prism of immigration. As one academic who researched the topic found: ‘My analysis shows that voters hit hardest by the cuts were more receptive to the Leave campaign, which shouldn’t be surprising as campaigners promised fiscal windfalls from leaving the EU that could prop up ailing public services.’ He concluded that ‘the tight 2016 EU referendum could have resulted in a victory for Remain had it not been for austerity. Leave won by a margin of 3.8 percentage points.’4
From the referendum campaign onwards, there was often a complacency within Labour’s ranks that Brexit would always prove more politically destructive to the Conservatives. It proved far more so for Labour for a few reasons. Firstly, Brexit unleashed an increasingly acrimonious culture war and, as Corbynism tragically discovered, culture wars are poisonous to a left politics founded on class politics. Labour’s slogan in the 2017 election had captured the essence of that class politics: ‘For the many, not the few.’ It provided a narrative for the party’s redistributive policies, such as hiking taxes on the well-off and big business to fund investment in public services. But a culture war cuts across the real divide in society—who has wealth and power, and who doesn’t.
Instead the British people were driven into two crudely defined boxes: Remainers and Leavers. Working-class communities were divided. Labour represented communities stretching from Hackney— which voted decisively to Remain—to Hull—which voted in large numbers to Leave. The ascendant right-wing populism within the Conservative Party had secured a means to win over older working-class people in the very communities ravaged by Thatcherism.
When Labour deprived the Conservatives of a majority in 2017 against all the odds, triumphalism overwhelmed the Corbyn project and its supporters. But the result—a hung Parliament—sowed the seeds of destruction for Corbyn’s leadership. With Theresa May deprived of a majority to drive through any possible Brexit deal, leading Remainers increasingly abandoned an acceptance of the referendum result and began pushing for its reversal with increasing assertiveness. Leading Leave voices ever more loudly declared that a democratic result was imperilled and exploited the instability to push for an ever more radical break from the EU. Both factions fed each other. The consequence was ever-growing radicalisation over this constitutional issue.
With Brexit conquering the political landscape, Labour’s popular domestic policies—founded in class politics—no longer got a hearing. The party’s attempt to strike a compromise—to leave the EU but maintain a close relationship and then pivot back to domestic issues— was rendered increasingly unlikely; it straddled a divide between two planks which were ever farther apart, and Labour risked falling through the middle. With most of its members and indeed voters having voted Remain, the party’s leadership increasingly zigzagged and pivoted towards supporting a new referendum: in the process, messages of clarity on domestic issues were replaced by confusion over Brexit. The right-wing populists stole the anti-establishment mantle from Corbynism, claiming to be representing the voice of the people against an elite which was conspiring to overturn a mass democratic vote. Corbynism itself could increasingly be cast as part of the establishment.
Brexit both highlighted and exacerbated a new divide which imperilled Labour’s electoral chances: an unprecedented generational gap. Traditionally, there was no great political chasm between older and younger voters. When Margaret Thatcher secured her crushing 1983 landslide, she won a decisive mandate among the young, too.5 But in the 2017 election, Labour won more support from younger voters than at any point in its history, including Tony Blair’s landslide victory two decades earlier. Two thirds of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds voted Labour, with less than a fifth opting for the Conservatives. This lead was nearly replicated for the under thirties, and 55 per cent of thirty-to thirty-nine-year-olds also opted for Corbyn’s party, as opposed to 29 per cent for Theresa May’s troops. But among older Britons, Labour had been reduced to a virtual fringe party: 58 per cent of those aged between sixty and sixty-nine years old voted Tory, and just 27 per cent Labour, while a staggering 69 per cent of those over seventy opted for candidates wearing blue rosettes, with just 19 per cent backing the red team.
This matters a lot: around a quarter of the electorate are pensioners, and they are the most motivated to vote. While Labour’s support dropped by a disastrous eight points two and a half years later, it retained a staggering lead among the young and a catastrophic deficit among the old. While its lead among the young had diminished, that was almost entirely due to defections to the Lib Dems and Greens, rather than a Conservative revival, and its advantage in those demographics remained overwhelming.6
This generational divide led the eminent psephologist Sir John Curtice to tell one Labour MP during the 2019 election, ‘But of course you are no longer a party of the working class. You’re a party of young people.’7 In doing so, he counterposed young people and the working class as discrete, separate categories: that so many from both groups owned no capital and worked for often low wages in precarious circumstances was irrelevant. Indeed, it is worth noting that the demographic who most decisively voted for Labour in 2017 were those classified as working-class people under the age of thirty-five: here, the party had a fifty-two-point lead over the Conservatives, compared to a twenty-two-point lead among those classified as middle-class in the same age group.8
For those of us whose worldview is founded in class politics—in a belief that the interests of the majority are not just different but on a collision course with those at the top—this generational divide is discomforting but nonetheless real. That does not necessitate becoming generational warriors. While there are affluent pensioners, 1.9 million live in poverty, a higher rate than in most European countries. There are those who advocate scrapping the ‘triple lock’ that secures generous annual increases in pensions and using the savings to invest in young people. But young people are themselves aspirational pensioners. Stripping back entitlements for older people leaves the young with the worst of all worlds: insecurity not just in youth but in retirement, too.
How did this generational divide become so entrenched to the extent it has severely disrupted class politics? A million pensioners were lifted out of poverty by New Labour in the noughties, and their living standards have been protected by the triple lock, increasing and already very high levels of homeownership, and booming house prices thanks in part to post-crash quantitative easing.9 Older Britons are the most socially conservative on issues such as immigration, Islam, LGBTQ rights and feminism.
Younger Britons, meanwhile, have suffered one of the worst wage squeezes in the industrialised world, as well as collapsing levels of home ownership combined with a depletion of social housing, driving them into an unregulated and rip-off private rented sector.10 They are saddled with debt for daring to aspire to a university education which benefits all of society; services they rely on have been decimated; and cuts to social security have hammered low-paid young workers. They have the most progressive social norms of any generation, articles of faith they quite understandably believe are under attack. It is this divide in economic security and social values that surely explains the political chasm separating the generations.
Younger Britons have not all become radicalised socialists. Thatcherism promised that they would be liberated from the deadweight of the state and collectivism, allowing them to freely realize their potential and prosper. But rather than finding freedom, their lived experience is insecurity, which is a prison. That insecurity does not just define the lives of those born into working-class families but many of those born into what would traditionally be described as middle-class backgrounds. The young are not separate from today’s lived working-class experience; they are integral to it.
When Labour faced electoral devastation in 2019, the understandable focus was on the so-called Red Wall, the constituencies in the North and the Midlands represented by the party, in some cases, for generations. This specific electoral calamity was portrayed as the mass defection of working-class voters. Again, an understanding of class must intersect with age. The last available data from British censuses is 2011; the trends they picked up have surely only accelerated since. What they reveal about the seats Labour lost is instructive.
In Kirkby-in-Ashfield, the over-sixty-fives population increased by 41.3 per cent between 1981 and 2011, while the under-twenty-fives population fell by 15.5 per cent. In the same period in Bishop Auckland, the older population