Recently I’ve become somewhat of an admirer of the writings of Patrick O’Flynn he of the Social Democratic Party and The Jam fandom. He’s one of those patriotic centrist writers and political types that this country really needs more of.
He’s recently written a piece for The Critic magazine that should be bad news for Boris Johnson. In his article Mr O’Flynn points out that among those who voted for the Tories either for the first time at the last General Election or who are long term Tory voters, immigration is one of the biggest concerns. Mr O’Flynn added that when you look at polls of Leave voters, immigration or rather the failure of the Johnson government to tackle it is a key issue.
Mr O’Flynn said:
You will see that as of 22 November, Immigration & Asylum is far and away the leading concern of this half of the electorate – basically the half that delivered the Tories their landslide election win in 2019.
Some 60 per cent rate it as one of the top three most important issues facing the country, far ahead of the 45 per cent each that Health and The Economy rack up. And it is on an accelerating upward path. Given the Channel drownings on November 24, it would be no surprise to see it hit 70 per cent next week.
As Tory MPs have been corroborating direct from their postbags, this is clearly the issue that is most responsible for the ebbing popularity of the Government — far more so than the endless sleaze rows that have dominated the broadcast media’s coverage of politics in recent weeks.
The “dog ate my homework” excuses of Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel for their failure to get a grip on the cross-Channel chaos have stopped working with their own bedrock support.
It appears that for both the Tories long term supporters and the new supporters, the failure to tackle immigration is the one thing that is possibly going to hurt the Tories at the ballot box. If these voters will depart from the Tories because they’ve got fed up with the Tories lying about reducing migration, then they won’t go to Labour as Labour are worse than the Tories on migration, they may either sit at home and not vote or vote for a party like Reform. Whilst this may not propel Reform into the Commons it will certainly take a large chunk out of the Tory vote and maybe let Labour slip into many seats by default.
The Tories need to deal with immigration. It’s a key issue for many people. If the Tories don’t tackle unwanted and excessive levels of migration then it’s going to hurt them one way or another at the ballot box.
The pigs are at present firmly in the driving seat and don’t give a fig what the other inferior animals may or may not think. As my arrogant Conservative MP recently ended a message to me “opponents who needs them?”. Thursday will give us a real insight into how things may be changing.
Indeed Thursday will be interesting. I’ll be running a Bexley prediction post tomorrow. I reckon I should be able to pick out who’s going to lose their deposits at least.
Not really commenting on the issue but as an aside I have a rule to never ever trust a press report of an opinion poll until I can find the original data from the research company. Not always possible, but interesting then to see all the questions and how they were phrased. Media reports also often for instance lump ‘slightly agree’ with ‘strongly agree’ to produce an aggregate which may correspond with their bias. It might be a bit worrying that the media get a preview to report on polls before the research companies publish them.
I’ve been given little reason to distr4ust Mr O’Flynn and he does give instructions on how to dig down into the data to find the results. I agree with you that some outlets may conflate ‘slightly agree’ with ‘strongly agree’. I think that Mr O’Flynn was commenting on an already published poll.