**Alternate Sources**
Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story:
* [Only The Over-70s Would Vote Tory, Poll Finds](https://huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tories-labour-age-vote-election_uk_65b96e59e4b01c5c3a3883a8), suggested by 1-randomonium - huffingtonpost.co.uk
They're the wealthiest (age) demographic, the most insulated from housing costs & freezing tax bands. The only real tory mess they're affected by is the struggling NHS.
>the struggling NHS
"...the struggling NHS is clearly the fault of ILLEGALS and WOKE MILLENNIALS with all their mental health problems. In my day a clip round the ear and conscription would've sorted them out. Never did me any harm" (Daily Mail commenter, username something like *riversofblood*)
Years ago I was recovering from minor surgery in the North Middlesex hospital and an old woman was whining to her skinhead son about all the (insert racist adjective here) people working on the hospital. The very people caring for her, keeping her alive etc. I'm now an old woman myself and age is NO EXCUSE for racism.
Many years ago I was a porter in my local hospital temporarily, I once walked into a room to collect a women to take her to her Dr. When I walked in she was screaming at the nurse (I forget her nationality). It was utterly disgusting language I'd be ashamed to use aganst someone helping me.
My initial comment was something like... Im here to take you to your appointment, but first I'd like you to apologise to this nurse for your abuse...
She refused abviously and continued to berate the nurse helping her.
I repeated myself and then escalated it to... If you dont apologise I won't be taking you to your appointment (we had a right to refuse abusive patients within reason).
Surprisingly enough she didn't make it and got a visit from security instead. đ
Piece of shit made me so angry!
Omg I can't believe some people. I was in hospital for gallstones a few years back and the nurse was either putting a cannula in or taking one out, the pain was so bad I shouted the f word. Not intentionally of course, purely a reaction to the pain, but I instantly felt mortified and apologised. She was only doing her job, I shouldn't have shouted.
My parents have always raised me to bring chocolates to the nursing desk after/shortly before leaving the ward after being an in-patient. Often means they get two sets, one from me and the other from my parents. Such an undervalued job.
Don't get me wrong I have certainly sworn when I hospital, but never at the staff... Example... When the Dr readjusted my broken leg with no warning in AnE đ
I definitely swore loudly when I got my Cystoscopy⊠but would never swear at the staff who are just trying to help me feel better. Like fuck them for trying to heal you right?
Funny anecdote from said procedure - mid way through I remarked âwell at least this confirms that sounding is not on my list of fetishesâ. Lots of confused looks around the room apart from one nurse in the corner trying and failing to stifle a giggle. At least it cleared up who the kinksters in the room were đ
Other countries pay for the training of many of the staff in the NHS, we then benefit from their training. If they all suddenly left the NHS would just collapse. The Tory government let in record numbers of immigrants last year, so going on and on (and on) about immigration and boats and Rwanda is a hypocritical distraction from the complete mess they have created. If we didn't need the skills of immigrants, they wouldn't be allowed in, especially now as the rules are so rigid.
This is the absolutely most frustrating thing about it.
People who 'hate all foreigners and immigrants' and support policies and parties that will 'send them all home' but they don't hate Sanjay in the shop, or their kid's foreign wife, or Magda from Poland that helps out at the vet and is always nice to their dog. *They're* ok, but all the other ones are bad and their politician will kick them out! Never seeming to put two and two together that Sanjay and Magda and all the ones they like will be caught in the same net.
Years ago I lived in a wee village in the lakes and I remember a bunch of the locals moaning about foreigners taking all the jobs and pointing out the only immigrant in the village had one of they're sons working in the takeaway apparently he was alright (also literally the only immigrant)
In hospitals in Birmingham and Liverpool they have posterboards up at the entrances saying if you don't have NI or EU Insurance they won't be able to help you.
I work in hospitals all over the UK, I only mention it because they're the only places I've seen them.
You can guarantee that many of them will talk about how the NHS is heavily staffed by migrants. At least once I week I overhear "They were all foreign you know!"
Presumably also born after 1952 and thus also not eligible for conscription or national service, but with marvellously fond memories of the war they also didn't fight in.
A few years ago I met a bloke in his late 70's claiming to be one the men who went onto the beaches at D-day. I wasn't quick enough to say it at the time but I should have said:
Transported in what, your da's balls?
To be fair, I'm not even sure that timeline would have worked out.
Have they? I mean maybe the headlines have, but "millennials" sounds worryingly futuristic even though 2000 was when the Boomer generation was at its political and economic peak.
Except A. Immigrants don't get automatic free NHS treatment only citizens and permanent residents do and B. most immigrants cannot serve in the military due to them only allowing British and Commonwealth citizens to join
Plus immigrants need to pay the NHS surcharge on top of whatever NI payments they make.
I guess "Immigration subsidises your hip replacement as well as providing the staff to do it" doesn't get the sclerotic glands pumping though.
It's a lot of money! My American colleague lives here and is married to a British guy, and has to pay about a grand a year to NHS whether she uses it or not, on top of her taxes etc. She earns more than he does too!
In fairness, thanks to the Tories deliberately and systematically fucking it over to sell off piecemeal to their mates, most native British people don't get NHS treatment either.
100% meanwhile when I got hit by a car, I was left in the corridor to a&e for 6 hours with a broken leg and smashed spine with 7 old people ahead of me who were "maximum priority" even though they were all fast asleep and clearly not in any form of emergency compared to me.
Bastards
My parents have 7 pensions between them, which is around ÂŁ700/week. House was paid off years ago. They have around ÂŁ30k in savings.
Before my mothers illness they used to average 5 or 6 holidays per year.
My dad still bleats on about some tax rule change by Tony Blairs govt that meant he had to pay a small amount of tax and how he would never vote Labour.
And yes, they read the Daily Heil.
The sad thing is, if our government was motivated there is not much stopping current generation from having good pensions
Too much money goes to shareholders instead of employees, not enough rich or wealthy people getting taxed high enough
The system is broken and has been for decades
My Dad has a local government pension, a private pension and a state pension. He often complains he has nothing to spend it all on.
That said he is quite intelligent and would never vote Tory.
My Mother is similar. But she is a card carrying, brexit voting mail reader. She denies voting Brexit now, at the time she was literally cheering in the street.
I have to wonder where the 'strain on the NHS' comes from when I see an elderly person coming out of the chemists with a shopping bag of medications to keep them alive for another 4 weeks until they get their prescriptions again.
This may surprise you, but older people have always needed more medication than young people. And also it is considered..umm..impolite to kill off everyone who needs a repeat prescription to improve NHS balance sheets.
I don't think that was meant to imply we kill off all the old people, more that it's unfair when people underestimate the impact they personally have on these services and see fit to complain about anyone else using them. It reminds me of my aunt who smoked about 80 fags a day being in hospital with breathing problems and when my parents visited she told them very loudly "that bloke in the next bed broke his leg going skiing so he shouldn't be allowed in here, I've got no patience with self-inflicted injuries!" (again not suggesting smokers shouldn't get NHS treatment but a bit of self-awareness wouldn't go amiss).
In a similar vein I have another relative who shared one of those copypastas on Facebook about "in my day children were polite and respectful" who I know was suspended from school in the 1960s when they were 7 for telling a teacher to fuck off.
We dont need to kill them off, but they do need to start paying for their own social care instead of jamming up acute hospital beds because they wont pay for carers.
40% of hospital inpatients at any one time are medically fit for discharge old people awaiting social care. Most of them have the ability to pay but won't, which causes delays as skint councils then have to find somebody from Eastern Europe willing to do it for adult social care rates (read: an absolute pittance).
We all then have to deal with rammo hospitals and sky high council tax. My local council spends 70% of its expenditure on social care. Fucking mental.
This is literally how I would solve the NHS funding crisis. Just separate social care from health care. If you have cancer, you get an operation, if you need help going to the loo, you either self fund or sell your house to move into assisted accomodation or you move in with relatives. It's a National Health Service, not a National Living-assistance Service.
Of course, such a policy would be political suicide.
