So what comes to mind when you think about places like Scarborough? Or Torbay? Pleasant coastal towns for sure. Perhaps the image that comes to mind is along the lines of the Guardian’s online constituency profile of Torbay: ‘Sunny south-west coast resort with many pensioners’. For many, the first thing they think of in relation to these traditional seaside resorts is old people – and lots of them to boot. Now think of seats like Rhondda, Bootle, Basildon, Blaydon, Pontefract, Bolsover or Sunderland North, and a very different image comes to mind. But, in 20 years time, these Labour heartlands will have the same, or indeed ‘older’, age profiles than the Torbay of today.
An age transformation of the electorate is taking place. By 2025, the electoral destiny of most parliamentary seats will be settled by older voters, who will cast over 50 per cent of votes on polling day. The next general election comes in the middle of this transformation. But debate on the inexorable rise of the grey vote has been strangely muted, despite the ever-widening age gap in turnout and the emergence of a Labour-Conservative ‘grey battleground’.
Pensioners already account for roughly one-in-five of the UK electorate. But older people are much more likely to vote in elections and this has accelerated the impact of ageing on electoral politics. At the last election, around 75 per cent of those aged over-65 voted, in contrast to a dismal 37 per cent of the 18-to-24 age group. First-time voters have always had lower turnout rates than the rest of the electorate, but as they aged their turnout rates increased. Something changed in the 1990s. Not only is the age gap widening; disconcertingly there are indicators that non-voting has become habitual as the first low-voting cohorts reaches its mid-20s.
According to my calculations, which were published by Age Concern, at the 2005 general election, for the first time pensioners accounted for more than one-in-four of votes cast. There are now more votes cast by voters aged over-65 than there are cast by voters aged under-35.
The research also looked at the wider grey vote – all voters aged 55 and over. Older voters are often simply defined as ‘pensioners’, understandable considering the social and economic implications of retirement. However, in the final decade approaching retirement, ageing issues such as retirement income, age discrimination, the quality of health services and long-term care (particularly for their older parents and relatives) become increasingly important. Furthermore, the over-65 may not think of themselves as ‘old’, but others will. The age-related taunting by opponents of Menzies Campbell, and even Gordon Brown, are topical examples.
The grey vote accounted for a hefty 41.2 per cent of the 2005 turnout. In 24 of the ‘oldest’ seats, it’s estimated that over half the turnout came from the grey vote. These grey-majority seats represent a new phenomenon, where older voters comprise a physical majority of votes in the ballot box on polling day. At the next election, if the age differences in turnout remain unchanged, there will be an additional 1.3 million votes cast by older voters and 79 seats with a grey majority. However, if current trends continue and the age gap widens by another 5 per cent, then there will be 126 grey-majority seats. Fast-forward to 2025, and close to 400 seats will have a grey majority.
What is going to be different about the new electoral demographics? Obviously, older people are not homogenous. As with the rest of society there is diversity in areas such as class, ethnicity and attitudes. Simplistic campaign targeting is doomed to failure. But age clearly does affect political behaviour. Older people are more likely to vote, join campaigns and contact elected representatives. They have higher levels of political literacy and are more likely to be keen consumers of the news media.
Ageist stereotypes need to be challenged. Age does not equate to decrepitude, but it does incorporate, at widely varying rates, a process of gradual loss of physical ability and decline of the senses. A proportion of older people will be living with more serious longer-term chronic conditions. Yet, in many ways, the ‘problem’ of ageing is how others start to treat you differently. A recent report by the Audit Commission and others found public services often fail to meet the special needs of older people, and evidence ‘of a lack of dignity and respect in the way older people are treated when in hospital’. Older people are the biggest users of the NHS. Public services delivered in this manner are politically unsustainable, particularly bearing in mind the impending retirement of the baby boomers who will have much higher expectations of public services than older cohorts bought up in post-war austerity.
Another defining characteristic of the grey vote is the high proportion who are financially insecure. This explains why council tax rising faster than pensions has caused so many political problems, and why the response to the Turner commission on pensions will be so important.
The 2005 campaign saw the opposition parties attempt to gain electoral capital from Labour’s perceived difficulties with several ageing issues. Early on in the campaign, the Conservatives placed newspaper adverts which featured a carefully targeted swipe at the ‘young’ Britain imagery associated with the New Labour re-branding. The advert, in Michael Howard’s name, stated: ‘The older generations may have been air-brushed out of Mr Blair’s Britain, but I will stand up for them.’
