A rabble of cheesed off FT readers

“Labour killing the economy folks. Prepare for Farage much to our detriment. Thanks Rach.”

On which newspaper website does this reader comment appear? The Daily Mail? Maybe The Express?

Actually, it’s from the FT, and it’s not a one-off.

The tone of FT reader’s comments are strident, increasingly blaming Labour for just everything.

There’s plenty of clever stuff too, of course. And I’ll accept this is not a statistical analysis.

But, try this: “Reeves and Labour’s knee jerk reaction against anyone with money and foreigners in particular is really going to cost them dearly. As for non-doms the stable door is blowing in the wind and the nag has already left for pastures new.”

The comments are not limited to tax. FT readers are cross about energy prices, about the decline of the high street and sometimes about immigration.

That’s a fairly standard list of complaints for folk who read the Mail and are likely to vote Tory.

I’ll repeat that this experiment doesn’t meet scientific laboratory requirements, but there is no doubt about the change of tone.

Before the election last year, FT readers were clearly anti-Tory and pro-Labour.

It’s also important to say that typical FT readers and FT readers who leave comments on websites may not be the same.

Nevertheless, it seems fair to say that FT readers, and, pardon me, some FT writers, thought of themselves as different to the rest of us.

Probably higher earning and certainly smarter. People who didn’t try too hard to wear their learning lightly.

Now they sound like the rest of us – a rather cheesed off rabble who think that robots are going to take their jobs and that Rachel from accounts can’t use an abacus.

It is too easy and too early to say that if Labour has lost FT readers, then it has lost the City, which means it probably loses the next election.

It doesn’t look great though.

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Simon.english@roxhillmedia.com