The UK General Election 2015

On May 7^th, my country held a General Election to determine the structure of Parliament for the next five years. The result was a shock for almost everyone and a profound disappointment for most of those within my own friendship circle. I've been trying to figure out how best to put my feelings into words ever since... and also trying to get a handle on the truth of the situation. This has taken a lot longer than I anticipated, simply because facing the matter is so depressing that I've rarely been able to stomach working on this article. Even so, I feel these results are worth posting belatedly.

If I had to state my personal emotional reaction to the General Election, it would probably be:

My country held an anonymous survey of the adult population which proved that a majority of them were ignorant, hateful or selfish enough to willingly cause harm or death to their neighbours and cared nothing for other people's rights. As a result, this was adopted as public policy.

I'm not trying to say that this is fair, but it's honestly how I feel. The stakes of this election were extremely large where the future of British society were concerned and a Conservative majority was the worst of all probable outcomes.

For the benefit of my overseas readers, I should explain that our country has traditionally had two electable parties – the right wing Conservatives (or Tories) and the left wing Labour party. I was born under the premiership of the massively influential Tory leader Margaret Thatcher (who destroyed the power of Trade Unions in this country) and her party continued to reign until I was 15. Unfortunately the Labour party remodelled itself into the centrist New Labour shortly before defeating them, meaning that I have never experienced a firmly left wing government during my 33 years of life.

In 2010, dissatisfaction with both these parties resulted in a hung parliament. The result was a coalition government led by the Conservatives but also incorporating the left wing Liberal Democrats (traditionally the firm but distant third place party). Although I was displeased to see David Cameron take leadership, as a Liberal voter I was pleased to see the party finally advancing and hoped that it was a sign of genuine three party contests to come.

Unfortunately the ability of the Liberal Democrats to restrain the Conservative agenda proved far smaller than the left hoped. By repeatedly backing Conservative moves in order to maintain a functional administration, Deputy Prime Minister Clegg lost all credibility with many people and the Liberal prognosis for the 2015 election was always dire.

Having taken the reins of a country in severe economic difficulty, Cameron focused on attempting to cut public spending whilst encouraging private sector growth. Unfortunately, a conspicuous part of this broadly sensible policy consisted of slashing the provisions designed to keep the poor from utter destitution and the incapacitated from dying. A relentless propaganda campaign painted this not as a process of grim necessity, but as a just action based on the recognition that these people didn't deserve the provision in the first place.

As a predictable result of these actions, poverty became more acute for a lot of struggling people and some of the incapacitated started to die. When declaring his intended policies if re-elected this year, Cameron announced that he intended to retain these welfare cuts in all future spending plans regardless of the size of the available public purse. He first announced this from a gold-plated lectern after a free banquet, apparently not seeing any negative symbolism in doing so. Having already removed free legal assistance for poor people in cases where the defendant is the State, he also promised to scrap the Human Rights Act – which binds the UK to observe the European Convention on Human Rights. He has also pledged to increase the amount of government censorship and surveillance applied to law-abiding members of the general public, declaring an intention to move away from the philosophy that 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone'.

On May 7^th 2015, the population of my country promoted his party from head of a coalition to a lone majority government. On a practical level, this means five years of the same unpleasant government without any of the minor restraints they formerly faced. On an emotional level, it's hard not to take it as an overt demonstration that the Dark Side is stronger in Britain.

When seeking escape from this feeling, the first thing that must be remembered is that the Conservatives didn't actually need to secure over 50% of the vote to get over 50% of the seats. Although there is no doubt that they received the greatest number of votes cast, the Tories actually only got 36.9% of the vote. Of course, many people also voted for the even worse UK Independence Party – a 'straight talking' newcomer that publicly skirts far closer to racism and homophobia than the other major parties care to and whose candidates are exposed as being far worse in private with almost comical regularity. UKIP polled 12.6% of the vote (more than the Liberal Democrats and the left wing Green Party put together) but their support was so evenly diluted across the country that they only got a single MP.

