The great turkey vote

Conservatives are puzzled, and with good reason. For the last few years, polls have shown their share of the vote climbing to and staying steady at around 40% - enough to guarantee them victory and a decent majority in any General Election.
Given the litany of disasters that have assailed Labour for the last two years, they should be in a position where they would be pushed to get an offer of coalition from the Raving Loony Party, let alone the LibDems.
And yet, weirdly and almost inexplicably, Brown and his cohorts are not dead and buried. The most recent polls put the two main parties neck and neck. With Labour suffering from so many self-inflicted wounds why have the Tories consistently failed to finish them off?
Perhaps the answer lies in the latest employment statistics .
According to the Office for National Statistics, employment rose in the final quarter of 2009. Hosanna, Good News shout the pundits. Well, perhaps. The problem is that the 7000 new jobs created were all in the Public Sector. The picture was somewhat different in the Private Sector, where 61,000unfortunates were thrown out of work.
Consequently, as of the beginning of this year, although the total number of people in work was 28.86 million, almost a quarter of them, 6.1 million people, work for government in one form or another.

So, let's imagine a scenario in which someone whose salary is around 7% higher than the private sector equivalent, with a final salary pension inflation-proofed and guaranteed by the Government, is considering his options at the forthcoming General Election. On the one hand, he has Messrs Darling and Brown saying that to make wholesale cuts to public services would stall the recovery, feeble as it is, so their approach will be gently, gently. On the other, he has George Osborne promising to take an axe to public expenditure and, by definition, public jobs at the first available opportunity. All other things being equal, which of these is likely to represent the most attractive proposition to the ou Public Sector worker?
Now, from the gainfully employed, let's turn to the gainfully unemployed; in other words the multitude of those of working age who are, in official terminology, Inactive. There are 8.16 million of them, to be precise. Of that number, 2.31 million are students who are not in the labour market. 2.5 million are officially unemployed and drawing benefits of some kind. Many of these are desperately unhappy to be in that predicament and will do almost anything to get back to paid work of some kind or another.
But, unfortunately, a large number are not. There are whole areas of the UK where lack of a job is a fact of life, where several generations subsist entirely on benefits. In these areas, some of the shrewder ones realised long ago that it is more rewarding to be officially incapable of work through disability than to bother with unemployment and job seekers' allowance. There are nearly 3 millions claiming Disability benefit. Of that number, a surprising proportion, as many as 1/2 million apparently, are under the age of 25.
Given that this group will be a target for some serious pruning, it is difficult to see any incentive for them to vote Conservative at the next election.

The UK allows any EU citizen who is permanently resident here to vote in ALL elections. By contrast, a UK citizen resident in Ireland is allowed to vote in local and European elections there but not at a General election or in any national referenda. The same is true of most other EU countries.
That means that Poles and other newly-minted EU citizens from eastern Europe who have settled here in the last three to four years are all entitled to vote in the coming General Election. This new constituency of potential Labour voters was one of the planned benefits of Labour's drive for multiculturalism when it came to office. As we are all now well aware, the assumption was that these newcomers would not only be grateful to their Labour hosts but register their gratitude in the most practical way possible, by endorsing the Party at the General Election. Suitably galvanised, this group could easily swell the Labour vote by several hundred thousand come the day
Do not be surprised to see a concerted government campaign to persuade these newcomers to exercise their newly-acquired right to vote over the coming six to eight weeks; purely in the interests of Democracy, of course.

Take all of these groups together and what you get is a significant proportion of the population for whom the current administration is the principal source of income. Asking them to elect the Tories is akin to expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas.