The Political Impact of the UK’s Ageing Population

by | Feb 17, 2023 | Ageing in the UK | 0 comments

Author: James Breckwoldt

The UK has an ageing population. The Office for National Statistics (2018) projects that in 50 years’ time, there are likely to be an additional 8.6 million people aged 65 years and over, which will make up 26% of the population – up from 18% in 2016. This will mean a changed electorate with a greater percentage of older voters and a decrease in younger voters. How this might manifest itself in electoral politics, and what the potential effects of the current wealth inequality between generations are, is the focus of this blog.

Politics

In general elections, the UK has gone from a situation in 2010 where 18-24 year olds voted 31-30 Labour-Conservative and 65 and over voted 44-31 Conservative-Labour (Ipsos MORI 2010) to the 2019 General Election where 18-24 year olds voted 56-21 Labour-Conservative, but those aged 70 and above voting 67-14 Conservative-Labour (McDonnell and Curtis 2019). 2017 saw similar age divides and the increased youth support for Labour was described as a ‘Youthquake’ (Sloam, Ehsan, and Henn 2018) – although the extent of how much turnout increased was disputed (Prosser et al. 2020). This evidence led Loughran et al. (2021) to conclude that ‘age has become the primary demographic explaining voter choice within the British electorate.’

This rising level of electoral polarisation between age groups has been picked up by the British media, headlines have included:

  • Boomers vs millennials: the defining schism in UK politics (Eaton 2018)
  • Class war may largely be behind us but the generation wars are just beginning (Littlewood 2021)
  • Respect your elders? Why the generation wars feel worse than ever (Aron 2021)
  • Baby boomers are the winners who have taken it all – now it’s time they gave some back (Hutton 2021)

The UK’s ageing population may be having the effect of creating ‘gerontocracies’ where older voters are able to realise their own material interests through the ballot box at the expense of the young’s interests, due to their larger percentage of the electorate (Mulligan and Sala-i-Martin 1999).

In the UK, the differences in preferences between young and old are shaping the coalitions of support for Labour and the Conservatives Nevertheless, this is a ‘bad generational equilibrium’ (p. 140), because different generational blocs’ hold on the two main parties limits their flexibility in creating policies to remedy generational social and economic imbalances (Bell and Gardiner 2019). Given that younger people tend to live in a concentrated number of constituencies, whilst older voters tend to be more dispersed throughout the country (Commons Library 2021), the UK’s majoritarian system could further give older voters disproportional power in upcoming elections.

Wealth

In the 2010s, a number of books were released exploring whether younger generations have been economically disadvantaged by older generations. The titles of these books give a sense of which side of argument they come down on: Jilted Generation: How Britain has Bankrupted Its Youth (Howker and Malik 2013); The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future (Sternberg 2019); The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and Why They Should Give it Back (Willetts 2019); OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind (Filipovic 2020). These views are not universal, and a number of works have disputed this Manichean view of differences between generations, whether because it distracts from the wider economic system which is to blame (Bristow 2019) or because differences in political preferences between age groups have been ever present since WWII (Duffy 2021).

One of the most prominent sources of economic division between young and old in the UK has been unequal homeownership rates. In the 21st century, the price of British housing has far outpaced rises in wages (Knoll, Schularick, and Steger 2017). Homeownership rates for cohorts that entered adulthood during this time have been far lower than earlier birth cohorts at the same ages (Cribb and Simpson 2018). Previous literature shows that homeownership is associated with voting for right-wing parties (Verberg 2000; Ansell and Cansunar 2021) and holding right-wing economic beliefs (Kemeny 1981; Ansell 2014)

Therefore, these differences in wealth may be driving political polarisation between age groups, where the non-homeowning young vote for parties that have policies to increase their chance of owning, and older homeowning voters vote for parties that will protect their wealth.

Whilst young and old currently have different financial positions, there is likely to be an upcoming ‘inheritance boom’ (Resolution Foundation 2017) in which today’s younger generation will receive the housing and investment wealth of their deceased parents. Around £5.5 trillion of wealth could be passed down between 2020 and 2050 (Kings Court Trust 2022). Given this, younger people who are currently railing against the economic system may soon – completely coincidently – change their mind about the utility of taxing wealth and begin to hold economic preferences suspiciously similar to the ‘Boomers’ that ‘stole’ their economic future.

Rather than manifesting itself in an age/generation divide, the ‘inheritance boom’ may lead to a renewed class and racial cleavage in politics, given the systemic differences in the ‘Millennials’ who stand to inherit wealth, and those that are not (Nolan et al. 2020). In the US, Levitz (2021) suggests that these inequalities could trigger a ‘Millennial Civil War’ in politics:

The millennial rich and upper-middle class will be the wealthiest America has ever known. Working-class millennials, meanwhile, are poised to enjoy less economic security than their parents, as their wages fail to keep pace with the rising costs of housing and health care.

Therefore, the current intergenerational political and economic conflicts could change into an intragenerational once these inheritances are received.

Conclusion

None of the potential effects of an ageing population are inevitable. Whilst demography – who are the largest groups in society – clearly has a large impact on electoral outcomes, it is not destiny. The political and economic divides outlined in this blog will be contested in the democratic process, which will determine outcomes. If people want to change the current intergenerational or future intragenerational wealth differences, then voters can do this at the ballot box. If they don’t, wealth and political divides will continue, just in a different form in the future from the age divides we see today.

