What happened to all the ‘vote Tory’ signs?

General election time in Britain invariably means one thing: lots of Labour, Green and Lib Dem posters displayed outside people’s houses and in front windows but hardly any Conservative ones. In my 11 years living and travelling around Kent, I haven’t seen a single one. The last time I saw one was in the Holland Park area of West London in the early 1990s. If you live in a city centre, they are a rare species indeed. So where are the ‘vote Tory’ placards?

Their absence has been the norm for decades now, especially since the Thatcherite 1980s. This was when Rik Mayall’s character in the comedy The Young Ones popularised the notion that Tories were ‘capitalist scum’ or ‘fascists’ (even though the character was an imbecile, and actually a send-up of student radicals). By then it had become the popular consensus that Tories were selfish and money-obsessed and that to vote Labour was an act of supreme virtue and altruism.