Many lefties have long believed that false consciousness causes some workers to vote against their own interests: I have some sympathy for this view. However, reading Dan Davies makes me suspect that it's not just workers who do this.

He points out that the benefit cap could clobber the buy-to-let market and says:

If anyone could be seen as a core Tory/UKIP voter, I would have thought that a small landlord in a southern coastal town would be. It's not often that you see a government attacking its core supporters in this way.

But it's not just BTL landlords who voted Tory even though this could hurt them. One big group of losers from austerity has been older savers. This is because - for a given inflation target - a tight fiscal policy means lower interest rates.

Of course, a looser monetary policy helps savers by raising asset prices. But given that equity and bond prices (and house prices too to some extent!) are set largely by global forces, it's not at all clear that Tory austerity has, net, been good for older, richer savers. And yet these have overwhelmingly voted Tory. Why?

I'm not sure it's because some of Labour's policies would have hurt them. The party's proposed rent controls were pretty watery and the people I'm thinking of would barely have been touched by the mansion tax or 50% tax rate. Net, it's quite possible that lower interest rates and the benefit cap timebomb are more damaging than Labour's proposals.

Instead, one possibility is that such people believe a Tory government would be good for the country if not for themselves. But there are two other explanations.

One is that people don't see even the most rudimentary policy mechanisms. They just don't get that the incidence of benefits does not fall solely upon "claimants", or that a tighter fiscal policy must mean a looser monetary policy.

The other, though, is that, in voting, brand matters. The Tories have spent decades building a reputation as being the party of savers and of the wealthy. This reputation wins it support from people who are hurt by its actual policies: as the saying goes, give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep til noon. In this sense, older richer people vote Tory for the same reasons that ethnic minorities don't - because their votes are shaped not by current policy but by a (folk) memory of what happened years or even decades ago.

This might be wrapped up with uncertainty aversion. Many older affluent people simply feel less uncomfortable with a Tory than Labour government, regardless of precise policies.

And herein lies a warning for Labour. Some of its leadership candidates want the party to woo southern middle-class voters by being pro-business and pro-aspiration. But if a party's image can't be built in a few months, and doesn't depend merely upon its actual current policies, then it might not be able to do this.