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Was 8th June the revenge of the millennials?

No party can ignore the concerns of the young—they're angry and now they're voting

by Shiv Malik / June 21, 2017 / Leave a comment
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Published in July 2017 issue of Prospect Magazine

Photo: Ray Tang/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Early on 9th June, the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg pronounced the great lesson of 2017: “This is the election where young people started voting. And it may seem that for all the political parties, the demographics of who they have to please might be shifting.” Or, to put it more bluntly, ignore the generational divide at your peril.

Theresa May never addressed them, at least not coherently, and she has suffered the consequences. Just ask Rob Wilson, the parliamentary under secretary for civil society who lost Reading East. He described the Tory catastrophe not in terms of a failure to attract the aspirational classes, the Mondeo man or whatever this year’s equivalent of Worcester Woman is supposed to be. His post-mortem was all about age. He said that May’s manifesto—with its “dementia tax,” and axing of pensioner perks—sent an “Exocet missile” through their support base, the old. At the same time Jeremy Corbyn stole a march with the young, with a clear offer including, prominently, the scrapping of student fees.

It is already clear that seats with more younger voters saw a sharper spike in turnout, and in the Labour share. This is no one-off. The European Union referendum split starkly by age: 75 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds voted to “Remain,” a mirror image of the split among pensioners.

Most politicians and analysts are blind to this divide, and have ignored its implications. Many hold tight to the old class categories (“Maggie worked magic on the C2s”) with which pundits have made sense of things for so long. The parties have long been so convinced that the young wouldn’t vote, that offering baubles to pensi…

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Comments

  1. Jack B.
    July 11, 2017 at 19:28
    The divide is between those that own land and those that don't. Millennials who are due a sizeable inheritance, or whose can rely on the bank of mum and dad, have and will become landowners themselves. The solution is to stop treating land as an asset and shift taxation from work and consumption, and on to land via a land value tax.

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About this author

Shiv Malik
Shiv Malik is co-founder of the think tank The Intergenerational Foundation. He is also the co-author of "Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted its Youth." His latest book "The Messenger," (Guardian/Faber) will be published in January

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