The Conservatives returned to ageing issues at the beginning of April by claiming Labour would be forced to solve the ‘pensions crisis’ by increasing direct taxes. This was followed the next day with two different press conferences on pensions. The Liberal Democrats attempted to use the issue of long-term care by highlighting their role in the Scottish executive in the introduction of free personal care. They also used the last Friday of the campaign to promote policies on a citizens’ pension, long-term care and the replacement of council tax with a local income tax.
The budget in March 2005 was used by Labour to directly respond to the opposition parties on council tax. Labour’s older people manifesto, New Opportunities for Later Life, stressed the importance of the economy in providing security in retirement. Where Labour proactively pushed ageing issues, they were typically framed as issues of general concern that would benefit voters of all ages. For instance, Labour’s media briefings on pension reforms to make it easier to qualify for a full state pension portrayed the issue as of primary concern to younger women, resulting in headlines such as ‘Blair’s pension offer to mothers’. By accident, or design, this approach avoided portraying pensions as solely a pensioner issue. However, on other occasions, the Labour campaign appeared strategically uneasy, as evidenced by the refusal to supply spokespeople to either Newsnight or the Today programmes for debates on pensions.
On last year’s polling day, the Conservatives made little progress among the grey vote. Their vote share remained unchanged among the baby boomers, and they only managed to increase vote share by one per cent among voters aged 65-and-over. The Liberal Democrats added four per cent to their national vote share, but only improved by one per cent among voters aged over-65.
The fall out for Labour from 2005 is that, while the party performed well, or perhaps relatively less badly, with the pensioner vote, there are now a number of seats where it is vulnerable to swings against them from grey voters. There are 27 seats, in three different categories, which look of particular strategic interest in this regard.
First, there are the super-marginals, with majorities of less than five per cent, with large grey votes. These include the more obvious seats such as Thanet South and Hastings. But this category also includes seats such as High Peak and Wirral West. Then, there are the fairly marginal, seats with majorities of between five and 10 per cent, which have considerable grey votes. Indeed, in this category, if the age gap widens, Great Yarmouth, Carmarthen West and Staffordshire Moorlands among others, will have grey majorities next time around. Finally, there are a clutch of more comfortable Labour seats which will have grey majorities and would be vulnerable to significant swings away by grey voters, of which Morecambe and the Vale of Clwyd are two examples.
These seats also have other important shared characteristics. All of them were Labour gains in the landslide of 1997 and, in all of them, it is the Conservatives who are challenging in second place. It is this grey battleground between Labour and the Conservatives which will be a crucial front in determining the outcome of the next campaign.
Of course, population ageing is a global trend within which the establishment of ‘pensioner’ parties has become a widespread phenomenon. There are plenty of examples, such as Israel and Scotland, where these parties have made electoral breakthroughs. In Slovenia, the pensioner party is part of the governing coalition. In many democracies, highly charged battles for the grey vote has become the norm. In the US, the Republicans are hampered in their desires to privatise Medicare and social security by the fear of reaping electoral retribution in senior-dominated swing states such as Florida. Indeed, the AARP, the lead campaign organisation for older voters in the US, has been described as a more powerful lobby than organised labour. In Australia, John Howard won the last election in large part by responding with new policies, and new money, on pensions and health care to Labour’s concerted efforts to woo the older voters who dominated marginal seats held by Howard’s coalition.
Election campaigns in the future will be run in multi-age electoral markets, perhaps with enfranchisement at 16, but dominated by the older age ranges. This is a challenge to traditional campaign thinking, often infected by advertising industry ageism and its adversity to appealing to the old for the fear of driving away the young. But this formula can work in reverse, and the time has now passed for visions of a young Britain. Success depends on age neutrality – but not age blindness – in developing political brands. Perhaps no more so than at the next election, where further growth in the grey vote will be accompanied with a high one-off increase in the number of first-time voters. The winning party will succeed at both ends of the age scale.
What is Labour’s strategy for working with the grey vote to secure electoral success? How is the party planning to be the beneficiary of the age transformation of the electorate? Why are these kind of questions so infrequently heard in discussions on Labour’s future direction? There are opportunities that must be seized, but a refusal to understand and adapt to change will lead to electoral defeat. Remember, the historical norm is for Labour to trail behind the Conservatives with older voters. Strategic rethinking that commits to understand – and respond to – older voters’ needs and aspirations is required in preparation for what could be the first election to hinge on their choices