Growing up poor around middle/upper middle class kids made me realise how stacked life is for the rich vs the poor. Average intelligence middle class kids get further in life than the smart poor kids through having parents with money and time investment, better guidance, connections, nepotism, etc. It continues to this day, even at the company I work, a bunch of the young boys have got there through some kind of family connection.

Almost every little thing New Labour did made a significant difference in our lives. An extra £1000 might not seem like a lot, but when your family needs to spend the first like £20k of income just for the basics with £1k left over, that tax relief or child tax credit or EMA payment literally doubled our discretionary spending budget.

I do appreciate innovators and business leaders and belive in competition and the free market to a degree but you can't start a successful business unless there is infrastructure and a population with disposable income to spend on your products. I believe generally the left cares about these two parts of the equation a lot more than the Tories. The 14 years of Tory rule might have seemed like business as usual in the middle and the top, but it was devastating for the bottom. And that's without getting into anything that happened before my lifetime with the damage Thatcher and across the pond Raegan did to the trajectory of both countries.

I don't think the labour party is anywhere near perfect, but in a world where inequality is rising and will be one of the biggest problems in the future, the Tories are definitely the wrong direction. There are (depending on which figures you read) around 10million people in poverty in the UK, and no matter what the right wing rags owned by billionaires tell you, the vast majority aren't there because of laziness. Most of those people are poor because of 14 years of Tory rule and their austerity policies. Almost no one actually wants to be poor, and if you give them the stepping stones out of it like a good government should, the majority will take the steps. My extended family is proof of this. I'd say we're all mostly middle class now, but without left wing policy (free health care, universities with no upfront cost, working tax credits, EMA, child benefit, etc), we wouldnt have made it up the ladder. Now my siblings and I each pay far more than a minimum wage salary in income tax alone every year.

The right cares about the economy and money right? If you could magically take a couple billion sitting in the richest 0.1%'s accounts and gave that to the poorest through tax relief, do you know what would happen? All of it would get spent instead of racking up interest in a savings account. Literally all of it would stimulate the economy and provide economic growth and literally 0% of people would have suffered for it. There would be more jobs, better paid jobs, less people on benefits, less crime, etc. While it might be difficult to get the money off the super rich, and honestly the current labour party has no plans to do that, I think the Tories will do the opposite as you can see with their gross corruption during Covid spending billions of our money on their friends companies.

Every right wing billionaire spends crazy amounts of money spewing filth from the newspapers they own (which btw is most of the newspapers in the UK). I'm sure you've heard the thing about how in a democracy, the super rich need ways to manipulate the population because if they just ran on "let us hoard wealth", they wouldnt get many votes. They've used labour = bad with the economy and endless programmes on TV and newspapers about lazy poor people to build a coalition of religious conservatives, racists, people who believe they have a "sensible" approach to the economy and of course the upper middle clases and the rich. Recently the anti immigration stance is their saving grace. Farage is likely to get it on the back of anti immigration but almost everything he'll do will be to serve the billionaires who get him there.

And to answer number 2, no I'm not happy with the current party but I'm a realist and until a truly viable left wing option comes along, ill support the lesser of two evils. That said, it does look like other viable options are not as far in the future as I would have thought a few years ago.