Voices: Keir Starmer’s Labour is ill-prepared for the next generation of voters

If Rishi Sunak were to ill-advisedly call an early election tomorrow, he’d quickly find himself out of a job. Not only that, but he’d consign his party to oblivion. The latest Politico poll of polls, dated 24 November, puts Labour on 48 per cent and the Conservatives on 26 per cent.

This figure also masks an even wider gulf: a bigger division in voting intentions marked out specifically by age. Some of the polls wrapped into this mega-analysis suggest that support for the Tories among the under-50s is now registering in single figures. That’s despite the fact that in 2019, Boris Johnson managed to reduce what is known as the “crossover age”, at which you become statistically more likely to vote Conservative than Labour, to just 40, because of his success – albeit temporary – in turning the “red wall” blue.

On paper, it looks as though the decline of centre-right politics among the younger half of the population is now irreversible. The shrill commentary in The Daily Telegraph this week about the effects of socialism in schools suggests that a form of panic has set in, for those who know they can’t possibly undo 20 years of neglect of a whole generation of adults whose lives are now beset by economic woes that cannot quickly be solved by any government – childcare costs, housing costs, and our broken relationship with Europe, to name just a few.

But the polls only tell one story. Attitude surveys suggest that the picture is far more complicated. While people under 50 might be less likely to actually vote Conservative, they are also increasingly likely to hold views about some public services that would traditionally have placed them on the right.

Take private medicine as an example. Young people might not be willing to vote for Sunak, but they’re apparently happy to share a charmingly furnished medical waiting room with him. According to a new PwC attitudes survey, two in five people (43 per cent) across the whole population would be prepared to use private healthcare, or a mix of NHS and private services, but this figure rises sharply among the youngest voters. Those aged 18 to 24 were twice as likely to say that they would do so.

The majority (77 per cent) of those youngest voters said they would mix care services, or go private, for medical treatment, compared with only a third (33 per cent) of people aged 55 or over. That’s despite the fact that the over-55s are far more likely to be Tory voters – and, of course, more likely to have good reason to fear being unable to access NHS healthcare when needed, and to want to jump the queue for treatment. So what’s going on?

The traditional links between public services and Labour are breaking. Socially liberal, pro-European and economically abandoned young voters see nothing in Conservatism for them, but they’ve also lived through their teens and adult lives seeing nothing but retrenchment and disinvestment in public services, in particular in the NHS.

They understand that the NHS is now at breaking point; they know it is struggling to recover from the pandemic. And they don’t trust it. They are also more willing to consider health, along with other matters under the aegis of public services, as a question of individual need rather than collective responsibility.

It’s not that they have undergone a volte-face on the structure of funding for healthcare. More than three-quarters (78 per cent) of young people simply said they would use savings or their income to pay for it, and a majority also said they would ask for help from family and friends if they couldn’t afford it.

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And it’s not just public services that younger voters are more willing to step away from. An unnecessarily alarmist and slightly preachy report by the right-wing think tank UK Onward, with the inflammatory title The Kids Aren’t Alright, found that young people are detaching rapidly from other structures of our society, such as face-to-face social and friendship networks and the traditional workplace. Of course, digital progress – along with the course of the pandemic, which atomised us more than most would have liked – has only exacerbated these forces.

What these studies really tell us is that young people experience being a member of society in a very different way from how older people experience it. It seems inevitable, then, that they will want very different things back from society in the form of public services.

But what do they want? There is far too little policy work done on this, and what there is isn’t being discussed seriously by politicians in Westminster. We talk endlessly about pension reform, but has anyone asked 20-year-olds what kind of health or social care service they envisage needing when they themselves are older?

Just as Conservatism has become a preserve of the eldest portion of our population, what it actually means to be a Labour voter is changing too, as the party dominates the opinion polls. Grappling with the expectations and unexpected assumptions of a new generation of voters will be a major challenge for Keir Starmer’s party, as it spends a long two years preparing for the general election.