Fortunately, politics are totally sane everywhere else in the world.
But as for the here and now (today), I find it hard to think of a EU country that went from so much to so little in such a short time, and 100% due to its own doing. Not even Italy I think.
I think if you narrow your scope to the Anglosphere and include Europe that could be true. However there's a lot of countries that are really bad and we must acknowledge their existence.
What is interesting in the UK is that it seems largely to be people voting against their own interests a lot of the time.
It's like the population is told that "bad people drink water, therefore we should poison the water" and they buy into it completely. The country (as mentioned before) is on the decline for sure, but the standards decline much faster than they should largely I think because people are protectionist in mentality.
It's the individualism that causes most problems; there's very little sense of collectivism in the UK. The belief is that everyone is sort of out to get you and that there is a finite number of resources we all compete for.
At least this is my experience having grown up in central England (but expatriated 8 years ago)
State use of propaganda has been perfected over the last century. The go-to emotion is fear. Next time you read the paper or watch it on TV, note how many stores are trying to instill fear.
Read some articles from 10 or 20 years ago and see how blown out of proportion the fear mongering actually was and realize you've been under a constant state of that for your entire news consuming life.
Without meaning this as a comment towards your post in particular, I've found that people who say "they're voting against their own interests" tend to project their own solidly middle-class interests (access to abundant, cheap labour, better deals on fees to go to university, etc - completely valid self-interests to have!) onto working-class people who may be unaffected or even harmed by those interests (competing with that same labour pool for work, being outbid for housing from the rest of the population, being unable to afford to have a child).
What this also misses is that people have self-interests besides straightforward economic metrics. Is it not a valid self interest for someone to want their home town to maintain a sense of local identity? For a community to not change beyond recognisability in a single lifetime? For a person to not feel like a foreigner in the only place they've ever been able to call home?
These concerns aren't as strongly felt by the more well-to-do people, since they have the means to live a more cosmopolitan, travelled lifestyle, and give their lives "higher" aspirations and meaning, like academia, or activism. But for poorer people, their home, and local identity and sense of community, is all they have. Like you said, there's little sense of collectivism in the UK, and is it any wonder why when whole communities have been either displaced by market forces, or replaced demographically, in less than a single generation?
I am so happy that it's me you're responding to.
My socio-economic status was "poor", "white-british" and from a very deprived area. My Mother continues in this social class though I (through accident of being interested in computers) have seemed to escape.
The reason I point out that "white-british" bit is because there's a lot of social programmes I was looked-over for simply because race was an important qualifier. As you might imagine that made me obscenely bitter about migration and non-native races; but that's something I haven gotten over as the years have gone by.
Cheap labour is not what I consider important at all, however if you vote for tax cuts because you think you'll be better off despite the tax cuts being mostly for the very wealthy: well that's less money for social services.
If you vote in favour of cutting benefits because you think that immigrants get too many benefits despite being on benefits yourself then that's directly against your own interest.
If you vote for a reduction in healthcare spending despite depending on it to live: you have voted against your own interest.
All of the above are some examples of what I mean, and I have tory-voting friends in these exact situations.
I'd imagine that most of poor and working class people "voting for" the policies you mentioned are victims of our terrible voting system, and doing so very begrudgingly because they believe that overall, that set of policies is the least-worst.
Out of genuine interest, when you say you say you have friends in these exact situations, do you actually have friends on benefits who are explicitly in favour of an across-the-board reduction in benefits in a way that would lower their own take-home? I'd be interested to know their reasoning for that. Or are they more in favour of a stricter set of requirements for immigrants to receive benefits?
Anyway, cheers to you for managing to get out of deprivation, definitely not easy.
It becomes about perspective at some point. The conservatives are seen as "tough on migration" but the mechanisms with which they are seen that way are actually "tough on lower classes". Thus when someone wants to vote against migration they wind up voting based on perspective.
It's also funny to consider the sorry state of the liberal democrats.
With the risk of your prior perspective of things being somewhat hardened; this is the reality of what happened:
* Lib Dems campaigned on a platform of an alternative voting mechanism and of freezing university caps.
* No clear majority in the GE
* Coalition government is floated, Conservative leader David Cameron says "join me and we will abide one of your major campaign pledges, you can pick which one".
* Lib dems join, pick alternative voting, as it has the best chance of doing the most good in the future.
* Conservatives employ the most underhanded tactics (using the same ad agency as Vote Leave fwiw) to undermine the referendum they hold. "This baby doesn't need an alternative voting system, they need a life support system" etc;
* Referendum fails
* Lib Dems come out as traitors for betraying their pledge to freeze university fees'.
* Nobody will seriously vote Lib Dem now because of this, instead preferring to vote for a party consistently embroiled in scandals after scandals.
Thus: we are perpetually stuck in a "lesser evil" voting system, and it's easy to completely decimate the other side by either eating a bacon sandwich wrong or making a choice that was intended to break this horrible situation.
Everyone loses, A/V is considered unpalatable due to the failed referendum.
Couldn’t respond to others in this comment chain for some reason but fwiw I think politics in my country (Germany) are equally insane at times if not more so…
in this case it seems we are in agreement because I absolutely limited my view to Britain & the continent (+ the US)
You mean like uncontrolled immigration and the highest tax burden for 70 years? That certainly does sound like a war on its own population.
no I don't. probably because I've been an immigrant my entire life. with the difference that I'm OKish off and people calling me an "expat" probably because I haven't been stepping off a boat chased by some s-hole country militia or Frontex.
what I referred to is the issue of how wealth is distributed, how the society isolates itself in a class-system, and people's mobility between these systems.
the fact that the poor are riled up against foreigners is a common pattern among the far-right world-wide and can also be seen as a failure by leftist politicians (who rather talk about pronouns than the struggling lower classes)
I agree that socio-economic mobility in the UK is bad and definitely needs to be improved. However, the lower classes are those most adversely affected by uncontrolled immigration due to the increased supply of labour and the downward pressure on salaries.