Saturday, June 22, 2019
Who will be choosing the next Prime Minister?
It is fair to say that most of us are watching the machinations and intrigues around selecting the next leader of the Conservative Party, and our next Prime Minister, with a mixture of astonishment and horror. It is like seeing a slow motion car crash in horrendous detail on a loop tape, so terrifying that even though we have seen it once, twice, three times, we still can't turn our head away.
But who are these 120,00 people who will be determining the fate of our country, and how representative are they of the rest of the country? The Independent thinks that it knows:
What we know about the make-up of the Tory membership is very little, because the party refuses to release demographic details.
However, helpfully, a research initiative by Queen Mary University of London and the University of Sussex has been surveying members of all parties since 2015. This is what it has found about our new Tory masters:
We are doomed, doomed, I tell you.
But who are these 120,00 people who will be determining the fate of our country, and how representative are they of the rest of the country? The Independent thinks that it knows:
What we know about the make-up of the Tory membership is very little, because the party refuses to release demographic details.
However, helpfully, a research initiative by Queen Mary University of London and the University of Sussex has been surveying members of all parties since 2015. This is what it has found about our new Tory masters:
- Around 97 per cent are white – so lacking the ethnic diversity of the UK population, which is only 86 per cent white.
- Nearly 40 per cent are above 66 years of age – compared with 18 per cent of the public, so the membership is also far older.
- Even more strikingly, seven in 10 are men – in a country where females (51 per cent) are in a narrow majority.
- Five per cent enjoys an income of more than £100,000 a year – compared with 1.5 per cent of the wider country, so they are significantly richer.
- Their favourite newspaper is The Daily Telegraph, followed by The Times then the Daily Mail – all, unsurprisingly, Conservative-supporting publications.
- No fewer than 57 per cent backed a no-deal Brexit as their first preference – more than twice the 25 per cent of the population which holds that view.
We are doomed, doomed, I tell you.
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There appears to be a lazy assumption in the popular press and indeed in the Westminster bubble that whoever becomes Tory leader will become PM. That assumes that the new leader manages to retain all the MPs currently taking the Tory whip. If it's Johnson then this cannot be taken for granted and it only takes a handful to leave and he wouldn't have a majority even with the DUP and wouldn't be able to win a vote of confidence, let alone deliver any kind of Brexit.
So unless the Tory faithful dump Johnson - a fairly unlikely pros[pect in my view - we may face a general election and then a referendum in short order. Or maybe the government of national unity to dump Brexit via a referendum might become other than fantasy.
We do live in interesting times.
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So unless the Tory faithful dump Johnson - a fairly unlikely pros[pect in my view - we may face a general election and then a referendum in short order. Or maybe the government of national unity to dump Brexit via a referendum might become other than fantasy.
We do live in interesting times.
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