The Saturn Campaign

British politics has always been about age. But perhaps not this deliberately...

Thanks for reading Political Calculus. And new subscribers, I’m afraid I can’t offer dank naughties memes every time. Nonetheless, with the election season underway, there’s lots to talk about. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t advertise my new podcast on democracy with Tortoise - What’s Wrong With Democracy? (I recommend saying it in a New York accent with a shrugging hand gesture). Last week’s episode was on the Indian elections. This week focuses on direct military attacks on the democratic body politic, with interviews with Ukraine expert Olga Onuch and the VP of Freedom House, Nicole Bibbins Sedaca. Listen here or here.

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I am, it turns out, an easy mark. I spent the weekend, as the father of two teenagers, riled up about Rishi Sunak’s plan for them to do some form of national service, as drafted on a Post-It note with “Royal Commission???” written at the bottom. And at around 10pm every evening since then, I have fallen into exactly the same trap, of staring incredulously at my phone as Sunak’s campaign announces a new policy that is either massively favourably to the over-65s, or a snide kicking to something young people like.

Now, I’m a professional political scientist, so I shouldn’t get annoyed. It’s campaign season, where policies are birthed and then deep-sixed like fruitflies. What’s more Sunak is polling poorly and needs to capture the votes of ex-Conservative voters who have either shifted to Reform UK or to not voting at all. Who are these lost voters? Generally speaking, socially authoritarian older people. What do they like? Their pensions. What don’t they like? Young whippersnappers who were spared the rod and hence spoiled. Hence the 10pm youth-bashing.

Still, I think this is a campaigning mistake. And that brings me to Goya’s famous picture of Saturn devouring his own son. This is a rather vivid and some might say too on the nose analogy. Yes, yes it is. I don’t really think the Conservative Party are promoting the metaphorical devouring of young British people. I usually prefer more subtle allegories. But the problem with Sunak’s campaign is it ain’t subtle. It is saying the quiet part out loud about British generational politics. In ways that I think will have minimal benefit and harm the party for many elections to come. Like Goya’s picture, it is in-your-face; it is aggressively meaningful.

There has been, if you will, a Cold War across the generations in British politics. I don’t for a minute think that young people don’t love their parents and grandparents, and vice versa, and want policies that help them. Of course they do. I mean in terms of the slant of political campaigning and policymaking. Year after year, there has been a noticeable tilt to the interests of the old.

As a Gen Xer I lie somewhere in the middle of this. I own a house, for a start. I didn’t struggle to get a job in the Great Recession because I already had one. I benefited from free higher education. So I share many of the wins of the Boomers. But I am close enough in age to younger generations to have a bit more of a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ view about their fortunes than an ‘avocado toast and Netflix’ one.

Of course I’m far from the only person to notice this. The Resolution Foundation has done sterling work for a decade, showing the stark intergenerational cleavages in access to housing that mark the UK. Pensioners now earn more on average than wage-earners, which is to be frank, pretty wild. (EDIT: Gavin Jackson from the Economist is less convinced by this claim - I concur, so let’s note instead that pensioners are the group least likely to be in poverty - see here) Public policymaking has often seemed to favour older voters whether it be planning restrictions that slow new house-building, or the focus on protecting pensions and the NHS to the exclusion of most other public spending.

This is not just a complaint of the disaffected left. On the right, there has been the development of a YIMBY wing from Robert Colvile to John Oxley to Sam Bowman and Kate Andrews, with deep concerns about whether younger people will vote Conservative again. Conservatives after all, will have to win elections in a future world where today’s over 65s no longer can vote. Burkean conservatism argues that our political decision making should take into account the choices made by the long ago dead. But it doesn’t argue we should actually give them the vote.

So is the Sunak campaign a downpayment on a new generation of Conservatives? Well… not exactly. It has turned a generational Cold War into a hot one.

First off, it involved a new national service commitment for eighteen-year olds. An amusing series of justifications ensued for why this younger generation should have to do something none of their parents did (or indeed, grandparents since national service hasn’t been compulsory for anyone born after 1939). The Telegraph published an amazing piece arguing that young people should give thanks for furlough (conveniently ignoring that anyone young enough to qualify for national service would not in fact have been working during COVID). Another series of claims made, including by Rishi Sunak, highlighted the wonders of national service in many EU countries. Which is an interesting angle on Europe for the Conservative Party to take…

This was followed in fairly short order by the guarantee of a quadruple lock (or triple lock-plus) for the state pension, which seems to be a guarantee that as and when the state pension’s value passes the currently-frozen income tax personal allowance, then pensioners but only pensioners, would not have to pay income tax on the difference. This seems to be a response to lots of moaning that pensioners had been unfairly targeted in this year’s budget because they did not receive a cut in national insurance contributions that they do not in fact pay. I’ll let you figure out that logic.

Next step was an attack on the Conservatives’ new bête noire, universities. Egads! My own employer! Actually, probably not my employer, the University of Oxford, but rather those horrible little places that offer ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees to people who, you know, really shouldn’t be going to university, it’s just not fair on them. So one eighth of higher education courses are to face the axe and be replaced by apprenticeships. This unusually statist piece of manpower planning doesn’t conflict with traditional conservative free-market views because… oh I don’t know. Woke lecturers or something.