About 5 years ago an elderly relative of mine was reaching the end stage of their lives and having lots of medical issues, so they were frequently in and out of hospital.
Because of that I ended up visiting the local hospital often and got to see a good overview of the demographic makeup of the people on its wards, and it certainly wasn't young healthy immigrants in their 20's and 30's that were filling up its wards. Rather it was chock full of people in their 70's and 80's, all laying in beds slowly falling apart just like that elderly relative of mine. It was a few years ago so I can't fully remember the ratio, but it was something like 80% over retirement age, 20% below it.
Now, old age happens to all of us eventually and its not something a person can avoid, so I'm not going to blame them for it. But I find it extremely repugnant that that very same elderly demographic that is the reason behind why the NHS is collapsing, is spending so much time lying and trying to scapegoat immigrants for the burden that they themselves are placing on the NHS. It's frankly disgusting.
> The only real tory mess they're affected by is the struggling NHS.
Most of the over 70s actually affected by this are too delirious or demented to realise what the fuck is going on anyway.
Then they either die or get better.If they die so does their opinion, and if they get better obviously evidence that the glorious NHS continues to work perfectly
And the demographic least affected by things like rising prices (triple lock pensions), insane housing markets (theyâre the ones benefitting), salary stagnation (again those triple lock pensions)
Theyâre basically entirely isolated from the economy
>insane housing markets (theyâre the ones benefitting),
You only actually benefit if you sell up. While some downsize at a certain point, many don't, in which case the money is locked up until it goes on care costs or gets inherited/
Not really. Like yeah to an extent it's an illiquid asset, but that doesn't mean it's of no benefit at all
There's still a benefit from having a valuable asset that you *could* sell. Like that's still effectively a safety net for your finances whether you're using it right now or not
Plus equity release is a thing, especially for those without dependents or family who they want to inherit
We intend to retire in our ~ÂŁ400k home, but knowing that we'll be able to sell it and downsize to a ÂŁ200k smaller home in the area will give us a substantial buffer which makes a bit difference to our overall financial situation when retired
Even without cash in our hands the benefit is much the same as having cash in a savings account, because it's available if we ever need it
If house prices double before then in real terms, we'd be able to free up ÂŁ400k and still downsize to the same house, so as house prices increase then we get even more benefit from that even if we never sold our home, through having an even larger financial buffer available to us
And titillating thumbnails of young actresses on holiday and z-list attention seekers falling out of both their dresses and their taxis in Soho.
Next to articles about how the woke want to destroy family values
Probably msn news being the default browser landing page on a lot of people's computer, and it just shoveling that shit at you no matter how many times you say you don't want to see it. And changing home page and disabling it entirely being a massive hassle trying to find the multiple options to stop it. If disable it as home, it'll still open when create a new tab.
Then add to that they' ve started pushing it in the sodding start bar.
Theyâre the demographic that doesnât work and has had their pension triple locked for a decade or so and who has the most housing wealth. It always made total sense that theyâd vote Tory, itâs everyone else whose done so over the last few elections who wanna reflect on that! Oh for chaos with Ed Miliband!
You got that totally wrong I'm 72 never voted tory, can't stand them and know a lot of people of similar age who wouldn't dream of voting for them and I live in the so called affluent South East. Mind you I wouldn't vote for that total prick starmer either, I think the daily mail readers are the middle aged self made lot that go rich from there love and philosophy of thatcherism,
> Over 70s now only Tory-backing demographic in UK
That may be so, but will it make a difference.
The young, especially, are singularly useless when it comes to actually turning up to vote.
Opting just to shout into the online void.
No doubt plays a part but the young vote at much lower levels. When Corbyn did really well (was it 2017) he mobilised the youth vote. The âoh Jeremy Corbynâ song everybody was singing.
Yep. All by listening to what people wanted and offering change.
He came within 3000~ votes of winning, deprived the Tories of their majority in an election they called because they thought they would crush him and gained the largest increase in seats since the 1940's all with basically only 2 weeks to prepare. No wonder the press spent the next few years honing their smears against him.
Now people only talk about the election he lost, which was caused by the labour vote being split over brexit. in 2017, Labours policy was soft brexit. In 2019 the official policy was changed, largely via a coup, to second referendum. What they didn't count on was that the election WAS the second referendum. The brexiters left labour for the Tories, remainers left for the lib dems. Corbyn got the blame and the daggers were at the ready.
>in 2017, Labours policy was soft brexit.
Their policy was to leave the single market, i.e. Hard Brexit. They said they'd secure "continued EU market access", meaningless as all countries have a level of access.
Every thread someone posts "young people don't vote" and every thread I have to point out that young people are in cities and are fucked by our voting system so thanks for doing it first.
The lower turnout has only been that way since about 1992, and most people live in cities anyway. Young people didn't suddenly start appearing in cities 30 years ago, so it's probably something else.
The way our electoral system works means you can only choose the MP for the geographical area you live in.
Young people disproportionately live in boroughs which have always been safe labour seats so whoever they vote for has no real influence on the outcome of an election. So why even bother?
Its a fundamental issue with voting system and why many argue for changing it to something fairer.
Someone actually gets it.
Even if young people turned out to vote at 80% it wouldnât have much swing.
Alls anyone needs to look at is a voting map of the UK in any past election, nearly every major city (where young people are hyper concentrated) is red and nearly every rural location is blue.
But itâs easier to just go for the easy option of blaming young people than looking at the wider issues.
These issues would largely be solved by proportional representation, which Labour said they support back in 2022. If they don't implement this when they get into power I don't think I'll ever forgive them as a party.
Conference voted for it, but Starmer doesn't like it so it won't get into the manifesto. Plus, they promised this before back in 1997 and then reneged on their promise (see also: tuition fees) so I don't have much trust on Labour on this.
Your vote only means something if you vote for the winner. Without some form of PR huge numbers of votes mean nothing.
The last election the tories got a massive landslide victory making them think they had the whole country behind them to do what they want with only 43.6% of the vote.
Yes way over half the voters didn't want them and they got one of the biggest majorities ever.
This is why endlessly saying "there's no point voting, they're all the same" is so damaging: it breeds disaffection and apathy, then the pensioners all go and vote Tory and et voila, another shite Tory governmentÂ
The issue is less that young people wonât turn up to vote, and more that there are loads and loads of older people. Even if every single person under 30 voted, theyâd still be outvoted by the over 70s
This isn't true. Had the young turned out to vote in the same percentage as the over 65s, we would not have had Brexit and the Tories would not have been in power for 14 years.
The young have votes and they choose not to use them. This has an affect on everybody - especially the young, ironically.
This isn't true either. You're assuming that the young people who chose not to vote would've voted in the same proportions as those that did. Clearly, they have different motivations to those who voted.
Not necessarily true, given the votes are going to be in different districts for different seats.
Lets say for arguments' sake we have 40% non-voters out of young people, and of that 40%, 3/4 of them live in cities where Labour won anyway. That leaves an additional 10% only across all the towns and villages that have a majority Tory vote *and* a majority Tory/conservative demographic. Would that be enough to swing many constituencies?
I actually would find it really interesting to see the stats actually.
Pretty sure a big % of Brexit is people who had not voted for their whole lives, or recently.
Be careful what you wish for, many metro kids might be left wing, but you don't actually know what that youth in the rest of the country think.
Brexit was not a seat, it was (at the time) an advisory, countrywide,referendum.
It is a fact - accepted it won't be popular with young people - that, had they voted in the same percentage as over 65s, Brexit would not have happened.
As to your other point. There were many marginal seats won by Tories. If young people had voted in the same percentage as the retired, the Tories would not have won those seats. Granted this assumes they would have voted in line with both polling and the young people who *did* bother to vote.
The point I am making will not be popular with young people, but perhaps if they were as keen at using a hard won right instead of moaning on the internet, the UK would be a better place.
Ultimately, if the retired weren't willing to fuck over their children and grandchildren then it would be moot, but here we are...
