VAL 2015 | Många av de väljare som Margaret Thatcher fick att känna sig välkomna i partiet har övergett Conservative Party för UKIP.
De är väljare som David Cameron nu måste locka tillbaka om man skall ha någon chans att vinna valet.
Hela deras strategi går ut på att locka tillbaka de väljare som står för något parlamentarikern Robert Halfon kallar ”white-van Conservatism”.
”White-van”-väljare, eller ”aspirational working-class voters”, refererar till väljare, inte så sällan småföretagare, som lockades av Thatcher på 1980-talet och Tony Blair på 90-talet.
The Economist skriver:
Over one in ten people who voted Conservative in 2010 have since left the party for UKIP, which detests the European Union and immigration. The defectors are typically male, white and working-class. Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ campaign chief, reckons that the party’s typical target voter earns about £15,000 ($23,000) a year—40% less than the national average—reads the Sun on Sunday, a right-wing tabloid, and values economic and national security above all else.
This analysis colours the entire Conservative campaign. In an interview on April 6th Mr Cameron urged UKIP voters to “come home”. At the party’s manifesto launch on April 14th, he described the Tories as “the real party of working people”. Two weeks later he called it the party of “the grafters and the roofers and the retailers and the plumbers”. He talks endlessly about security.
The Tories have courted white-van man in their manifesto and in the promises they have made on the campaign trail. The prime minister has pledged to create 50,000 new apprenticeships, expand free child care and take those earning the minimum wage out of income tax. He even promises to legislate against any increases in the government’s main revenue-raising taxes until 2020. He has revived Margaret Thatcher’s totemic bid for working-class support by promising to extend the “right to buy” social housing to tenants of housing associations.
The pursuit of van-driving voters also partly accounts for the Conservatives’ frequent dire warnings about the risk to Britain’s economic and political stability of a Labour government propped up by the separatist, left-wing Scottish National Party. Polls suggest UKIP supporters worry more about this than most.
Bild: David Cameron talar till anhängare i Abingdon, södra England, 4 april, 2015. Reuters.
the Campaign Dossier 