 million people voted. That was the manifesto that promised to cut inheritance tax for a few hundred thousand people. 3% of those voters might have benefitted, maybe? (I am not sure how you benefit from reduced taxes when you are dead.)

@19 Sally: “In that one sentence you have shown yourself as an idiot if you think Cheshire is in the Midlands.”

I suggest that it is you who should look at a map of England.

Locate Northampton on the map. Draw a line east to west below Northampton. That is The South. Draw another arbitrary line north to south from around Northampton. That creates The South West and The South East.

Move north and draw a line east to west just below Ellesmere Port. That is The Midlands. It includes Crewe, for example, in the county of Cheshire. A somewhat wonky south to north line from Coventry divides the region into The West Midlands and The East Midlands.

Everything north of the Ellesmere Port line is The North. Like much of The Midlands, geography is dominated by the Pennines. The finest part of England, acknowledged by most aesthetes, is The North West, on the west side of the Pennines.

I though the North started at Watford gap

I suppose this stuff would be a bit less offensive if it weren’t for the fact that all of these supposed “client” areas used to have thriving industries, hence little need for benefits or public sector jobs.

I suggest that the reason, say, Scotland and the north of England don’t vote Tory might have something to do with those now-defunct jobs, and how they came to be defunct in the first place. Further, I’d like to see these Tory jokers ^^^^^^^^ take their pisspoor chat to some of the places they’re badmouthing, so that the locals have an opportunity to respond in detail.

” practically all of England is blue ”

Just shows how much of England is rural. Most people in this couutry live in the cities. The “England is tory ” is a myth. The tories did not even get 50 % of the vote in England.

The south East of England is heavily subsidised by the State.

Look at the Armed sever ices. Where is the home of the British Army? South east of England. Where is the home of the Royal navy? South of England? Most of the major RAF bases are in the south of England. Where is the Ministry of Defence located ? South of England. That money does not appear on the figures that claims the English get less than the Welsh or Scots.

I could go on and on about the bias of the South. But it is pointless arguing with tory morons.

20. MattMunro

Even after Labour’s landslide in 1997 much of England was a sea of blue.

Those coloured constituency maps prove how reliant on the rural vote the Tories really are.

At this election, the Tories made some gains into urban England, but as we know, not anywhere near enough.

And the habit of my South East England neighbours (mostly middle aged and older) voting Tory still bemuses me. If you are paid around average or less you get equally as screwed by a Tory government as the rest of the country. The Tories don’t do much for constituents here in England either.

@26: “The south East of England is heavily subsidised by the State. ”

That’s pretty much the exact opposite of the conclusion of this study of UK regional winners and losers by Oxford Economics:

“As in previous years, the analysis shows that it is only the wider South East (Greater London, the South East and the Eastern Region) that made a positive net contribution to the UK public finances in 2006-07, with the Northern regions, the Midlands and the South West joining Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland as a net drain on the Exchequer.”
http://www.oef.com/Free/pdfs/ukmpubfinfeat(jul).pdf

A generation ago, The Tories commanded about half the popular vote in Scotland. However, after suffering merciless attacks by Thatcher and her flunkies, the Tories have been reduced to ‘also ran’ status. What few winnable seats they have are, of course, the areas where State dependency has become an art form, the farming community.

Note to editors: How are the subsidy junky farmers faring at this time? Are they seeing savage cuts as well?

The Tories have their own “clientelle” of course – not the hordes of evil leaching, sponging unproductive teachers, nurses, firemen, support staff and all their useless ilk – but the true heroes of society – -the ruggedly individual financial sector and their assorted bankers who have received rather more largesse than that other rotten lot from their mate George Os following shoring up his vote -and who have performed such a sterling service for society these last few years.

It really is quite staggering the way these sacks of shit who have fucked over the world have managed to extricate themselves from the blame and are now pointing at nursery school support staff, shouting “greedy!” Its even more staggering that thickos who have themselves been screwed over too are going along with it. The McKinstry’s of this world certainly do their job well, you’ve got to give them that.

“Note to editors: How are the subsidy junky farmers faring at this time? Are they seeing savage cuts as well?”

Oh yes, my favourate Olympic Gold medal champions in scrounging off the state, the farmer. Always moaning, always wanting govt hand outs, and always hating paying a penny in tax, and always voting tory.

Why does Prince Charles and the Duke of Westminster need welfare payments for their farms?

CJ –

That expansion may or may not (may not) have been a good idea but inasmuch as there is a “payroll vote” it certainly did expand under Labour.

If there is the client base electorate, and if we are to believe what the frigging Mail, or the delusional right have to say, why was it that the vote count for New Labour went down over progressive elections? Dave was on a cake walk into a landslide victory until he stated what the Tory policy was going to be. Given another week the seats in the HoC would have been far, far closer than they actually were.

Even now, no matter what the polls are saying, the next election is going to be a very, very close run thing, and the Tories haven’t even enacted those cuts or pushed unemployment up yet. The pre-election budget come next time will have to have some serious sweeteners in it to give the Tories an over-all majority.

@ 26 “Look at the Armed sever ices. Where is the home of the British Army? South east of England. Where is the home of the Royal navy? South of England? Most of the major RAF bases are in the south of England. Where is the Ministry of Defence located ? South of England. That money does not appear on the figures that claims the English get less than the Welsh or Scots”.

A huge number of people in the Armed services are *from* Scotland and Wales, they actually provide one of the few reliable sources of employment (and a way out) for working class men in areas of deprivation. And irrespective of where they are based, the armed services are for the benefit of the whole UK, unlike free university places or precsriptions

@ 30 I violently agree with you on McKinsey, having had personal experience of their particular brand of mid atlantic “strategic” bollocks at a million quid an hour, they truly are the spawn of the devil but

a) It was lab that enthustically hired them, and others of their ilk as “advisors” to several government departments

b) That it wasn’t the tories who bailed out the banks – in fact Redwood was derided on this very blog for suggesting that failed banks be allowed go to the wall (which they should have done – the “cashpoints will stop working” narrative was bollocks)

Matt Munro @ 33

And irrespective of where they are based, the armed services are for the benefit of the whole UK,

Horseshit. The armed forces are there only for the small elite who have anything worth defending. The rest of us can go and fuck ourselves. Why did Cameron bribe the army with doubling ‘operations payments’. i.e. a bonus for doing the job they are allready being paid to do? It because when push comes to shove, he and his rich freinds may need them to ‘clear a path’ (i.e. shoot the plebs) to the nearest airport if things go tits up.

Just a mo’.

Where were Britain’s nuclear submarines built?

“The current Vanguard-class submarines were built at what is now BAE Systems Submarine Solutions in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, the only submarine yard in the United Kingdom.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Trident_programme

Are where is the current home base for Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet?

“HM Naval Base Clyde, at Faslane, some 25 miles north west of Glasgow, is home to the United Kingdom’s strategic nuclear deterrent and the headquarters of the Royal Navy in Scotland.”
http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/operations-and-support/establishments/naval-bases-and-air-stations/hmnb-clyde/

A likely story – that one about all those turkeys from the parasite sector marching into the polling stations to vote Tory for an early Christmas. Yeah, I bet they just couldn’t wait to be laid off and have the gilt taken off their cushy pensions too.

Interesting to note though how you co-opt useful public sector people – medics, nurses, teachers… even judges, as if these were the sort of people the right have in mind when discussing clientelism. They aren’t, of course.

Flowerpower: the reason we mention them is because they’re actually representative of public sector workers. Your examples of ‘client state non jobs’ are either made-up Littlejohn-esque fantasies, or perfectly sensible jobs given silly titles.

Labour wins back social worker vote, finds pre-election poll

Social care professionals look set to return Labour in this week’s election with almost half pledging to back the governing party in an online poll by Community Care.
The 48% rating for Labour is well above the 34% share received by the party in a poll we conducted before the 2005 general election.
As in 2005, the Liberal Democrats were the second most popular party with 32% of social care practitioners saying they would back them, up from 30% in our previous poll. The Conservatives received 12%, up from 7% in 2005

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/Articles/2010/05/04/114414/labour-wins-back-social-worker-vote-finds-pre-election-poll.htm

Right, so social workers are a pointless non-job in your book? Child-abuse-condoning-tacular!

Let’s shorterise here – Hello 1980s Britain, we’re the Conservative Party. Keep smiling while we deliberately toss you, your family and all of your friends and acquaintences out of work for deranged ideological reasons. We’ll be back in two decades to call those of you who took public sector jobs in the meantime grasping, stupid parasites.

It takes balls of brass for the Tories to complain about a situation they themselves intentionally created. Again, I invite commenters to visit, say, Fife and explain to the locals why they’re all looters and moochers. They may have something to say about how a formerly prosperous area became to be so dependent on government largesse, and will probably be fairly blunt about it.