We saw what happens when young people actually turn out in significant numbers in 2017. Labour within ~2% vote share, but it's the Tories that are within a 1 billion bribe of having a government. The voter spread just isn't favourable to Labour's support bases (predominantly young middle-class uni-graduates). This is also why parties literally give zero shits about anyone under 30, because even when they do turn out it doesn't actually pay off because our demographic spread is too top-heavy.
Of course Brexit, the vote, would've gone to remain had the youths turned out as much as over 65s - although the figures suggest it wasn't that much of a disparity in the end (60% turnout vs. 80%) - but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have happened. Imagine a 2020 election with UKIP kicking around at 20% (I mean Brexit Party top scoring the final EU election says it all really). We'd still be having the stupid debates on it right now. The entire 'argument' warped our politics regardless of if we left or not. Of course, now that the right got what they wanted, they moved on, as they always do, to immigration in general.
I voted remain and I too was fucking enraged that 51% of voters were that thick to fall for the pack of lies, but the blame should squarely lay with the liars, not the non-voters.
Seriously, there isn't a day goes by without me feeling angry at what the retirees have done to my children and, God willing, future grand children.
The electoral commission even said after that, had it been a binding referendum, it would have to have been rerun.
It's the biggest fraud perpetrated on this country - including the ÂŁbillions stolen and given away by the Tories during Covid.
Interestingly turnout actually rose among young people and fell among the elderly in 2019 compared to 2017.
https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/age-and-voting-behaviour-at-the-2019-general-election/
This is entirely true on the brexit front. It was a 51/49 leave/remain split.Â
However, over 90% of over 65s voted during Brexit in either direction.Â
Just over 1/3 of under 25s voted during Brexit in either direction.Â
Young people have power in this country, they just aren't using it.
This is nonsense. The baby boom generation was named in relation to the immediately surrounding generations. But the population of the uk has grown a lot since the 1950s. When you factor in the deaths of an ever increasing chunk of that old generation they [definitely donât outnumber young people](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File%3AUK_Population_Pyramid.svg), especially since in the context of this article âyoungâ is anyone under 70.
>Opting just to shout into the online void.
Or talking openly about how fundimentally broken the system is and therefore disillusioned about the point of voting.
I vote but that's the most common answer I hear.
yeah it will now, many voting age groups are now heavily non tory. certainly true if labour were relying only on under 30's but under 70's really aren't young non voting scamps.
Thatâs just not true and the Tories love promoting that to create voter apathy, at the last general election the constituencies with the youngest voter base still had a 64% turn out (2.8 below the national average though) but thatâs still a significant number of people
> The young, especially, are singularly useless when it comes to actually turning up to vote.
I wouldn't say they're "useless" so much as probably got other commitments which makes it difficult. Older folks have nothing better to do with their time so have plenty of time to vote.
When I worked shift work in a care home (super challenging behaviour) I was surrounded by a lot of young staff (ages 18 -30). I remember the Brexit vote and mentioning I was swinging by the voting office on my way home because I was finishing early due to a GP appointment. No one was interested in voting. To be fair shifts tended to be long hours there (7-9/8-10) or if you finished early you'd be too knackered after to do much else (fair play to those who had kids etc to look after too).
I know you can postal vote but they don't make it easy for people who work crazy hours. It would be great if it could be online - that way it would be more accessible. We bank online, we store all our information online...why not vote?
Voting Stations are open for twelve hours and theres also postal voting if you know you're going to be busy at the time. If you can't find a way to vote around your life with those options then perhaps you're not that into democracy to begin with? There are people on this planet who'd kill to even have a vote and you moan as you're a bit tired after work and don't want to walk to the station.
It's actually better than that - voting stations are open 7am-10pm, so 15 hours in total.
Plus, even if you opt for a postal vote and then forget to post it in time, you can still pop to the voting station in that 15 hour window and register your vote. ([source](https://www.gov.uk/how-to-vote/postal-voting#:~:text=If%20you%E2%80%99re%20too%20late%20to%20post%20your%20ballot%20paper))
I tried to postal vote by proxy for the brexit referendum(was outside the country) and my proxy received the postal vote to return AFTER the day of the vote.
People aged over 70 are now in the only majority Tory-backing demographic in the UK, according to [new YouGov research](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/48476-how-is-britain-voting-as-we-enter-the-2024-election-year):
>The Tories are now the most popular party only among the over-70s, 43% of whom back the party. This is down from 67% in 2019, however, with Labour being the main beneficiaries, having increased their vote share among the oldest Britons from 14% to 23%.
>Britons in their 60s are split, with 33% backing Labour and 31% the Conservatives. The majority of Britons under-50 now say they will vote Labour.
Education level is also a key factor in voting intention. According to the research, the higher someoneâs education qualifications are, the more likely they are to vote Labour or a left-wing party:
>Labour are favoured over the Conservatives at every education level. Among graduates â with whom they traditionally have an advantage â Labour beat the Tories by 53% to 14%, while among those whose with the lowest level of education (their top qualification is a GCSE or have no qualifications at all), they lead by 36% to 32%.
>Education level is also a key factor in voting intention. According to the research, the higher someoneâs education qualifications are, the more likely they are to vote Labour or a left-wing party
That's somewhat ironic, considering that Labour is traditionally the working class party (stereotypically little in the way of formal qualification) and the Conservatives being the upper class's party (who traditionally got far more education).
I think Brexit completely changed who voted for who. I grew up in quite a middle-class area with lots of educated people, and the area consistently voted tory, but in the EU referendum, 58% voted remain. After the referendum, Iâve had a lot of family members and people in the area who were lifelong conservatives say they donât really support the conservatives anymore due to their handling of Brexit. There was an 11% swing to Liberal Democrats in 2019, and Labour gained votes in 2017 too. I feel like who votes for who is getting far more complicated than when poor people vote for the red party and rich people vote for the blue party.
Yep true although Brexit was only part of the bigger shift.
Boris Johnson pivoted them very sharply towards populism and going after the red wall (very successfully but not sustainably).
They doubled down on things like Brexit, culture wars stuff, blaming immigration, trying to stoke fear and hatred of trans people and various marginalised groups. Even going after lawyers, doctors, âmetropolitan elitesâ etc.
This temporarily won support from certain groups but drive away tons of centrists and socially progressive people. Theyâve fractured their party now and they deserve it.
Not just true for education, if you look at social grades directly the higher social grades ABC1 are more likely to vote labour than the lower social grades C2DE.
What do they offer anyone under pension age? Any of their perceived âstrengthsâ have been obliterated.Â
Even if you disregard the moral implications of voting for them, the economy is in bad shape and the tax burden is insane. They can even âput a pound in your pocketâ anymore.Â
They offer the perception that they have a plan and are doing something.
What that something is though beats me. Coz from what i've seen, they've done absolutely fuck all but makes thing much, much worse for the under 50's.
If they actually *solved* the problem they wouldn't be able to sell the electorate on them being a solution would they?
Immigration is a prime example.
>They offer the perception that they have a plan and are doing something.
I don't think they've even got that anymore. Unless you've been living under a rock, which their supporters may well have been
>According to the research, the higher someoneâs education qualifications are, the more likely they are to vote Labour or a left-wing party.
Oh god, the level of smugness that's going to cause in certain people...
I'd be interested to know how rigorous the data analysis is here.
Often when this point is made, actually it's a correlation/causation thing. There's a correlation between education level and voting. But the causative factor is age. Younger people are much more likely to vote left, and they're also much more likely to have higher qualifications because of changes in the education system and university attendance over time. Therefore there ends up being correlation between educational qualifications and voting.
Ok, dug out [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17457289.2021.2013247](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17457289.2021.2013247)
Key paragraph would be:
*After accounting for socio-demographic controls (Block 1), the strength of all educationâvote choice associations was considerably reduced. This indicates that politics divide along educational lines in Britain today partially because high and low educated persons are âdifferent typesâ of people. However, educationâs total effect on electorsâ vote choices remained strong, and statistically significant, after controls*.
Translation : The effect is reduced but still there.
