Yes I can understand that self-interest would lead to disadvantaged people voting for a party that prioritises addressing their issues, which explains a lot of the Labour BAME votes. However, I'm not sure that Priti Patel, Sajed Javid, Rishi Sunak etc or even Thatcher thought that they achieved their success despite Tories policies. I think their perception is that Tory policies helped them succeed and that Labour policies would have hindered success for them and others like them.
They probably do, they may even be correct that those policies did help them - on balance, though, they have a more profound negative effect on people from those backgrounds.
So self-interest could also lead to a significant BAME Tory vote, as many ethnic minority groups seem to be academically and economically out-performing Caucasians and those people are more likely to support Tory policies such as a mandatory requirement for immigrants to learn English or a perceived support for hard-working entrepreneurs and small businesses through their wage and lower tax rate policies, though given the Tory position on IR35 this isn't really true for contractors.
Except that education, as with so many other things, is the minimum requirement for moving upwards, but it's not enough in and of itself. You still need the good fortune and the opportunities that are regularly denied women, the disabled and people of colour.
It may be as you say because Tory policies are more authoritarian with an emphasis on discipline, which may appeal to a significant number of ethnic minority voters who want a tougher approach to crime, or it may be that the Tory policies are perceived by hard-working, well-integrated immigrants as serving their families better than Labour policies.
By those who support them they are - the idea that everyone is on the same playing field and has the same opportunities is something that Tory members and supporters espouse as inherently fair, and I don't disagree with them that it should be the aspiration. I find, generally, that they either don't appreciate (or don't want to acknowledge, in some instances) the nuances that mean differentiate between equality and equity.
Apparently without female voters the Tory party would not have a majority. Again self-interest seems to be the key to winning female votes by addressing issues that primarily affect women.
In this day and age I don't think anyone could achieve a majority in the UK without at least a significant plurality of the female vote; I don't want to give the impression that I think the modern Tory party are trying to take us back to the 1800s, I just feel that they think the work is broadly finished on bringing about equal opportunities.
It's a fair point though that it's fairly arbitrary that Europeans get an immigration advantage denied to Commonwealth citizens.
It's not arbitrary, it's a result of the way the political realities developed - the Commonwealth countries, on aggregate, moved away from the UK, and the UK moved towards Europe. Now we're moving away from Europe (and it's questionable whether the Commonwealth generally have a strong urge to move back towards us as much as some of the soundbites in the UK suggest a 'we're getting the old band back together' sort of mentality). Economically, politically and geographically it made more sense - to many of us it still does, regardless of whether we're going to leave the EU politically or not.
Therefore it's not surprising that a number of immigrants from Commonwealth countries were incentivised to vote against continuing such a policy by voting Tory and Leave.
There's a great deal of crossover between Tory and Leave voters, but the Leave vote managed to appeal to a large number of Labour voters as well, it's an issue the cut across a huge number of demographics. One of the reasons that Cambridge Analytica's involvement was so important was because of their ability to quantify the many, many different influences on people and balance them against each other to try and make the small marginal gains that all added up - by focussing on one or two specific messages out of many influences people were convinced in some instances to vote against their own best interests because their perception of the issue wasn't the same as the reality.
That undoubtedly happened both ways, and it undoubtedly happens in other political arenas than just the Brexit referendum, in that instance the Leave campaign appear to have made a significant improvement in how effective they were with it.
The days are long gone, I think, when people's affiliation can easily be summed up in simple 'Tory/Labour', 'right/left' oversimplifications - intersectionality is the new reality, as much as some of the people making the best use of it might publicly decry it as part of the new 'woke' culture.
O.
