A possible explanation . . .

. . . for how in God's name 8,609,527 people could have voted for the Labour party in the general election, after it had betrayed everything it was supposed to stand for while ruining the country's finances for a generation. I found it in my Cambridge contemporary Graham Hurley's 2007 novel One Under:

She'd worked in the public sector all her life and was prepared to defend to the death the state's right to fuck up.

'Fuck up what?'

'Everything. Anything. Child protection. Social housing. Secondary school education. Operations for gallstones. Public libraries. Whatever. Just as long as nothing else falls into the laps of those greedy bastards who call themselves businessmen.'

This rings terribly true, and then there are the morons who say they vote Labour 'because they're from the north.'

What a complete waste of time it is to devise policies seeking to appeal to such people. If they cannot even work out that the money spent on them has to come from business, and that business is concentrated in the south precisely because of the dreary post-proletarian sense of entitlement prevalent in the north, then it would be best to cut them loose to find their own way, and let the greedy southern bastards who call themselves businessmen raise the standard of living for the rest of us.