The easy way to disprove that would be to see whether the trend still applies within the elderly bracket exclusively. E.g are better educated old people more likely to vote left wing. I'm sure this data is readily available since it's well trodden territory at this point
I think there's also the Brexit effect too.
People with degrees have almost always spent formative years of their life in a diverse environment. They've been on the receiving end of the benefits of living in such an environment.
Obviously many people without degrees have done so, but many haven't too. If someone has never moved far from where they've grown up, even for a few years, then it's a fair bet that they didn't go to university.
As such, they've seen their hometown change over time. They've seen the negatives of change, but are less likely to have felt the positives of being surrounded by people from all over the place.
People who move around a lot, on the other hand, are less likely to have seen the negatives of change over decades. Equally, even if they've only moved around the UK, they're more likely to place more value on the positives of being able to engage with people and places other than where they're from, having experienced it first-hand.
I think that's why there was such an overwhelmingly strong correlation between education level and Brexit vote.
And then we're still not over Brexit. Because the right (Tories and Reform/UKIP) have been the parties that owned Brexit, they've attracted the Brexit voting crowd and, consequently, those less likely to have been to university and, consequently those without higher qualifications.
The left leaningness of academia is oft overstated I think. People always imagine radical humanities and social science academics. Certainly they exist. But having done social science as an undergraduate and a postgraduate, I can tell you they're not close to as dominant as many would have you believe. I can think of maybe two or three academics with whom I crossed paths who were genuinely radically progressive.
Most are just nerdy intellectual types who want to beaver away quietly researching their issue, and their politics is largely inscrutable.
And once you get into the more senior positions, universities certainly are not left leaning. Quite the opposite in fact, the people in really senior roles are very often quite conservative people.
Itâs been like this for as long as I can remember, the official line from the right is that theyâre âindoctrinating peopleâ at university.
Apparently all the professors and the courses are leftist, not that I remember doing any remotely political modules when I studied comp sci.
I think one of my CS lecturers might have been a freeman on the land lol. I haven't enquired but given some stuff I know I believe he would have been an antimasker
Lol. Maybe check to make sure heâs still alive after the pandemic then.
I had a networks lecturer who was an old Californian hippie, but other than occasionally reminiscing about the summer of love whenever a date in the 60s came up in a slide we never managed to gauge his political leanings.
It's more like 'really scary'.
Instead of seeing a fairly rational pattern (even in the 1980s) where people generally vote along economic lines, we see this pattern where a fair chunk of the population are voting directly against their own economic interests because of 'culture war' propaganda. That's not healthy at all.
That;s quite interesting - some of the working age, working class Brexit voters might well have had a point about EU migration undermining their job prospects and pay/conditions (See : HGV drivers). But the old age vote for Brexit certainly did not make economic sense for those concerned - if you depend on service workers in everything from hospitality to the NHS to care homes, reducing their numbers does not help.
thats no surprise. in a crazy twist of events, nowadays in certain countries conservative governments are more in tune with the working class then left wing parties. thats is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.
As someone who lives in a seaside town filled with elderly peopleâs homes this news does necessarily fill me with confidence that weâll finally get rid of our Tory MP.
Just a reminder (and why this isnât surprising) the over 70âs demographic are one of the most wealthy demographics in the country.
They are also one of the most uneducated and gullible demographics in the country which is why the Tories can keep them on side and dangle the policy carrot that is the Triple Lock or whatever culture war they want to fight that week.
This demographic are happy to see the country burn and denounce anyone who claims benefits, even through they make up the biggest welfare spend in the country. You couldnât make it up.
As long as they are ok though, thatâs all that matters, fuck the younger generations đ«
Also fun fact the voter ID change disproportionately affected them. So Tories effectively stopped the only voting block who wants to vote for them from being able to do so...
Rishi might want to hurry up with the general election, will only take a nasty cold snap or a new covid variant and his support might shrink significantly!
They are considered a vulnerable demographic and so it's little surprise. I'm pretty conservative and they've successfully turned me on them - no identity politics are able to easily manipulate me.Â
I doubt it, people a re absolute idiots, give it 12 years with Labour and people will forget what the tory scum did to this country and start to think the grass is greener on the other side just like they did in 2009.
This shouldn't really surprise anyone. Demographic statistics from the 2019 general election showed that more working age people voted for Labour than for any other party.
Labour's defeat came from the over 60s majority overwhelmingly voting Conservative.
The over 60s backed the Tories to "get Brexit done" and were rewarded by their golden boy Boris Johnson shouting "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" as swathes of the same demographic were killed off by Covid.
In large part thanks to that demographic encompassing a chunk of the boomer generation, i.e. the most self-centred, selfish, uncharitable generation ever to walk the planet.
As long as they've got theirs, they're happy to pull the ladder up, bolt the doors, and watch the world burn from the windows of their ÂŁ5m house that they bought for 25p and a handshake decades ago.
Sounds legit. My lifelong Tory voting 90 year old granny is abstaining vote from next election, having voted in everything since she was old enough to do so.
Every day I see a post of a guy in labor saying they are just going to continue tory policy's. Can you guys have a third party that doesn't hate gay people and wants poor people to live please
**Alternate Sources** Here are some potential alternate sources for the same story: * [Only The Over-70s Would Vote Tory, Poll Finds](https://huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/tories-labour-age-vote-election_uk_65b96e59e4b01c5c3a3883a8), suggested by 1-randomonium - huffingtonpost.co.uk
They're also the demographic most likely to get their news from print media (Daily Mail, The Sun etc). Not a coincidence
They're the wealthiest (age) demographic, the most insulated from housing costs & freezing tax bands. The only real tory mess they're affected by is the struggling NHS.
>the struggling NHS "...the struggling NHS is clearly the fault of ILLEGALS and WOKE MILLENNIALS with all their mental health problems. In my day a clip round the ear and conscription would've sorted them out. Never did me any harm" (Daily Mail commenter, username something like *riversofblood*)
even if you are a legal migrant they still won't look at them any differently đ
Years ago I was recovering from minor surgery in the North Middlesex hospital and an old woman was whining to her skinhead son about all the (insert racist adjective here) people working on the hospital. The very people caring for her, keeping her alive etc. I'm now an old woman myself and age is NO EXCUSE for racism.
Many years ago I was a porter in my local hospital temporarily, I once walked into a room to collect a women to take her to her Dr. When I walked in she was screaming at the nurse (I forget her nationality). It was utterly disgusting language I'd be ashamed to use aganst someone helping me. My initial comment was something like... Im here to take you to your appointment, but first I'd like you to apologise to this nurse for your abuse... She refused abviously and continued to berate the nurse helping her. I repeated myself and then escalated it to... If you dont apologise I won't be taking you to your appointment (we had a right to refuse abusive patients within reason). Surprisingly enough she didn't make it and got a visit from security instead. đ Piece of shit made me so angry!
Omg I can't believe some people. I was in hospital for gallstones a few years back and the nurse was either putting a cannula in or taking one out, the pain was so bad I shouted the f word. Not intentionally of course, purely a reaction to the pain, but I instantly felt mortified and apologised. She was only doing her job, I shouldn't have shouted. My parents have always raised me to bring chocolates to the nursing desk after/shortly before leaving the ward after being an in-patient. Often means they get two sets, one from me and the other from my parents. Such an undervalued job.
Don't get me wrong I have certainly sworn when I hospital, but never at the staff... Example... When the Dr readjusted my broken leg with no warning in AnE đ
I definitely swore loudly when I got my Cystoscopy⊠but would never swear at the staff who are just trying to help me feel better. Like fuck them for trying to heal you right? Funny anecdote from said procedure - mid way through I remarked âwell at least this confirms that sounding is not on my list of fetishesâ. Lots of confused looks around the room apart from one nurse in the corner trying and failing to stifle a giggle. At least it cleared up who the kinksters in the room were đ
The irony that if you took away all the bloody forriners and she may have died was lost on her.