Added together, this gives the political right 49.5% of the vote. But only 66.1% of those registered to vote actually did so, giving them the active support of less than 32.8% of the national adult population. Even adding in the statistically insignificant numbers that voted for the avowedly racist British National Party, the proudly fascist National Front, the anti-feminist Justice For Men And Boys and the delightful War Veterans Pro-Traditional Family Party (who believe that anti-social and criminal behaviour is caused by teaching schoolboys that 'homosex is OK') the total number of practising Sith in this country may be less than 1 in 3 of the people you meet on the street.

I say 'meet on the street' because this certainly is not a reflection of many individual social circles. People tend to group together based on ideological common ground, with the result of excluding differing people from their lives. This is obvious to anyone with a Facebook feed – if mine truly monitored the pulse of the nation we'd have had a Green Party landslide – but the scale of the segregation is often underestimated. In a generally fascinating article, one American author stated that he didn't believe any of the 150 people who form his Dunbar's Number of social contacts were Creationists. Using overall polls of belief within the USA, he then calculated that the odds of randomly selecting 150 non-creationist Americans in a row were approximately the same as those of randomly selecting one specific atom from the entire mass of the Earth.

Of course, he's probably slightly wrong in this estimate of his friends. There was no statement in the article that he'd actually surveyed all 150 people on that specific subject. It's easy to assume that a generally like-minded person will hold the same opinion as you on a given subject, but they can surprise you when you actually ask. After the election the media made much of the concept of the 'Shy Tory' – someone who votes Conservative but won't admit it to their left wing social circle. But even if a few folk blind-side you, the vast majority of those who differ are likely to be in separate social circles composed of others like themselves. The very concept of the 'Safe Seat' in politics proves that these divisions can be large-scale enough to be geographically mapped, even in the internet age.

As a result of this, the question of 'why did so many people vote Conservative?' isn't an easy one for me to seek an answer to. I just don't know that many Conservatives to ask. The answer from some of my left-wing friends is simple enough – 'they figured that the Tories would do things that benefited them, and didn't care about the harm they'd do to others.'

Unfortunately, that answer won't do. Although there are certainly people who will endorse a universal erosion of rights because their social privilege will protect them and who will let others starve in exchange for a tax cut, this isn't a fair assumption to make about all Tory voters. None of us truly know what will happen if a given party takes power – we simply make our best predictions and cast a vote accordingly. Voting for UKIP because you believe that they will end racial inequality isn't immoral, it's just really dumb. If someone says that they truly believe voting Conservative is the best thing for Britain, my question must not be 'why are you such a dishonest prick?' but rather 'what does the world look like from over there?'

Although I don't know many Conservatives, I do know some. I therefore messaged the one person on my wall who was conspicuously celebrating the result, asking him about the issues of Welfare cuts and the repeal of the Human Rights Act.

The response was quite illuminating. On the subject of Welfare, he argued that the current Welfare state was unsustainable in size due to the expanding actions of the previous Labour government. He acknowledged the damage caused by withdrawing these supports, but argued that this was why they should never have been erected in the first place.

From this viewpoint, the responsibility for the harm caused by the cuts does not lie with the government making them. It lies with the Labour politicians who made impossible promises in the first place, thus forcing the economic grown-ups to be the bad guys by reneging on them out of necessity. This perspective does nothing to explain the deliberate exaggeration of the actual Welfare bill by including public sector pensions in the figures, the systematic denial of benefits to people who are still legally entitled to them or the attempts to use the unemployed as a pool of coerced unpaid labour, but it does much to explain how many Tory voters can sleep at night.

On the subject of the Human Rights Act, he cited the desire to avoid unjust judgements being forced upon us by Europe. This kind of thinking is hard to sympathise with, given that the media portrayal of most controversial cases and of the actual influence of the European court has been so wildly inaccurate.

However, he also pointed out that these rights would still broadly exist without the Act. This is not unfair – Britain outlawed slavery a long time before the Convention on Human Rights was written and ditching it won't throw that into question. We have many hundreds of years of law protecting most of these rights, the Act just puts them all in one convenient place.

The Convention isn't a holy scripture and there is no reason to think that it couldn't be improved. The Tories have always stated that they would replace the Act with a new Bill of Rights, which could theoretically be better than the Convention it replaces (although nothing they've said so far supports that idea). When it comes down to it, my problem with this proposition is based on a profound suspicion towards the motives of those making it. Many of their more problematic and abusive actions in the past (such as attempting to force Welfare claimants to do unpaid work) have been challenged on the basis of the Human Rights Act. The fact that Britain cannot change the Convention also provides a degree of security to its provisions that the new law would not have. I can only perceive the government's actions as an attempt to remove a limitation upon their own power, in order to permit them to oppress or abuse the British people – but perhaps some of those who bestowed votes upon them take a more positive view.

When looking into the question of 'why do people vote Conservative?' more generally, the most interesting thing I came across was the work of Jonathan Haidt. Although I haven't yet read his book, I've read several articles explaining what he says in it. Haidt proposes that the left and the right are equally influenced by moral concerns when casting their vote – but that they have very different feelings about which moral questions are the most pressing.

Haidt divides moral sensitivities into six different axes, representing different concerns. These are Care/Harm (protecting and tending to others), Fairness/Cheating (justice and consistency), Liberty/Oppression (concern for freedoms), Loyalty/Betrayal (standing with your own group), Authority/Subversion (respect for tradition and legitimate authority) and Sanctity/Degradation (respect for taboos and aversion to 'disgusting' things). He surveyed a large number of people with questions related to these different fields, noting how their responses varied with their position on the political spectrum.

As a group, the left showed noticeably more resistance to the idea of kicking a dog in the head for personal gain. Conversely, they showed far less resistance to the idea of repeating unflattering lies about their home country to a foreign audience in exchange for the same profit.

Although most left wingers would probably be quite happy with the notion that they take a firmer stand against puppy kicking than against unpatriotic behaviour, a true moral divide would show increased resistance to both ideas. Instead the left demonstrated a far stronger passion on the Care/Harm axis and a weaker regard for the Loyalty/Betrayal axis (and indeed most of the others).

The overall conclusion that people have drawn from this work is that the left have an overwhelming concern for the Care/Harm axis. In fact, they care so much about it that it can overpower the other concerns entirely, creating what the right dismiss as 'bleeding heart liberals'. Ironically, the right consider themselves more concerned with Liberty/Oppression than the left – because the left are more willing to make protective laws obliging people to behave a certain way and to condemn opposition as immoral. The main reason that the concept of the 'Shy Tory' gained so much currency in the media is that it portrays the right wing voter as the suppressed victim of an ideological dictatorship. Many on the right have been known to complain that accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia are used in an attempt to invalidate their stances, allowing social changes that are undemocratically opposed to what many citizens want to see.

Haidt's model does shed some light on how the right wing voter thinks differently to the left with regard to the election issues I've described. To a left wing voter, the question of whether benefits cuts will cause large amounts of human suffering is vastly more important than the question of whether continuing to distribute public money in this fashion is fair. To a right wing voter, these moral issues have a far different weighting and stories about 'scroungers' and 'cheats' strike a powerful chord. It is obvious to the left that human rights should be equally available to all humans as a shield against harm, but empathy with the Loyalty/Betrayal axis allows the right to justify a hierarchy of protections in which immigrants lose out to locals and foreign civilians lose out to our soldiers.

For me personally, engaging with these theories has in no way lessened my commitment to the political left. I honestly believe that the moral character of an act is greatly dependant upon the intended or foreseeable consequences regarding the well-being of others. I recognise the importance of things like justice and liberty, but ultimately see them vital foundations of the popular well-being. I am entirely at ease with the idea that morally correct laws should be passed even if most people don't agree with them – with moral correctness here being largely defined as shielding people from harm that they would otherwise (continue to) suffer.

It is however very important for me to recognise that the actual building blocks of my moral perspective can be out of sync with those of others. It is important because ultimately we must engage with right wing voters and change their minds. People may socially isolate themselves from the politically different, but elections serve as a painful reminder to us all that the very existence of those differing people can harm us. It is therefore necessary to reach out and try to sway others to our side. The left is far more passionate about this than the right in many cases – but we must recognise the difference in moral priorities that we will encounter. I honestly believe that the choice of a Conservative government will have a terrible effect upon at least some sections of the British public in Care/Harm terms, but it is sobering to realise that this isn't nearly as important to the moral centres of many other people as it is to mine.