http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/jun/05/why-working-class-people-vote-conservative

The Guardian asks why working-class people vote Tory.

People are duped.

It may be that a large proportion of working-class people have values that the Left do not express. But it is also the case, that the Tory working-class voter believes that their party will improve the economic conditions of people in general. Therefore, there is some duping going on.

Why did a majority of people go along with the Coalition’s ridiculous idea that cutting government expenditure would lead to economic growth? If you asked people what part of the economy was going to provide the nation with growth, what would they have said? The truth is not a secret. We have experienced this in the past before. That is, people could have done some homework to find out that the Coalition’s policies were questionable.

Why did people go along with the economic commentators after the 2008 financial crash that this was a short-term problem? After their policies were proved wrong, the public still went along with them?

In fact, if you told people in the UK in 2006 that the West was facing a major economic contraction, it is literally the case that they would have said that you were mad.

Is this a matter of economic knowledge? That people allow their thinking to be done for them by economic experts? Because if this was the case, when these experts were proved wrong, they would start doubting them. It is only four years after the economic medicine has not worked that people start asking whether the experts have not got it right. Note, these are the same experts that didn’t predict the crisis in the first place.

I don’t think this is a matter of economic knowledge. Because why would people who believe they have no economic knowledge think they know more than those people who voiced warnings of the crisis? They didn’t ask them what evidence they had? They wouldn’t listen to what these people had to say. What they did was mock and laugh at them.

It is not that people are stupid. Or is it that people are too frightened to question the concensus?