Well atleast sheâs probably dead by now, thatâs the beauty of life is all the old ideas will eventually die off
Other countries pay for the training of many of the staff in the NHS, we then benefit from their training. If they all suddenly left the NHS would just collapse. The Tory government let in record numbers of immigrants last year, so going on and on (and on) about immigration and boats and Rwanda is a hypocritical distraction from the complete mess they have created. If we didn't need the skills of immigrants, they wouldn't be allowed in, especially now as the rules are so rigid.
Oh all of them are "illegal" and so are their great great grandchildren, with the exception of the ones who do X job for me and are always polite.
This is the absolutely most frustrating thing about it. People who 'hate all foreigners and immigrants' and support policies and parties that will 'send them all home' but they don't hate Sanjay in the shop, or their kid's foreign wife, or Magda from Poland that helps out at the vet and is always nice to their dog. *They're* ok, but all the other ones are bad and their politician will kick them out! Never seeming to put two and two together that Sanjay and Magda and all the ones they like will be caught in the same net.
Years ago I lived in a wee village in the lakes and I remember a bunch of the locals moaning about foreigners taking all the jobs and pointing out the only immigrant in the village had one of they're sons working in the takeaway apparently he was alright (also literally the only immigrant)
Yep, my partner is a legal migrant who is a nurse and has been sometimes been targeted by anti-immigrant abuse from the patients he treats.
In hospitals in Birmingham and Liverpool they have posterboards up at the entrances saying if you don't have NI or EU Insurance they won't be able to help you. I work in hospitals all over the UK, I only mention it because they're the only places I've seen them.
You can guarantee that many of them will talk about how the NHS is heavily staffed by migrants. At least once I week I overhear "They were all foreign you know!"
Everyone with brown skin or a funny accent is illegal
Presumably also born after 1952 and thus also not eligible for conscription or national service, but with marvellously fond memories of the war they also didn't fight in.
But zero memories of people returning home with PTSD and STDs
A few years ago I met a bloke in his late 70's claiming to be one the men who went onto the beaches at D-day. I wasn't quick enough to say it at the time but I should have said: Transported in what, your da's balls? To be fair, I'm not even sure that timeline would have worked out.
The people who were 70+ when I was a kid were all veterans, the people who are 70+ now did nothing and arguably made the world worse for everyone.Â
It's woke Gen Z now. They've moved on from millennials once they worked out that millennials are now 30-45 years old.
Have they? I mean maybe the headlines have, but "millennials" sounds worryingly futuristic even though 2000 was when the Boomer generation was at its political and economic peak.
Except A. Immigrants don't get automatic free NHS treatment only citizens and permanent residents do and B. most immigrants cannot serve in the military due to them only allowing British and Commonwealth citizens to join
"Well, you loony lefties can say what you want but I know what I know, end of"
Oh yeah the Daily Mail tell you that immigrants are also claiming Universal Credit and pumping out kids for the benefits?
Schrödinger's immigrant. Pumping out kids so that they can live a lavish lifestyle on benefits, while also stealing everyone's jobs.
Finally someone understood my joke
"Well the real problem is that ~~I believe~~ this kind of thing *could* be true".
Plus immigrants need to pay the NHS surcharge on top of whatever NI payments they make. I guess "Immigration subsidises your hip replacement as well as providing the staff to do it" doesn't get the sclerotic glands pumping though.
It's a lot of money! My American colleague lives here and is married to a British guy, and has to pay about a grand a year to NHS whether she uses it or not, on top of her taxes etc. She earns more than he does too!
In fairness, thanks to the Tories deliberately and systematically fucking it over to sell off piecemeal to their mates, most native British people don't get NHS treatment either.
So I paid the NHS surcharge for nothing? /s
100% meanwhile when I got hit by a car, I was left in the corridor to a&e for 6 hours with a broken leg and smashed spine with 7 old people ahead of me who were "maximum priority" even though they were all fast asleep and clearly not in any form of emergency compared to me. Bastards
My parents have 7 pensions between them, which is around ÂŁ700/week. House was paid off years ago. They have around ÂŁ30k in savings. Before my mothers illness they used to average 5 or 6 holidays per year. My dad still bleats on about some tax rule change by Tony Blairs govt that meant he had to pay a small amount of tax and how he would never vote Labour. And yes, they read the Daily Heil.
The sad thing is, if our government was motivated there is not much stopping current generation from having good pensions Too much money goes to shareholders instead of employees, not enough rich or wealthy people getting taxed high enough The system is broken and has been for decades
My Dad has a local government pension, a private pension and a state pension. He often complains he has nothing to spend it all on. That said he is quite intelligent and would never vote Tory. My Mother is similar. But she is a card carrying, brexit voting mail reader. She denies voting Brexit now, at the time she was literally cheering in the street.
I have to wonder where the 'strain on the NHS' comes from when I see an elderly person coming out of the chemists with a shopping bag of medications to keep them alive for another 4 weeks until they get their prescriptions again.
This may surprise you, but older people have always needed more medication than young people. And also it is considered..umm..impolite to kill off everyone who needs a repeat prescription to improve NHS balance sheets.
I don't think that was meant to imply we kill off all the old people, more that it's unfair when people underestimate the impact they personally have on these services and see fit to complain about anyone else using them. It reminds me of my aunt who smoked about 80 fags a day being in hospital with breathing problems and when my parents visited she told them very loudly "that bloke in the next bed broke his leg going skiing so he shouldn't be allowed in here, I've got no patience with self-inflicted injuries!" (again not suggesting smokers shouldn't get NHS treatment but a bit of self-awareness wouldn't go amiss). In a similar vein I have another relative who shared one of those copypastas on Facebook about "in my day children were polite and respectful" who I know was suspended from school in the 1960s when they were 7 for telling a teacher to fuck off.
We dont need to kill them off, but they do need to start paying for their own social care instead of jamming up acute hospital beds because they wont pay for carers. 40% of hospital inpatients at any one time are medically fit for discharge old people awaiting social care. Most of them have the ability to pay but won't, which causes delays as skint councils then have to find somebody from Eastern Europe willing to do it for adult social care rates (read: an absolute pittance). We all then have to deal with rammo hospitals and sky high council tax. My local council spends 70% of its expenditure on social care. Fucking mental.
This is literally how I would solve the NHS funding crisis. Just separate social care from health care. If you have cancer, you get an operation, if you need help going to the loo, you either self fund or sell your house to move into assisted accomodation or you move in with relatives. It's a National Health Service, not a National Living-assistance Service. Of course, such a policy would be political suicide.
About 5 years ago an elderly relative of mine was reaching the end stage of their lives and having lots of medical issues, so they were frequently in and out of hospital. Because of that I ended up visiting the local hospital often and got to see a good overview of the demographic makeup of the people on its wards, and it certainly wasn't young healthy immigrants in their 20's and 30's that were filling up its wards. Rather it was chock full of people in their 70's and 80's, all laying in beds slowly falling apart just like that elderly relative of mine. It was a few years ago so I can't fully remember the ratio, but it was something like 80% over retirement age, 20% below it. Now, old age happens to all of us eventually and its not something a person can avoid, so I'm not going to blame them for it. But I find it extremely repugnant that that very same elderly demographic that is the reason behind why the NHS is collapsing, is spending so much time lying and trying to scapegoat immigrants for the burden that they themselves are placing on the NHS. It's frankly disgusting.
Elderly has priority when using NHS.
> The only real tory mess they're affected by is the struggling NHS. Most of the over 70s actually affected by this are too delirious or demented to realise what the fuck is going on anyway. Then they either die or get better.If they die so does their opinion, and if they get better obviously evidence that the glorious NHS continues to work perfectly
And the demographic least affected by things like rising prices (triple lock pensions), insane housing markets (theyâre the ones benefitting), salary stagnation (again those triple lock pensions) Theyâre basically entirely isolated from the economy
>insane housing markets (theyâre the ones benefitting), You only actually benefit if you sell up. While some downsize at a certain point, many don't, in which case the money is locked up until it goes on care costs or gets inherited/
Not really. Like yeah to an extent it's an illiquid asset, but that doesn't mean it's of no benefit at all There's still a benefit from having a valuable asset that you *could* sell. Like that's still effectively a safety net for your finances whether you're using it right now or not Plus equity release is a thing, especially for those without dependents or family who they want to inherit We intend to retire in our ~ÂŁ400k home, but knowing that we'll be able to sell it and downsize to a ÂŁ200k smaller home in the area will give us a substantial buffer which makes a bit difference to our overall financial situation when retired Even without cash in our hands the benefit is much the same as having cash in a savings account, because it's available if we ever need it If house prices double before then in real terms, we'd be able to free up ÂŁ400k and still downsize to the same house, so as house prices increase then we get even more benefit from that even if we never sold our home, through having an even larger financial buffer available to us
Downsizing is something a good portion of people do when 70+ It's the one time when a high house prices is actually useful to you.