 

References

Ansell, Ben. 2014. “The Political Economy of Ownership: Housing Markets and the Welfare State.” American Political Science Review 108 (2): 383–402.

Ansell, Ben, and Asli Cansunar. 2021. “The Political Consequences of Housing (Un) Affordability.” Journal of European Social Policy 31 (5): 597–613.

Aron, Isabelle. 2021. “Respect Your Elders? Why the Generation Wars Feel Worse Than Ever.” Independent, March. https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/millennial-gen-z-generation-war-b1823071.html.

Bell, Torsten, and Laura Gardiner. 2019. “My Generation, Baby: The Politics of Age in Brexit Britain.” The Political Quarterly 90: 128–41.

Bristow, Jennie. 2019. Stop Mugging Grandma: The ’Generation Wars’ and Why Boomer Blaming Won’t Solve Anything. Yale University Press.

Commons Library, House of. 2021. “Constituency Data: Population, by Age.” https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/constituency-statistics-population-by-age/.

Cribb, Jonathan, and Polly Simpson. 2018. “Barriers to Homeownership for Young Adults.” IFS Green Budget: October.

Duffy, Bobby. 2021. Generations: Does When You’re Born Shape Who You Are? Atlantic Books.

Eaton, George. 2018. “Boomers Vs Millennials: The Defining Schism in UK Politics.” The New Statesman, January. https://www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2018/01/boomers-vs-millennials-defining-schism-uk-politics.

Filipovic, Jill. 2020. OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind. Simon; Schuster.

Howker, Ed, and Shiv Malik. 2013. Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth. Icon Books.

Hutton, Will. 2021. “Baby Boomers Are the Winners Who Have Taken It All – Now It’s Time They Gave Some Back.” The Guardian, September. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/05/baby-boomers-are-the-winners-who-have-taken-it-all-now-its-time-they-gave-some-back.

Ipsos MORI. 2010. “How Britain Voted in 2010.” Ipsos.com. https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2010..

Kemeny, Jim. 1981. The Myth of Home-Ownership: Private Versus Public Choices in Housing Tenure. Routledge.

Kings Court Trust. 2022. “Passing on the Pounds: The Rise of the UK’s Inheritance Economy.”

Knoll, Katharina, Moritz Schularick, and Thomas Steger. 2017. “No Price Like Home: Global House Prices, 1870-2012.” American Economic Review 107 (2): 331–53.

Levitz, Eric. 2021. “Will ‘the Great Wealth Transfer’ Trigger a Millennial Civil War?” New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/07/will-the-great-wealth-transfer-spark-a-millennial-civil-war.html.

Littlewood, Mark. 2021. “Class War May Largely Be Behind Us but the Generation Wars Are Just Beginning.” The Times, June. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/class-war-may-largely-be-behind-us-but-the-generation-wars-are-just-beginning-7j5tlhtnt.

Loughran, Tom, Jon Tonge, and Andy Mycock. 2021. “Young People and UK Electoral Rights.” UK In a Changing Europe. https://ukandeu.ac.uk/young-people-electoral-rights-uk/.

McDonnell, Adam, and Chris Curtis. 2019. “How Britain Voted in the 2019 General Election.” YouGov. Accessed 02/02/2023.

Mulligan, Casey B, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin. 1999. “Gerontocracy, retirement, and social security.” National Bureau of Economic Research.

Nolan, Brian, Juan Palomino, Philippe van Kerm, and Salvatore Morelli. 2020. “The Wealth of Families: The Intergenerational Transmission of Wealth in Britain in Comparative Perspective.” Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School.

Prosser, Christopher, Edward Fieldhouse, Jane Green, Jonathan Mellon, and Geoffrey Evans. 2020. “Tremors but No Youthquake: Measuring Changes in the Age and Turnout Gradients at the 2015 and 2017 British General Elections.” Electoral Studies 64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2020.102129.

Resolution Foundation. 2017. “The Million Dollar Be-Question: Inheritances, Gifts, and Their Implications for Generational Living Standards.” Resolution Foundation Intergenerational Commission.

Sloam, James, Rakib Ehsan, and Matt Henn. 2018. “’Youthquake’: How and Why Young People Reshaped the Political Landscape in 2017.” Political Insight 9 (1): 4–8.

Sternberg, Joseph C. 2019. The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials’ Economic Future. PublicAffairs.

Verberg, Norine. 2000. “Homeownership and Politics: Testing the Political Incorporation Thesis.” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie, 169–95.

Willetts, David. 2019. The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – and Why They Should Give It Back. Atlantic Books Ltd.

 

Short bio

James Breckwoldt is a PhD student at the University of Manchester, supported by the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership (NWSSDTP). He holds a MPhil in Politics (Comparative Government) from the University of Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree in History & Politics from the University of Warwick. His research interest covers new voting cleavages, particularly age divides, homeownership and ‘culture wars’.

Contact: james.breckwoldt@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Twitter: @jamesbreckwoldt

LinkedIn: James Breckwoldt

 

Image credits
Author: Matthias Zomer
Permission: open source, free to use

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