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So, now its the 'wealthy boomers' who are going to help out the #Tories, thinks Phillip Inman.
Well, I'm one 'comfortable' retired #boomer, who has never voted for those #Toryscum & never will....
The reading off of the advantages flowing to baby boomers (still) & their likely voting patterns feels like rather lazy materialism.
Lets stop blaming the boomers & say what's really the problem: the mendacious, corrosive right wing media's grip on political debate(s)!
@TCMuffin@toot.walesIt’s hugely lazy 
There are two more “Tofu eating, Guardian reading” boomers in Cardiff who have never voted Tory and who never will vote Tory.
Two boomers who were horrified when Blair introduced university tuition fees as he’s from our generation who benefited from free tertiary education!
A generation who are blamed for brexshit when we campaigned and voted for Remain!
It’s so lazy and it makes me furious as it’s a distraction from the real causes of the state of the UK 
There is a much more interesting conversation to be had about the “educated” versus the “uneducated” than there is about pitting generations against each other.
Take brexshit…if you must 
Every town or city in the UK with large university communities voted Remain and the number of highly educated people is a much better predictor of voter intentions than age, yet the “red tops” prosper by setting generations against each other.
The generational argument is a distraction!
@TCMuffin Maybe if the ‘educated’ took better care of the ‘uneducated’ there would be less of a divide. 
I agree
@KimSJ @TCMuffin Sure. But how?
I grew up in a single parent family on a Welsh council estate. I've never voted to make people in similar situations worse off. But many of those same people do, not least with Brexit or the "red wall" voting for the Tories. This self-destructive nihilism seems especially strong in the UK, where FPTP justifies a sense that it doesn't matter who you vote for as the Mail-anointed candidate usually wins and nobody's listening to you anyway.
What's your solution?
@hengymrohebwlad A dream solution for 2024:
1. Make ‘deliberately or recklessly misleading the public’ a serious crime. If voters are not told the truth, their votes mean nothing, and democracy dies.
2. Use German/NZ-style PR voting system (additional member system).
3. Introduce UBI
4. Fully tax unearned income.
5. Add new higher tax band
6. Divide England into regions of size comparable with Scotland and Wales, each with a devolved parliament. Leave Westminster as the Federal Government.
HNY
@KimSJ Sounds good to me!
@KimSJ Only thing I'm not sure about is PR. It's very hard to get lots of little parties to agree on anything which leads to a legislative process which is extremely slow and when agreement it reached, it's such a watered down compromise that the resulting law is not always fit for purpose. We'll, that's what seems to happen in Italy. @hengymrohebwlad
@alexproe @KimSJ Despite some problems, PR has generally worked OK for Germany since WW2, although I think a federal system is also an important factor. This is one of the many aspects of post-war Germany's constitution that was deliberately designed to prevent the disproportionate concentration of power in a small number of hands.
Very few democracies use FPTP because of its obvious tendency to generate binary (bipolar?) politics as in the UK or USA (whose electoral college works like FPTP).
@hengymrohebwlad Must look into how the German system works. Didn't know it was a form of PR. Federations are not a bad idea as they divide nations up into more manageable chunks. Small nations seem to work best, so big nations split into smaller ones can too as Germany shows. @KimSJ
@alexproe @hengymrohebwlad I’m a big fan of the German (and very similar New Zealand) system of elections. It retains the concept of directly chosen local MPs, but adds a very fair rebalancing of the final make-up of the parliament by allocating MPs from national party lists.
@KimSJ @hengymrohebwlad I believe New Zealand already has legislation preventing politicians from lying to the public
@hengymrohebwlad @KimSJ @TCMuffin Have no fear, self-destructive nihilism is much more common than you think! Italians are truly expert at it!
1. only elite children are educated, the rest are "prepared for the world of work".
2. "uneducated" they may be, nevertheless they know things that you don't.
I was born in 1956 and by the start of 1958 my mother was a single parent and we lived with my grandparents.
I’m from a poor working class background who went to university as I’d struck lucky to be born at a time when tertiary education was free at the point of use.
I was horrified when Blair introduced tuition fees as I knew that this would have excluded me from tertiary education.
@TCMuffin @ChrisMayLA6 @cstross reminded me of Stewart Lee talking about the remain-voting cities as bright shining jewels in the mist 
. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uovt1sC3rtM&t=26s
I am less sure that "Education" is a good predictor. We may have to distinguish between STEM and the Arts, and other indicators.
As it is, it feels like the all-too-common Left/Right divide, one of the many unreliable 1-dimensional models.
I'd hesitate over the labels used by the Alignment system in the Dungeons and Dragons game, but it is one of a whole family of 2-dimensional charts, from such people as Pournelle and Nolan, who often have their own axes to grind.
Against that is the general statistical problem of survey design. A multi-dimensional problem needs a lot more work, and likely a larger sample, while a badly-chosen question can ruin the whole thing.
I see a lot of stories around warning of "useless degrees" which feel like "don't trust the degrees that prove me wrong".
Am I opening a supertanker-equivalent can-of-worms?
@TCMuffin @ChrisMayLA6 as a white, male boomer, I also feel the sting of comments like these. Of course, #NotAllBoomers. But from the point of view of the less-favored/powerful/wealthy groups suffering the consequences of favored groups' behavior, it's an understandable shorthand for e.g. 61%/56%/44%/25% Leave voters among 65+/50-64/25-49/18-24 age groups. It's not just lazy journalism, it's not UK-specific, and it's not directed at you as an individual (1/2).
@TCMuffin @ChrisMayLA6 those of us who object to being lumped in should of course take more concrete actions to push back against our cohorts' behavior, to the extent possible. (2/2)
We did…and we still do.
@oddhack @TCMuffin @ChrisMayLA6 With regard to the Brexit vote, lots of ageist or "left behind" explanations ignore the fact that every single voting district in Scotland voted Remain. The proportion of Boomers or of "uneducated" people in Scotland is similar to England, so why was this?
Perhaps the existence of a robust and distinct Scottish political/media culture allowed Scottish voters to make their decision on a more rational basis than voters drowning in RW propaganda in England or Wales?