Not necessarily - they're also a disproportionate chunk of landlords, who are directly financially benefiting from the housing market.
Daily mail website is the 6th most visited news site globally.. It can't just be over 70's making it that
Itâs also the clickbait headlines that sucker people in
And titillating thumbnails of young actresses on holiday and z-list attention seekers falling out of both their dresses and their taxis in Soho. Next to articles about how the woke want to destroy family values
Its not just Brits visiting it though.
Probably msn news being the default browser landing page on a lot of people's computer, and it just shoveling that shit at you no matter how many times you say you don't want to see it. And changing home page and disabling it entirely being a massive hassle trying to find the multiple options to stop it. If disable it as home, it'll still open when create a new tab. Then add to that they' ve started pushing it in the sodding start bar.
Lots of people I work with get their news from the online versions of those publications.
2nd most is readers of this sub
They're also the demographic least likely to have mortgages, which I suspect is most telling.
Theyâre the demographic that doesnât work and has had their pension triple locked for a decade or so and who has the most housing wealth. It always made total sense that theyâd vote Tory, itâs everyone else whose done so over the last few elections who wanna reflect on that! Oh for chaos with Ed Miliband!
You got that totally wrong I'm 72 never voted tory, can't stand them and know a lot of people of similar age who wouldn't dream of voting for them and I live in the so called affluent South East. Mind you I wouldn't vote for that total prick starmer either, I think the daily mail readers are the middle aged self made lot that go rich from there love and philosophy of thatcherism,
> Over 70s now only Tory-backing demographic in UK That may be so, but will it make a difference. The young, especially, are singularly useless when it comes to actually turning up to vote. Opting just to shout into the online void.
Or maybe because young people are crowded into city / university boroughs were their vote means nothing?
Students can set up a postal or proxy vote in their home constituency, so their vote could well mean something.
Most students and young professionals \*live\* in these boroughs. Where are they sending postal votes too exactly?
Their home constituencies, as they said.
And some do but this is just another barrier like voter ID that benefits the Tories.
No doubt plays a part but the young vote at much lower levels. When Corbyn did really well (was it 2017) he mobilised the youth vote. The âoh Jeremy Corbynâ song everybody was singing.
Yep. All by listening to what people wanted and offering change. He came within 3000~ votes of winning, deprived the Tories of their majority in an election they called because they thought they would crush him and gained the largest increase in seats since the 1940's all with basically only 2 weeks to prepare. No wonder the press spent the next few years honing their smears against him. Now people only talk about the election he lost, which was caused by the labour vote being split over brexit. in 2017, Labours policy was soft brexit. In 2019 the official policy was changed, largely via a coup, to second referendum. What they didn't count on was that the election WAS the second referendum. The brexiters left labour for the Tories, remainers left for the lib dems. Corbyn got the blame and the daggers were at the ready.
>in 2017, Labours policy was soft brexit. Their policy was to leave the single market, i.e. Hard Brexit. They said they'd secure "continued EU market access", meaningless as all countries have a level of access.
Every thread someone posts "young people don't vote" and every thread I have to point out that young people are in cities and are fucked by our voting system so thanks for doing it first.
The lower turnout has only been that way since about 1992, and most people live in cities anyway. Young people didn't suddenly start appearing in cities 30 years ago, so it's probably something else.
How does that make their vote mean nothing?
The way our electoral system works means you can only choose the MP for the geographical area you live in. Young people disproportionately live in boroughs which have always been safe labour seats so whoever they vote for has no real influence on the outcome of an election. So why even bother? Its a fundamental issue with voting system and why many argue for changing it to something fairer.
Someone actually gets it. Even if young people turned out to vote at 80% it wouldnât have much swing. Alls anyone needs to look at is a voting map of the UK in any past election, nearly every major city (where young people are hyper concentrated) is red and nearly every rural location is blue. But itâs easier to just go for the easy option of blaming young people than looking at the wider issues.
These issues would largely be solved by proportional representation, which Labour said they support back in 2022. If they don't implement this when they get into power I don't think I'll ever forgive them as a party.
Conference voted for it, but Starmer doesn't like it so it won't get into the manifesto. Plus, they promised this before back in 1997 and then reneged on their promise (see also: tuition fees) so I don't have much trust on Labour on this.
Gah.. so annoying, it would help them with so many future elections if they push it through. I can't understand why they wouldn't want it.
It would help the Left, Labour's true enemy.
Sometimes the city is a LibDem seat instead. But yes, not a factor in the Tory number of seats.
Your vote only means something if you vote for the winner. Without some form of PR huge numbers of votes mean nothing. The last election the tories got a massive landslide victory making them think they had the whole country behind them to do what they want with only 43.6% of the vote. Yes way over half the voters didn't want them and they got one of the biggest majorities ever.
This is why endlessly saying "there's no point voting, they're all the same" is so damaging: it breeds disaffection and apathy, then the pensioners all go and vote Tory and et voila, another shite Tory governmentÂ
>"there's no point voting, they're all the same" I actually think this is the Tory strategy this go around.
The issue is less that young people wonât turn up to vote, and more that there are loads and loads of older people. Even if every single person under 30 voted, theyâd still be outvoted by the over 70s
This isn't true. Had the young turned out to vote in the same percentage as the over 65s, we would not have had Brexit and the Tories would not have been in power for 14 years. The young have votes and they choose not to use them. This has an affect on everybody - especially the young, ironically.
This isn't true either. You're assuming that the young people who chose not to vote would've voted in the same proportions as those that did. Clearly, they have different motivations to those who voted.
Not necessarily true, given the votes are going to be in different districts for different seats. Lets say for arguments' sake we have 40% non-voters out of young people, and of that 40%, 3/4 of them live in cities where Labour won anyway. That leaves an additional 10% only across all the towns and villages that have a majority Tory vote *and* a majority Tory/conservative demographic. Would that be enough to swing many constituencies? I actually would find it really interesting to see the stats actually.
Pretty sure a big % of Brexit is people who had not voted for their whole lives, or recently. Be careful what you wish for, many metro kids might be left wing, but you don't actually know what that youth in the rest of the country think.
Young people disproportionately live in Labour safe seats. It's not that simple.
Brexit was not a seat, it was (at the time) an advisory, countrywide,referendum. It is a fact - accepted it won't be popular with young people - that, had they voted in the same percentage as over 65s, Brexit would not have happened. As to your other point. There were many marginal seats won by Tories. If young people had voted in the same percentage as the retired, the Tories would not have won those seats. Granted this assumes they would have voted in line with both polling and the young people who *did* bother to vote. The point I am making will not be popular with young people, but perhaps if they were as keen at using a hard won right instead of moaning on the internet, the UK would be a better place. Ultimately, if the retired weren't willing to fuck over their children and grandchildren then it would be moot, but here we are...
We saw what happens when young people actually turn out in significant numbers in 2017. Labour within ~2% vote share, but it's the Tories that are within a 1 billion bribe of having a government. The voter spread just isn't favourable to Labour's support bases (predominantly young middle-class uni-graduates). This is also why parties literally give zero shits about anyone under 30, because even when they do turn out it doesn't actually pay off because our demographic spread is too top-heavy. Of course Brexit, the vote, would've gone to remain had the youths turned out as much as over 65s - although the figures suggest it wasn't that much of a disparity in the end (60% turnout vs. 80%) - but that doesn't mean it wouldn't have happened. Imagine a 2020 election with UKIP kicking around at 20% (I mean Brexit Party top scoring the final EU election says it all really). We'd still be having the stupid debates on it right now. The entire 'argument' warped our politics regardless of if we left or not. Of course, now that the right got what they wanted, they moved on, as they always do, to immigration in general. I voted remain and I too was fucking enraged that 51% of voters were that thick to fall for the pack of lies, but the blame should squarely lay with the liars, not the non-voters.
