- Thu Jun 20, 2019 4:57 am
#578433
I think generally their membership is in three kinds:
The long retired who are comfortable financially, own their own homes, can afford a few holidays a year. While the majority of them likely have grandchildren, I suspect many of them are in low paid, insecure wotk and are not academically gifted which makes them ripe for the mascinations of Yaxley-Lennon and Farage which fuels the anti EU sentiment of the elders.
Giggling privately educated boys who never did and never will have to worry about money as they were assured a directorship in one of daddy's companies or they were of the right "sort" to be parachuted into organising Tory canvassing providing they kiss enough backside to be pushed to the top. I went to secondary school with someone like this. They are usually outwardly or subtly misogynist hence I say "boys".
Your local-boy-made-good entrepreneur who, because they made a financial successes of themselves, literally cannot see why there are barriers to others doing it. They are the School of Hard Knocks, University of Life, you-make-your-own-luck types who think thr youth don't have it bad but need a mighty kick up the arse group.
The first group are generally reactionary more about immigraction as they are more resistant to change being much older (I do not mean all older people, of course) and believe, wrongly, that immigration is damaging their grandchildren's chances and are more sympathetic to the Yaxley-Lennon's of the world.
The second group want a bonfire of regulations as they are so removed from how ordinary people live, they can't begin to get their heads around hardship. They believe workers should be grateful for what they have and are there to be exploited by their "betters" and that food banks, for example, are good because they feed people without any sense of outrage as to how one gets in the position to have to use a foodbank. There is no poverty, just lazy people the guy I went to school with used to point out until we had an argument and I unfriended him on Facebook.
The third group are the nationalistic, "we're being ruled by foreign powers" group and place "sovereignty", Britain standing alone and "independence" above any economic concern. The children of the WW2 generation, they make the most reference to it, they place a vague concept of BritishNess against all else and wish the "snowflake" generation would stand on their own two feet and the EU give them too many opportunities rather than work for it like they did etc.
This is why Boris Johnson is likely next PM as figured in 2016 how to appeal to them all and why Corbyn is being an idiot as he will never appeal to any of them nor anyone flocking to the Brexit Party.
This does not mean it is all over. Parliament will have their say and Johnson may betray them. However, this is why this mess is going to get worse before and if it gets better.