Anyway, I hope my jaundiced views on this have not put you off entirely. Bluntly, these policies bear all the hallmarks of policy ideas that you throw out at the start of an election to see if they will move the dial, in the hopes that they do but also that you don’t really have to figure out how to implement them. Because the joke in Westminster is that this all just politics, old chum. Don’t take it too seriously. Nothing worse than humourless centrist dads pedantically pointing out problems. There’s an election on, don’t you know?

Normally, I would agree. And I’m not sure that much that happens in British campaigns - save the infamous ‘dementia tax’ framing of Theresa May’s social care plans - actually matters. But I do just wonder if this round of framing has cut through among younger generations in ways that are very damaging to the Conservatives’ long-run viability.

To make that case, let’s look at some data. First off, the breakdown in YouGov’s most recent polling. The tweet below shows the Conservatives behind the Greens among younger voters. And by younger voters I mean people under 50. I mean that even includes me. They are on eight percent. EIGHT PERCENT.

On over 50s the news is better. They are on thirty percent. Still behind Labour but not completely embarrassing. But I don’t know, it feels to me that writing off everyone below the median age for voters is a bold strategy. Let’s see if it pays off.

We can also look at YouGov polling on the quadruple lock. Here it’s worth noting that generous pensions are not unpopular overall. About as many people say Conservative pension plans don’t go far enough as that they are OK or go too far. I’m not surprised since British state pensions really aren’t very generous compared to other wealthy countries and although we do have a robust private and occupational pension sector, there’s a good argument that the state pension should rise even further. Not least, because I’m going to get it one day.

But the split is quite clear here too. Over 54% of pensioners don’t think the quadruple lock goes far enough. They got more. And they ain’t happy. Meanwhile, younger folks are more skeptical. So we have a policy where the winners are still mad and the losers are disaffected.

Now we could do the same thing for lots of other policies. Young people dislike national service and Brexit. Old people like them. Young people like immigration and higher education. Old people don’t. Rinse and repeat. Generational divides in policy are becoming ever sharper. And so indeed are voting patterns.

Below is a figure Jane Gingrich and I created in our IFS piece on political inequality. It shows the estimated effect of age on voting Conservative in General Elections back to the 1960s, using data from the BES. The way to read this is to note that from the 1960s until quite recently, a year of age was associated with a 0.003 increase, which means that a decade of greater age made you three percent more likely to vote Conservative. But in 2017 and 2019 - post Brexit - that jumped to over seven percent. So three decades of age equals more than twenty percent points more likely to vote Conservative. That’s big stuff.

The age divide in who people vote for has been amplified by whether they vote. Below I plot average turnout rates for over and under fifty year olds back to the 1960s. Older people have always been more likely to vote than younger people - just not by much until the late 1990s. And then in the Blair era, a total collapse of turnout among younger people. Very recently this has reversed partway but still with at least a ten point gap. And of course this is not looking at youth turnout, unless you count being under fifty as youth, in which case thanks, your cheque’s in the mail.

The final thing to note is that although the young have either stopped voting Conservative or stopped voting at all, there has been an interesting change in what happens to voting patterns as people age. Again using the same data, but following the average support for Conservatives by each generation, we see that what used to be a pattern of becoming more conservative as you aged - for the Greatest through Boomer generations - stopped with Gen Xers and has reversed with Millennials, who have shifted towards Labour as they have aged.

So putting this all together, the Conservatives have done very very well out of recent trends in terms of an aging population, where older people voted Conservative and were more likely to turn out. But that strategy was already on its last legs as Gen Xers and Millennials have not followed the pattern of their elders. Policy has unsurprisingly followed the interests of older generations. But this leg is about to be sawn out from under the chair.

It’s also worth noting that, although we all get along with our youngers and elders on a day to day basis, there is growing discontent out there about intergenerational fairness among the young. Back in 2022 I ran a survey asking people whether they thought personal effort or ‘outside forces’ were more important in determining people’s life chances. Fifty percent of 70 plus respondents thought effort. Just twenty percent of under forties agreed.

And the British public also get that different generations have had sharply contrasting experiences. I asked respondents which generation had had the best educational opportunities, and everyone agreed the Millenials and Gen Z. But when it comes to access to good affordable housing, it is, of course, the Boomers.

Finally in an earlier survey I ran during COVID in October 2020 and February 2021, I asked which generations had had it hardest during COVID and who would have it hardest in the future. There was broadly consensus that older people had it harder in the pandemic but that it would be more balanced in the future. But among younger people there was much more skepticism that the old had in fact had a harder time. Hence, I’d argue that claims they should do national service to make up for furlough or whatever else are rather misjudged.

As a final warning, here is what current polls estimate for the Conservative Party’s seats in Westminster, plotted against the proportion of the constituency aged over 65, taken from my election prediction app here. It’s easy to see how a post-election Conservative Party, especially one that has adopted this generationally divisive campaign, gets stuck in a limited number of seats that are disproportionately elderly. Which will encourage further doubling down. And back them into a generational cul-de-sac.

Rishi Sunak’s campaign has flown into this growing intergenerational divide with all the subtlety of a Goya picture of a father devouring their own son. He has poked at one of the new third rails of electoral politics with a big metal stick. Much like Apple’s recent iPad advert - in which they crushed horrible old-fashioned things like trumpets and pianos to demonstrate that they were obsolete in the digital age - this campaign has wallowed in its own offensiveness, in this case to young people. And young people may indeed not vote today, in this election. But they will eventually. And I suspect they won’t forget. Saturn may get bitten back.