AceNewsDesk – It’s not Red or Blue Wall Conservatives should be worried about: the desertion of working-age voters is the real existential threat for the Conservatives

Ace Press News From Cutting Room Floor: Published:Apr.26: 2024: Conservative Home by Julian Gallie is a Research Associate at JL Partners: TELEGRAM Ace Daily News Link https://t.me/YouMeUs2 

In 2019, Boris Johnson won the Conservatives their largest majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher. He thanked voters who “lent” Conservatives their votes as a new Conservative coalition had formed, a coalition that included many constituencies in the Red Wall that had previously always voted Labour. After winning over those new Red Wall voters, commentary focused on how the Conservatives would balance their priorities and spending between voters in the Red Wall alongside the more traditional Tory heartlands of the Blue Wall. However the Conservatives won with an even more finely balanced coalition: that between younger and older voters.

Part of winning that majority was not only gaining new seats in the Red Wall but lowering the age at which a voter was more likely to vote Conservative than Labour from 47 in the 2017 election to 39.

Winning over those middle aged voters gave Johnson the platform to secure a stable majority; according to YouGov analysis of the 2019 election, the Conservatives won over almost a third of voters aged 30-39 and beat Labour in the 40-49 age range.

Now, they are languishing around 18-20 points behind Labour.

Hopes of keeping the Red Wall have vanished. But most seriously, the scales balancing younger and older generations have broken: every age group under 70 is now more likely to vote Labour, leaving only the retired generation as the Conservative base.

However, new JL Partners analysis shows that the new crossover age is now 70 years old, a staggering 31 years higher than it was just five years ago.

Conservatives are second to the Labour Party in every younger age group. The coalition built up by Johnson has collapsed. As younger and middle-aged voters have abandoned the party, there is now no pathway to the Conservatives winning a majority and  previously safe seats across the country are now under threat. Losing the Red Wall breaks the 2019 coalition; losing working-age voters will break the Conservative party.

Winning back working-age voters while keeping retired voters (who are increasingly succumbing to the temptation of Reform) onside is a challenge to which the Conservatives have not yet found a solution.

Red Wall voters have similar priorities to the electorate as whole. Redfield and Wilton’s Red Wall tracker shows that the most important issues are the economy, followed by healthcare, with immigration some way behind. YouGov’s most important issue tracker has a similar result for the electorate. However, for those over 65, the top priorities are reversed, with immigration seen as the most important issue. Looking more closely into how those issues should be approached further highlights the differing views between age groups.

Recent polling by WeThink shows that every age group under 65 oppose increasing taxes to pay for additional NHS funding, those over 65 say taxes should be increased.

Older voters want their services funded by workers – workers who want to keep more of their own money to deal with the cost of living crisis. The triple lock pension protects pensioners; workers get no such government handout.

While retirees celebrated the positive effects of increased interest rates on their savings accounts, renters and mortgage holders suffered.

As older homeowners campaign against homes to protect their view, the cost of owning a home becomes ever more unaffordable.If Conservatives are unable to speak across generations on the most important issues, they will continue to be deserted by those who feel their interests are being ignored.

Retirees have become dependent on government handouts, dispensed liberally by the Conservatives to court their votes – and recent efforts to win back working-age voters highlighted the perilous position the party is now in. In the most recent budget, Jeremy Hunt again cut National Insurance, a tax cut that exclusively benefits those of working age.

A JL Partners rapid response poll for 38 degrees highlights the reaction of older 2019 Conservative voters to this news.

• “The two cuts in national insurance do not apply to me… I will be worse off”
• “Benefits workers but not me”
• “I am on an index linked final salary pension, the wife in a high paying job where the impact of the previous budget was all swings and roundabouts. Retired people get no benefit from NI cuts and we will both be in this situation later in the year.”
• “As a retired person todays budget has done nothing whatsoever to help me”

There was only one mention of the positive effect the renewal of the triple lock will have on those same voters (many of whom were able to retire on final salary pensions, a luxury which will not be available to most voters who are currently working age).

The gulf in policy aims between generations is far larger than that between the Red and Blue Wall, and intergenerational tensions are a much bigger threat to the survival of the Conservative Party than geographical differences.

Without a solid mix of younger, middle-aged and older voters, the Tories will not win an election in walls of any colour, regardless of any levelling up, immigration, or ‘culture war’ policies.

Pensioners have become the Conservative base – much more so than any geographical area of the UK – and they have stuck with the Tories throughout their time in government.

However, this has come at a cost to the Party’s popularity: recent polling from YouGov has the Conservatives hovering on the ten per cent mark with under-50s; where Ipsos predicted that in 1997 the party won 27 per cent of 18-24 year olds, a recent Deltapoll has the current figure as low as three per cent.

Blocking housing, boosting the triple lock, locking down to protect the old, funnelling money into the NHS, and increasing taxes on young aspirational workers to fund the benefits pensioners enjoy has led to a complete abandonment of the Party’s working voters and a retired age group feeling ever more entitled to, and expectant of, government protection of their incomes and assets.

The Conservative Party now needs to demonstrate a vision that works in the interests of retirees and workers, both younger and older. Not for nothing has housing, and the example set by Pierre Poilievre, the leader of the Canadian Conservatives (who has campaigned vigorously on housing affordability), started to feature much more heavily in Tory discourse.

But the polling shows that it will take more than a few gimmicks or tinkering with National Insurance to win back the trust of working-age voters and reverse the current, existentially-dangerous trend.

The current focus may be on unifying perceived divisions between moderates and those further to the right, or between the Red and Blue Wall. But to renew their party, the next generation of Conservative leaders will have to show how they intend to broaden their coalition beyond those over 65 – and win back working voters.

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