Bando @ 40

It is the social workers, let’s not forget, that in inquiry after inquiry have been shown to be the ones who permit child abuse to happen because they’ve learned on their racial sensitivity courses to adopt a culturally relativist approach.

But that’s not why I brought them up. It was just to show a topical example of how far removed from reality Mr Osler’s denial of Labour clientism is.

26. Sally , when it comes to R and D much of th best work is done by the universities stretching from Cambridge , Oxford , London to Southampton. 24% of the nations R and D is undertaken in the SEEDA region. Many of the high tech irms are located within greater London and SEEDA region. Even with so many people going to university and during a recession , there are still shortages of top engineers and scientists. As Anthony Sampson has pointed out “The Changing Anatomy of Britain 1982” the large increase in student numbers post 60s did not correlate with a large increase in quality. The UK failed to produce the large numbers of well trained middle ranking engineers needed to run large industrial concerns.

If we want to grow the economy a large transfer of resources from the humanities and arts to applied science and engineering the country will produce the skilled people industry needs. A requisite for developing an advanced industrial capability with well paid jobs outside of SE England is a large, technically skilled workforce.

Right-wingers have been arguing that claimants and public sector workers (except, oddly, the Armed Forces and the Police) shouldn’t be allowed to vote since at least the 1980s. They opposed votes for women earlier than that as well.

Strangely, this is even though they are perfectly capable of reading the more detailed opinion polls which show that the correlations, whilst there, are relatively weak – as the earlier comment noticing that Labour’s vote fell as the public sector payroll rose confirms.

Richard P
We are not alone. There are huge numbers of us. Sadly some were inclined to vote Lib Dem rather than Labour or Green over the years. But hopefully they learned their lesson. Our voice needs hearing though, otherwise many people will think that sharing our circumstances means the left is not for them.

“Sadly some were inclined to vote Lib Dem rather than Labour or Green over the years. But hopefully they learned their lesson.”

Speaking personally – a little bit, yeah. Still not voting Labour until they can convince me that the Straw-ite authoritarian tendency is on the way out, and there’s not yet much point in voting Green without PR, but… the Lib Dems would have to pull something huge out of the hat at this point to prove to me that they (or at least their judgement) could be trusted again.

gwen

I imagine a lot of Lib Dems take that view – though they will eventually divide between those who mean it – and those who will in the end find something they can cling to and tell themselves is “something huge” as you put it.

Meanwhile we may get a braver Labour Party under a new leader. No guarantees, but we have to at least hope and as a left-wingers campaign for it as best we can.

As for the Greens – having voted Lib Dem are you really saying a Green vote is a wasted vote?

I find that bizarre. Perhaps because I back the Greens as a principled force in politics. But also the Lib Dems are now seemingly the biggest wasted vote in politics as Nick Clegg has made them a vote for backing whoever wins whichever side that is. Which suggests if you want to try to change who wins, you have to vote for some one else.

Not that I believe in wasted votes. The Greens can rise slowly if people back them, just as the Liberals have. The Labour-Green 1-2 vote in GLA elections helped there – but their first MP is in Brighton under FPTP.

Oh, sod it. I’m going to rise to the bait after all.

sally,

“I don’t know about the rest of the article, but Cheshire, being south of the Mersey, is not truly in the north – it is the northern county of the Midlands…”

In that one sentence you have shown yourself as an idiot if you think Cheshire is in the Midlands.

But then judging by you usual crayon scribblings on here it is not surprising.

sally. Cheshire is a midland shire. It was in the kingdom and earldom of Mercia, and was never considered part of the north (e.g. it did not send representatives to the Council of the North). Its focuses have always been the Mersey estuary and the roads south (Chester and Crewe nowadays). And culturally, it has far more in common with Staffordshire and Shropshire to the South than to the much more industrialised (and hilly) Lancashire to the north.

And I should probably point out that crayon scribbling on a computer does not tend to post comments, just make reading them difficult. Hence your problem with mine perhaps – you seem to have missed the point that I believe there is no Labour clientele, and that this is an idiot right wing story. Mind you, you would fit in well on the idiot right with your ability to read only what you want to read and a willingness to strike out randomly at perceived opponents. The personal attacks would also go down well – do you think there is a space for a left-wing Melanie Humphries or even Glenn Beck for you to fill?

“Cheshire is a midland shire. It was in the kingdom and earldom of Mercia, and was never considered part of the north (e.g. it did not send representatives to the Council of the North). ”

Have you told the people of Cheshire that, because they certainly would class themselves as Northern folk