Much has been made of Iain Duncan Smith and his sudden resignation these past few days. As the Tory Leadership seems to be having some sort of meltdown over George Osbornes intended budget smash and grab on the disabled, it now transpires according to David Cameron that he, Osborne and Smith were all culpable for the reversed Robin Hood policy of stealing from the poor to give to the rich.
No big surprise there I hear you say.
Questions need to be asked however, of the British/English electorate. Every voter knew in advance of the General election what the Tory intent was. It is not as If they tried to hide that they Intended to hit welfare hard if they were elected. So why the sudden furore by the public, some Tory Mps , and the media, when it all comes to pass?
I said the British/English electorate, because the Scots electorate almost unanimously voted for the SNP, leaving only one Blue Tory, one Red tory, and one Yellow Tory hanging on by the skin of their teeth…
Now let us move onto the Red Tories, who were responsible when they were in power, for setting up the policies and mechanisms of ATOS that the Blue Tories have taken such advantage of .
Time and time again, since the Blue Tories took over the reins, they have been conspicuous by their abstaining through a feast of Blue Tory policies.
They got hammered all over the UK, but mostly Scotland, in the last General Election,and quite rightly so.
Yet they claim they are against Austerity, but do nothing to try to stop it. Why? Perhaps, because under their last chancellor, a certain Lord Darling as he now is, started the implementation of austerity…after they had been found to have made such a mess in nearly bringing the country to it’s knees because of lax financial management.
In claiming to be against austerity, they talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk…yet so many still believe them…Why?
Now let us move across the Big Pond….and the Democrat/Rebublican party nominations…
They are the equivelant of our Red and Blue Tories…2 heads of the same coin..
The Democrats have Clinton/Blairite and Sanders/Corbin ….and Sanders is getting hit by the media and the democrat senators and big business for trying to bring something like socialist policies to the country… Clinton has the money men and bankers..
The Rebublicans…..have Trump!
People are actually voting for these? Why?
What is it with folks with any sort of half a brain cell, actually vote for any of them? Not just vote…but cheer on and campaign for. Are ordinary folks utterly bonkers or what?
The answer may be within our grasp according to an American study… and discomforting as it seems, it lies within the same roots as what brought the Nazi’s to power.
studies of authoritarianism study — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters who are characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.
“In South Carolina, a CBS News exit poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters supported banning Muslims from the United States. A PPP poll found that a third of Trump voters support banning gays and lesbians from the country. Twenty percent said Lincoln shouldn’t have freed the slaves.”
A striking resemblance there to the UKIP and Britain first views we have here! Yet we see more of this sort of garbage being posted in Social media in this country.
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Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.
Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.”
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Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians’ fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.
A candidate like Donald Trump.”
How do people come to adopt, in such large numbers and so rapidly, extreme political views that seem to coincide with fear of minorities and with the desire for a strongman leader?
When they face physical threats or threats to the status quo, authoritarians support policies that seem to offer protection against those fears. They favour forceful, decisive action against things they perceive as threats. And they flock to political leaders who they believe will bring this action.
Which goes a lot to explain why some decent folks voted for Cameron or Farage in Engand, and conversely why they didn’t want the weak indecisive Milliband.
study of authoritarianism began shortly after World War II, as political scientists and psychologists in the US and Europe tried to figure out how the Nazis had managed to win such wide public support for such an extreme and hateful ideology.
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Hetherington and Suhay found a distinction between physical threats such as terrorism, which could lead non-authoritarians to behave like authoritarians, and more abstract social threats, such as eroding social norms or demographic changes, which do not have that effect. That distinction would turn out to be important, but it also meant that in times when many Americans perceived imminent physical threats, the population of authoritarians could seem to swell rapidly.
Together, those three insights added up to one terrifying theory: that if social change and physical threats coincided at the same time, it could awaken a potentially enormous population of American authoritarians, who would demand a strongman leader and the extreme policies necessary, in their view, to meet the rising threats.”
Authoritarians, were found in a survey, tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats, the researchers point out, to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah. Non-authoritarians were much less afraid of those threats.
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Hetherington also noticed something else: A subgroup of non-authoritarians were very afraid of threats like Iran or ISIS. And the more fear of these threats they expressed, the more likely they were to support Trump.
This seemed to confirm his and Suhay’s theory: that non-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.”
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But the research on authoritarianism suggests it’s not just physical threats driving all this. There should be another kind of threat — larger, slower, less obvious, but potentially even more powerful — pushing authoritarians to these extremes: the threat of social change.
This could come in the form of evolving social norms, such as the erosion of traditional gender roles or evolving standards in how to discuss sexual orientation. It could come in the form of rising diversity, whether that means demographic changes from immigration or merely changes in the colors of the faces on TV. Or it could be any changes, political or economic, that disrupt social hierarchies.
What these changes have in common is that, to authoritarians, they threaten to take away the status quo as they know it — familiar, orderly, secure — and replace it with something that feels scary because it is different and destabilizing, but also sometimes because it upends their own place in society. According to the literature, authoritarians will seek, in response, a strong leader who promises to suppress the scary changes, if necessary by force, and to preserve the status quo.”
authoritarians are much more susceptible to messages that tell them to fear a specific “other” — whether or not they have a preexisting animus against that group.
And there we have it in a nutshell..
Why Scots for years voted for a party that said it represented them, but effectively helped itself…because they perceived it to be strong for their rights,even when the evidence pointed in a different direction.
For decades, generations of ordinary Scots who were scared to dream, were kept insecure.
Why so many voted Tory and UKIP in England….because of a fear of muslims, fanatics, and refugees, and their own jobs, mortgages and livelihood.
Why so many Scots voted with fear because of Better Together lies, they felt safer with the status quo, and what they disliked but felt a sense of security with.
They believed the BIG LIE because it felt safer than the uncertainty of change.
Auld Acquaintance 