Time-warp nonsense an insult to voters

HAVING read Martin Shipton’s article about the visit made by Prime Minister Theresa May to Bridgend to launch her election campaign in Wales (Western Mail, April 26) I am wondering if he and I were actually at the same event.

He states with certainty that the party members present were a “late middle-aged army of prosperous Tory activists”. Later, he asserts that Jeremy Corbyn’s rally in Whitchurch, Cardiff, a few days before was attended by people “largely from the alternative middle class – public sector professionals who sympathise with those worse off than themselves”.

Meanwhile, Mrs May’s supporters in Bridgend were “overwhelmingly from the real middle class with a vested interest in keeping the social order as it is”.

What insulting, utter tosh! These sweeping generalisations, masquerading as political analysis, attempt to bracket people into convenient but very outdated pigeonholes which serious political journalists have long eradicated both from their writings and from their minds.

Indeed, I half-expected him to refer to the “blue-rinse brigade”, which was a phrase regularly trotted out for many years by those attempting to claim that all Conservative voters are middle-aged or elderly.

The people attending the rally in Bridgend came from a cross-section of age groups – there were many young people in their twenties and thirties present, including a couple of young families with babies and toddlers. And how Martin Shipton could declare that they were “prosperous” or from the “real middle class” beats me.

Similarly, how can he claim that Corbyn’s supporters were professionals “who sympathise with those worse off than themselves”? Does he possess a crystal ball which gives him insight into the nature of the people who attended two political rallies?

All of this points to the fact that Mr Shipton lives in some 1980s time warp, viewing British politics through the outdated prism of ideological stereotypes where Conservatives are all prosperous and uncaring while, of course, Labour supporters have a monopoly on sympathy with those worse off.

If his left-wing take on Britain today is shared by the Corbynistas running Labour, then it’s no wonder that so many people – including those who are not middle-aged and not prosperous – view Mrs May and the Conservatives as the party they need to support. Jayne Isaac Maesteg