The Tories who dare not speak their name

Interesting article from the Torygraph which, whilst slanted towards you-know-what-party does cover a phenomenon I'm sure we have all come across. There is no doubt about it, the Conservative party does have an appalling image and people do tend to keep quiet about voting for them.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/12/ntory12.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/03/12/ixportal.html

They are the Tories who dare not speak their name - and they never thought it would come to this. Most have not yet decided whether to confess to their neighbours or their work colleagues or even to their families. But they are actually considering voting Conservative.

Does their disappointment with Mr Blair really mean that they could vote Tory? Conservatives, they assume, are old, stuffy and reactionary. Saying you are going to vote Conservative is provocative.

These are the people the Tories need to woo in order to have a chance at the next election. But, first, they need to find them. And it's not easy when these people won't even admit to pollsters what they will do with their vote.

The Tories' secret weapon is Voter Vault - a mixture of Carol Vorderman's maths and Voldemort's black arts. Last year, Liam Fox, the Tory party co-chairman, went to America and pleaded for help from the Republican party's great wizard, Karl Rove, President Bush's election supremo. Dr Fox knew that Mr Rove had an extraordinary machine that was reputed to churn out sensational information that could swing elections (Diebold surely? T_I_B). It could define, across America, those people who hadn't yet realised they were Republicans, and convince them to vote.

we do here? Or do you have some system in place to keep the government from becoming abusive to its people?

Parliament is already abusive to us... :-(

It tells people you're greedy, right-wing, reactionary, xenophobic, hate the poor and that's why they don't admit it to people - because they know what they believe in is wrong.

apply the 1st 3 to anyone voting Labour at this election...

You could arguably apply them to Tony Blair (for what it's worth, I think he's run the economy and the public services reasonably well, but that he deliberately and knowingly lied to get support for the war in Iraq, which was shameful in the extreme), but there are an awful lot of people (including me) who don't support Blair, but will never the less vote for Labour and hope that he doesn't serve the full term.

There will not be a left wing government in Britain in the next twenty years that is not formed by the Labour party.

The only hope for left wing government in Britain is to move the Labour party back to the left.

Trying to persuade left-wingers to leave the party or not to vote for it, so that it has to move back to the left to get their votes, sounds like a good strategy, but in fact the result would (or rather, I fear, will) be to move it further right as all that are left in the party are Blairites.

In my experience you have only to go down the nearest pub and ask the person spouting the "hang 'em and flog 'em" stuff at the bar if he's a Tory and they will quite often go a bit coy on you! The small number of houses with Conservative posters at election time tends to be another sign of this (at least in my own experience).

If you want to know why the Tories have an image problem I have only two words to say that should bring to mind the relevant image that makes people wary of admitting to be conservative...

Young Conservatives

Make of that what you will.

If I recall correctly an embattled Labour government with a large majority was expected to win a narrow election but instead lost to the Tories surprisingly handily.

I was at Uni at the time. Wilson, of course, had nowhere near the majority that Bliar had and I don't recollect that another Labour victory seemed a "shoo-in" - the Tories had had some good poll figures earlier in the campaign but Wilson seemed to have pulled back. It certainly didn't seem a one-horse race.

Of course, my Uni was a hotbed of leftwing radicalism (Vlad, you'd have loved it!) and when Heath won, the general consensus was that they'd exchanged Tweedledum for Tweedledummer.....

The Skin