Gay marriage cost Cameron the referendum
by Mark Ellse, The Conservative Woman:
[…] And yet both gay marriage and poll tax shared a common flaw. Forgetting the the moral arguments behind both measures, what it comes to is a simple matter of political arithmetic. Both gay marriage and the poll tax upset more voters than they gained. For every little old lady who was grateful to receive a cut in her ‘unfair’ domestic rates, there were two or three more who were disgruntled by their increase. True, most of these were not Conservative voters. But enough were and the net effect of the poll tax was to lose votes for the Conservative party.
The same is true for gay marriage. So many who voted Leave opposed gay marriage. True, many of us had serious doubts about David Cameron from the beginning but it was the railroading of gay marriage under the ‘Conservative’ banner during the Coalition that finally and completely lost us from the Cameron camp. After the casual dismissal of deeply held concerns, David Cameron could never again count on the personal support of so many instinctive Conservatives. Like the poll tax before it, gay marriage lost Cameron more political support than it gained. When the big issue – the EU referendum – came along, there was no trust, no personal loyalty and no personal support for the Prime Minister. Had he handled gay marriage differently, likely he would have won the EU referendum and still been in office.
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