Labour in fact won the highest share of most working-age voters in 2019. But pensioners are harder for the party to reach
Read much commentary about electoral politics in Britain and you’ll quickly come across an inescapable narrative. What’s distinctive about the current moment, it goes, is that the Conservatives are the new party of the working class in England, while Labour’s electorate has been reduced to a rump of the city-dwelling, middle-class and “woke”. The crumbling of the “red wall” in the 2019 general election, and the recent Conservative triumph in the Hartlepool byelection, has elevated this myth to a near political religion.
There are figures in Labour who have uncritically swallowed this narrative, largely for factional reasons: in the party’s forever-war, portraying the left flank as bourgeois dilettantes who never left the student debating chamber is a convenient rhetorical device. It is, however, a deceit. As recent analysis underlined, in 2019, Labour won a higher share of the working-age population than the Tories; excluding retirees, it had a decisive lead with low-income workers and indeed triumphed in every income bracket except for those earning more than £100,000 a year. The Tories secured victory thanks to pensioners, who comprise a quarter of the electorate and are most likely to vote.
