I've come across various sources that lean center-left, note, CENTER-left, saying this. I think there might be something to it.
The only way out of this is if you successfully blame $marginalised_group for the peoples problems. Or spend decades undoing the damage, but nobody ever gets decades in power.
The British public are in an odd place on this. There's a lot of "folk libertarianism", but that mostly consists of not having ID cards, while at the same time supporting all sorts of crackdowns on protest as soon as it's mildly inconvenient.
And then there's immigration. As in the US, it's a magic bullet for discourse that allows any amount of authoritarianism (or headshots to soccer moms) as long as you promise it will be used against immigrants.
† Local in the sense of being the ones who turn up, my guess is that a good number of them travel by car from quite some distance, personally I live five minutes walk away.
I appreciate this in an anecdotal but I've spoken to quite a few people I know in my family, that saw it as their civil duty to vote and they told all told me some variation of "there is nobody worth voting for", "I don't think it matters who I vote for".
https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2021/0526/12239...
Remember also that when Sunak stepped down, Priti was put forward for leader. If she had played off her Zionist aspirations just a few years later she'd be right in the current newscycle re proscribed organisations and 'domestic terrorism' charges in the UK, and possibly in the running for the big chair.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priti_Patel#Meetings_with_Isra...
The point clearly stands that had Reform not been a thing, 2024 would have been a conservative landslide.
What we got was a Labour landslide, what we should have got was some coalition.
It's certainly not a given that all the 2024 Reform vote would have gone to the Conservatives: a good chunk of it would have likely been disgusted abstention, another chunk to other anti-system parties (mostly of the right fringe, I suspect, but not excluding the Greens despite wild ideological differences), and likely a further (if smaller) chunk to other parties which were simply not the Conservatives (including Labour and the Lib Dems).
Edit: the best analysis on this is likely to be in the latest volume of the long-standing The British General Election of XXXX series, which has just been published online[0]. I haven't had time to look at it yet, though.
Also not every Reform voter would vote Conservative if Reform didn't exist.
I am sure many green voters felt the same way for many years and now they stand a decent chance of getting many seats!
I don't vote. There are many reasons I don't vote. However the biggest reason I don't vote is that the whole premise or at least how it is presented to you is false. The way it is presented to you both in school, media etc. is that you are supposed to read the manifesto, consider the candidates arguments and history etc. etc.
People don't do that, they vote for their team. People have their political teams, much like Premiership Football it often comes down to the "Reds vs the Blues" (literally Man U vs Man City).