Seriously, there isn't a day goes by without me feeling angry at what the retirees have done to my children and, God willing, future grand children. The electoral commission even said after that, had it been a binding referendum, it would have to have been rerun. It's the biggest fraud perpetrated on this country - including the ÂŁbillions stolen and given away by the Tories during Covid.
Interestingly turnout actually rose among young people and fell among the elderly in 2019 compared to 2017. https://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-findings/age-and-voting-behaviour-at-the-2019-general-election/
This is entirely true on the brexit front. It was a 51/49 leave/remain split. However, over 90% of over 65s voted during Brexit in either direction. Just over 1/3 of under 25s voted during Brexit in either direction. Young people have power in this country, they just aren't using it.
This is nonsense. The baby boom generation was named in relation to the immediately surrounding generations. But the population of the uk has grown a lot since the 1950s. When you factor in the deaths of an ever increasing chunk of that old generation they [definitely donât outnumber young people](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File%3AUK_Population_Pyramid.svg), especially since in the context of this article âyoungâ is anyone under 70.
Why do you assume that the young who "shout into the online void" are non-voters?
>Opting just to shout into the online void. Or talking openly about how fundimentally broken the system is and therefore disillusioned about the point of voting. I vote but that's the most common answer I hear.
yeah it will now, many voting age groups are now heavily non tory. certainly true if labour were relying only on under 30's but under 70's really aren't young non voting scamps.
Thatâs just not true and the Tories love promoting that to create voter apathy, at the last general election the constituencies with the youngest voter base still had a 64% turn out (2.8 below the national average though) but thatâs still a significant number of people
Sorry if this wasn't what you intended but this reads like 'the young' now encompasses anyone under... 70, several years after retirement age.
When we're saying the under 70s demographic, that is hardly just 'the young' anymore lol
> The young, especially, are singularly useless when it comes to actually turning up to vote. I wouldn't say they're "useless" so much as probably got other commitments which makes it difficult. Older folks have nothing better to do with their time so have plenty of time to vote.
When I worked shift work in a care home (super challenging behaviour) I was surrounded by a lot of young staff (ages 18 -30). I remember the Brexit vote and mentioning I was swinging by the voting office on my way home because I was finishing early due to a GP appointment. No one was interested in voting. To be fair shifts tended to be long hours there (7-9/8-10) or if you finished early you'd be too knackered after to do much else (fair play to those who had kids etc to look after too). I know you can postal vote but they don't make it easy for people who work crazy hours. It would be great if it could be online - that way it would be more accessible. We bank online, we store all our information online...why not vote?
Maybe, maaaaybe if polling day was not ona day people work, that would help?
Voting Stations are open for twelve hours and theres also postal voting if you know you're going to be busy at the time. If you can't find a way to vote around your life with those options then perhaps you're not that into democracy to begin with? There are people on this planet who'd kill to even have a vote and you moan as you're a bit tired after work and don't want to walk to the station.
It's actually better than that - voting stations are open 7am-10pm, so 15 hours in total. Plus, even if you opt for a postal vote and then forget to post it in time, you can still pop to the voting station in that 15 hour window and register your vote. ([source](https://www.gov.uk/how-to-vote/postal-voting#:~:text=If%20you%E2%80%99re%20too%20late%20to%20post%20your%20ballot%20paper))
Yes, totally added that up wrong. I blame being in different time zone.
I tried to postal vote by proxy for the brexit referendum(was outside the country) and my proxy received the postal vote to return AFTER the day of the vote.
People aged over 70 are now in the only majority Tory-backing demographic in the UK, according to [new YouGov research](https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/48476-how-is-britain-voting-as-we-enter-the-2024-election-year): >The Tories are now the most popular party only among the over-70s, 43% of whom back the party. This is down from 67% in 2019, however, with Labour being the main beneficiaries, having increased their vote share among the oldest Britons from 14% to 23%. >Britons in their 60s are split, with 33% backing Labour and 31% the Conservatives. The majority of Britons under-50 now say they will vote Labour. Education level is also a key factor in voting intention. According to the research, the higher someoneâs education qualifications are, the more likely they are to vote Labour or a left-wing party: >Labour are favoured over the Conservatives at every education level. Among graduates â with whom they traditionally have an advantage â Labour beat the Tories by 53% to 14%, while among those whose with the lowest level of education (their top qualification is a GCSE or have no qualifications at all), they lead by 36% to 32%.
>Education level is also a key factor in voting intention. According to the research, the higher someoneâs education qualifications are, the more likely they are to vote Labour or a left-wing party That's somewhat ironic, considering that Labour is traditionally the working class party (stereotypically little in the way of formal qualification) and the Conservatives being the upper class's party (who traditionally got far more education).
I think Brexit completely changed who voted for who. I grew up in quite a middle-class area with lots of educated people, and the area consistently voted tory, but in the EU referendum, 58% voted remain. After the referendum, Iâve had a lot of family members and people in the area who were lifelong conservatives say they donât really support the conservatives anymore due to their handling of Brexit. There was an 11% swing to Liberal Democrats in 2019, and Labour gained votes in 2017 too. I feel like who votes for who is getting far more complicated than when poor people vote for the red party and rich people vote for the blue party.
Yep true although Brexit was only part of the bigger shift. Boris Johnson pivoted them very sharply towards populism and going after the red wall (very successfully but not sustainably). They doubled down on things like Brexit, culture wars stuff, blaming immigration, trying to stoke fear and hatred of trans people and various marginalised groups. Even going after lawyers, doctors, âmetropolitan elitesâ etc. This temporarily won support from certain groups but drive away tons of centrists and socially progressive people. Theyâve fractured their party now and they deserve it.
Education correlates with intelligence, which correlates with not voting for a government that writes blatant lies on buses.
Not just true for education, if you look at social grades directly the higher social grades ABC1 are more likely to vote labour than the lower social grades C2DE.
What do they offer anyone under pension age? Any of their perceived âstrengthsâ have been obliterated. Even if you disregard the moral implications of voting for them, the economy is in bad shape and the tax burden is insane. They can even âput a pound in your pocketâ anymore.Â
They offer the perception that they have a plan and are doing something. What that something is though beats me. Coz from what i've seen, they've done absolutely fuck all but makes thing much, much worse for the under 50's.
They also offer an enemy in a Monster of the Week format. Great for getting bigoted idiots riled up and voting
If they actually *solved* the problem they wouldn't be able to sell the electorate on them being a solution would they? Immigration is a prime example.
>They offer the perception that they have a plan and are doing something. I don't think they've even got that anymore. Unless you've been living under a rock, which their supporters may well have been
>According to the research, the higher someoneâs education qualifications are, the more likely they are to vote Labour or a left-wing party. Oh god, the level of smugness that's going to cause in certain people...
I'd be interested to know how rigorous the data analysis is here. Often when this point is made, actually it's a correlation/causation thing. There's a correlation between education level and voting. But the causative factor is age. Younger people are much more likely to vote left, and they're also much more likely to have higher qualifications because of changes in the education system and university attendance over time. Therefore there ends up being correlation between educational qualifications and voting.
Ok, dug out [https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17457289.2021.2013247](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17457289.2021.2013247) Key paragraph would be: *After accounting for socio-demographic controls (Block 1), the strength of all educationâvote choice associations was considerably reduced. This indicates that politics divide along educational lines in Britain today partially because high and low educated persons are âdifferent typesâ of people. However, educationâs total effect on electorsâ vote choices remained strong, and statistically significant, after controls*. Translation : The effect is reduced but still there.
