Labour leadership: Jeremy Corbyn voters most likely to believe 'the world is controlled by a secretive elite'

You can call someone who voted for Jeremy Corbyn a “dreamer”, but it is no use asking him or her to look under the bonnet of a car to put right a fault, or to do a complicated long-division sum. And don’t get them started about the “secretive elite” who rule the world. A  survey by the polling company YouGov has delved into which character types support each of the four candidates in Labour’s leadership election, and it provides some intriguing insights. Someone who votes for the Blairite Liz Kendall, for example, is likely to be on a household income of over £40,000 a year, but not be a great user of social media. Ms Kendall’s supporters are not keen to abolish the monarchy, nor are they set against sending in the RAF to bomb Isis. And as a rule they don’t tend to believe in conspiracy theories about who rules the world.

But as YouGov’s pollsters tried to get inside the mind of the average Corbyn supporter, they found that two-thirds accept that the famous phrase  “You may say I’m a dreamer”– taken from “Imagine”, John Lennon’s anti-war song – applies to them. Meanwhile, more than a quarter of these supporters – 28 per cent – believe that “the world is controlled by a secretive elite”.

Nearly two-thirds of Corbyn’s supporters are in households with an income below £40,000 a year. When asked what their “mental strengths” are, just under half say “verbal”, but only 13 per cent claim to be good at mathematics, and a paltry 5 per cent rate themselves as having “mechanical intelligence”. The political opinions of the typical Corbyn backer, unsurprisingly, are along the same lines as the candidate’s own. They want to see wealth distributed from rich to poor, they think the monarchy should be abolished, the railways and the big six energy companies should be renationalised, that private firms should not be involved in running any part of the NHS, and that “the greatest single menace to world peace is the USA”.



http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn-voters-most-likely-to-believe-the-world-is-controlled-by-a-secretive-elite-10475488.html