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Comment by sailorganymede | Hacker News Reader

Average Brit here - we do not like this and the way politics here has been so tumultuous has shown the general public are sick of this behaviour too.

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Tumultuous in what way? There's so little distance between Conservative and Labour today that it really doesn't matter who's in power.

I think there’s more difference than there has been since the 1980s. People really underestimate how far the Tory base (and parliamentary party following closely) have shifted to the right. The willingness of sitting Tory MPs to knowingly lie and dissemble on immigration related issues to create heat is a real break from a past consensus.

And both are now more unpopular than ever.

And they have record low shares of the vote, so … seems consistent?

Sick enough to stop it or only sick enough to vote for the other party who has been doing the same shit but everyone has forgotten now?

Maybe you're not as average as you think you are.

and yet they keep voting for blue labour or red labour…

Current opinion polls for both are abysmal, but I don't think that civic freedoms are the main reason; the main reason is immigration, which all the previous governments promised to limit and then silently decided not to.

Decided not to, but continued to actively campaign on. It’s created a really weird situation where the actual policy choices are hugely disconnected from the rhetoric and emotion in the debate.

Legal immigration from South Asia dominates illegal immigration by an order of magnitude, but nobody wants to lose seats in Birmingham, so essentially doesn’t figure in the arguments about small numbers of afghans in miserable hotels in Essex.

Immigration is sucking support more from the tories than labour. They rode into power based upon a promise to do something about it and then massively increased it.

Labour are recently leaning into being anti immigration because it's one of the few wealthy-donor-friendly policies they can pursue which will potentially gain them votes.

For the Conservatives it's all about irregular/illegal immigration. Labour are hugely unpopular on that having apparently no idea what to do about it but they also have massive challenges on the economy/cost of living and the state of publicly funded services.

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