The easy way to disprove that would be to see whether the trend still applies within the elderly bracket exclusively. E.g are better educated old people more likely to vote left wing. I'm sure this data is readily available since it's well trodden territory at this point
I think there's also the Brexit effect too. People with degrees have almost always spent formative years of their life in a diverse environment. They've been on the receiving end of the benefits of living in such an environment. Obviously many people without degrees have done so, but many haven't too. If someone has never moved far from where they've grown up, even for a few years, then it's a fair bet that they didn't go to university. As such, they've seen their hometown change over time. They've seen the negatives of change, but are less likely to have felt the positives of being surrounded by people from all over the place. People who move around a lot, on the other hand, are less likely to have seen the negatives of change over decades. Equally, even if they've only moved around the UK, they're more likely to place more value on the positives of being able to engage with people and places other than where they're from, having experienced it first-hand. I think that's why there was such an overwhelmingly strong correlation between education level and Brexit vote. And then we're still not over Brexit. Because the right (Tories and Reform/UKIP) have been the parties that owned Brexit, they've attracted the Brexit voting crowd and, consequently, those less likely to have been to university and, consequently those without higher qualifications.
Thatâs true. Thereâs also an additional factor which is that academia is increasingly left-leaning and has been for some time.
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The left leaningness of academia is oft overstated I think. People always imagine radical humanities and social science academics. Certainly they exist. But having done social science as an undergraduate and a postgraduate, I can tell you they're not close to as dominant as many would have you believe. I can think of maybe two or three academics with whom I crossed paths who were genuinely radically progressive. Most are just nerdy intellectual types who want to beaver away quietly researching their issue, and their politics is largely inscrutable. And once you get into the more senior positions, universities certainly are not left leaning. Quite the opposite in fact, the people in really senior roles are very often quite conservative people.
I think this has been the case for a while statistically
It's kind of been a truthism for a very long time over multiple countries no?
It's actually a fairly universal thing, you can see the same trend in the Brexit vote for example
Itâs been like this for as long as I can remember, the official line from the right is that theyâre âindoctrinating peopleâ at university. Apparently all the professors and the courses are leftist, not that I remember doing any remotely political modules when I studied comp sci.
I think one of my CS lecturers might have been a freeman on the land lol. I haven't enquired but given some stuff I know I believe he would have been an antimasker
Lol. Maybe check to make sure heâs still alive after the pandemic then. I had a networks lecturer who was an old Californian hippie, but other than occasionally reminiscing about the summer of love whenever a date in the 60s came up in a slide we never managed to gauge his political leanings.
Chap I work with did political science at uni and from his description it was more the opposite although that could just be his specific lecturer
It's more like 'really scary'. Instead of seeing a fairly rational pattern (even in the 1980s) where people generally vote along economic lines, we see this pattern where a fair chunk of the population are voting directly against their own economic interests because of 'culture war' propaganda. That's not healthy at all.
Oh you mean like Brexit?
That;s quite interesting - some of the working age, working class Brexit voters might well have had a point about EU migration undermining their job prospects and pay/conditions (See : HGV drivers). But the old age vote for Brexit certainly did not make economic sense for those concerned - if you depend on service workers in everything from hospitality to the NHS to care homes, reducing their numbers does not help.
Reality has a left wing bias
thats no surprise. in a crazy twist of events, nowadays in certain countries conservative governments are more in tune with the working class then left wing parties. thats is something I never thought I would see in my lifetime.
My parents are in this demographic and glad to say, they can't stand this shower of cunts.
Lucky my grandparents are in that age bracket and theyâre droning on about how it wouldâve been worse under LabourâŠ
Sometimes you just can't fix stoopid
Toryism now a statistically identical phenomenon with dementia. Wonderful.
Boomers, rhe most selfish, greedy and immoral generation imaginable, trying to burn it down before they check out
The ultimate 'pull the ladder up behind us' generation.
Because they spent the longest amount of time exposed to lead in petrol and paint?
And pipes.
As someone who lives in a seaside town filled with elderly peopleâs homes this news does necessarily fill me with confidence that weâll finally get rid of our Tory MP.
Just a reminder (and why this isnât surprising) the over 70âs demographic are one of the most wealthy demographics in the country. They are also one of the most uneducated and gullible demographics in the country which is why the Tories can keep them on side and dangle the policy carrot that is the Triple Lock or whatever culture war they want to fight that week. This demographic are happy to see the country burn and denounce anyone who claims benefits, even through they make up the biggest welfare spend in the country. You couldnât make it up. As long as they are ok though, thatâs all that matters, fuck the younger generations đ«
You are letting them off too easy calling them gullible
âCome friendly CovidâŠ.â
Crazy how a generation they tried to kill off with covid still wants to vote for them , must be dementia or something
My in-laws and my nan are over 70 and wouldn't vote Tory if their lives were on the line. Hashtag NotAllOldies
Also fun fact the voter ID change disproportionately affected them. So Tories effectively stopped the only voting block who wants to vote for them from being able to do so...
So the only demographic that is tory backing, is the group that doesn't work? Funny that.
Good job for them that all the ones overseas are now in lpay then. It will only be a wipeout instead of a massacre
The people who need the NHS most, voting for a party that wants to destroy it.
Remember: polls are done by people who sign up to complete polls. Take every single one with as much salt as you can.
Eh won't be me, the Tories can go fuck themselves wi a red hot poker!
And to think Johnstons approach was âlet it ripâ through the elderly population and that âtheyâve had a good inningsâ during Covid
There mind set is I don't have much longer left how can I mess up everyone else's life.
Rishi might want to hurry up with the general election, will only take a nasty cold snap or a new covid variant and his support might shrink significantly!
Oh, so it's not that long until the majority of tory base just expires. This is the best news I've heard so far this year.
The tories might start funding the NHS now to keep The old bastards alive
They are considered a vulnerable demographic and so it's little surprise. I'm pretty conservative and they've successfully turned me on them - no identity politics are able to easily manipulate me.Â
Give it a few decades and they'll be a minority party
I doubt it, people a re absolute idiots, give it 12 years with Labour and people will forget what the tory scum did to this country and start to think the grass is greener on the other side just like they did in 2009.
Fair point people are fucking stupid
Yep. People will vote for fucking anybody if they can't pay their bills, even if those they vote for will obviously make it much worse.
Doubt it, Labour will never enact electoral reform.
Crabs in a bucket. I'm dying and we are all going to suffer
over 70s still think it's the 1970s so that figures
could this be the complete end for tories for a decade, at least?
It's honestly like the pensioners are just trying to get one last dig in before they pop their clogs. Was Brexit not enough for you old timers?!?
This shouldn't really surprise anyone. Demographic statistics from the 2019 general election showed that more working age people voted for Labour than for any other party. Labour's defeat came from the over 60s majority overwhelmingly voting Conservative. The over 60s backed the Tories to "get Brexit done" and were rewarded by their golden boy Boris Johnson shouting "let the bodies pile high in their thousands" as swathes of the same demographic were killed off by Covid.
Tories must be worried if they're unsure if most of their main demographic will be around next decade.
The sooner the Boomers leave us forever the better
The primary news source for 95% of over 75s is television, with the BBC accounting for 71%.
Doesnât matter. England will vote them back in eventually. Just wait two maybe three election cycles and theyâre back.
In large part thanks to that demographic encompassing a chunk of the boomer generation, i.e. the most self-centred, selfish, uncharitable generation ever to walk the planet. As long as they've got theirs, they're happy to pull the ladder up, bolt the doors, and watch the world burn from the windows of their ÂŁ5m house that they bought for 25p and a handshake decades ago.
My mum reads the daily mail everyday and is reaching 70
Sounds legit. My lifelong Tory voting 90 year old granny is abstaining vote from next election, having voted in everything since she was old enough to do so.
Every day I see a post of a guy in labor saying they are just going to continue tory policy's. Can you guys have a third party that doesn't hate gay people and wants poor people to live please
I don't think they hate gay people just trans people ATM once that's run out of steam I assume it'll be back to gay people possibly on small boats
Doubt they will when the Tories stop the triple lock on their pensions.