the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Here something you may have missed, from metro.co.uk:

The fate of the UK over Brexit will be decided by around 100,000 people who are predominately male, white, middle-class pensioners. Grass roots members of the Conservative Party will choose the new prime minister whose job it will be to lead us out of the EU.

However, their demographic is ‘entirely unrepresentative’ of the general population based on gender, wealth, ethnicity and their hard-line attitudes against Brussels. Experts say this situation could make a no-deal exit from the EU more likely – but also, paradoxically, there is a higher chance of a second referendum too. The race to be Theresa May’s successor when she stands down on June 7th will be decided by Tory party members rather than the general public.

Research has confirmed that 70% of party members are male and 97% are white British. The average age is 57, although over 40% of the group is aged 65 or above. Members are concentrated in the southern half of the country with six out of ten living in Eastern England, London, the south east and the south west.

Before adding,,

Some 86% of them fall into the ABC1 category, used by researchers to describe the top social grade.

And if that doesn’t make you want to share a bath with a toaster, this might,

Politics professor Tim Bale told Metro.co.uk: ‘The average member will be a man, in his late 50s, will be white British, will live in the south of England and be comfortably off. ‘They are certainly more comfortably off than most people and certainly not representative in terms of ethnicity. ‘In the UK some 15% of people come from ethnic minority backgrounds whereas only 3% of those in the Conservative party do.’

Tory MPs are now queuing up to throw their hats into the ring and a leadership contest is set to start the week commencing June 10th. MPs will hold a series of secret ballots to whittle down the candidates to two. This final pair will be put to a postal vote of the wider party membership and the winner declared the new prime minister, probably by the end of July.

Membership costs £25 per year but it is too late for anyone wanting to join in the process for this time.

That last line is highly revealing, both about who the Conservative want as members and also who they don’t want. Only someone affluent , so ‘comfortably off’ as to be relatively unscathed by the worst effects of successive government’s austerity agenda would have enough disposable income to join. It cost me £3 to be able to join the Labour party ias a supportern order to vote for Corbyn, and when he won – to nobody’s surprise – I joined as a full member. How much of a member I feel I am now is a moot point, but at least the eligibility criteria to vote wasn’t predicated on wealth.

Basically, the new Conservative leader and PM will be chosen by people who one imagines mix within their own narrow social sphere and therefore their life experience and opinions gained from that will be equally narrow too. I mean, I could be wrong but something tells me I’m not, Anyway whatever they decide, they won’t have to live with it for long.

Talk about putting the con into co