Why are major political parties ignoring us middle-aged voters? - Jayne Dowle

Writing before the last General Election, in 2019, Torsten Bell, chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, an economic think-tank, argued that, “old and young seats are becoming the new safe seats for the Conservatives and Labour respectively, just as old and young voters are becoming their core supporters.”

To illustrate the divide, he identified Oxford, where five years ago, the average resident was just aged 29, barely half the age of someone in North Norfolk, then the oldest place in Britain, with an average age of 54.

Obviously, five years is a long time in politics and there are absolutely no guarantees that older voter behaviour in particular will follow suit on July 4. Disenchantment with Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader and the appearance of Nigel Farage heading right-wing Reform UK will bring about an interesting – but perhaps predictable – demographic twist.

This does however, leave a yawning chasm. What about voters aged between 40 and 60, who can claim to be neither old nor young, but hovering in the middle, in seats which are not overwhelmingly dominated by a specific age group?

As analysis by the Resolution Foundation shows, we make up 28 per cent of the electorate, versus 31 per cent each for baby boomers, born in the 1950s and early 1960s and millennials from the 1980s and 1990s. And now we must also factor in the older members of ‘Gen Z’ born, between 1997 and 2012, like my son and daughter, eligible to vote this time.

Boomers are crucial for parties to appeal to because they are more likely to vote, but millennials and likely, Gen Zers, will turn out less, so politicians must work much harder to gain their support.

Still, if we mid-lifers hold the make-or-break power Bell talks about, why are politicians not going all out to appeal to our concerns too? This generation, often raising children whilst paying off a mortgage and dealing with rising costs of everything from pet food to car insurance, was first identified as ‘the squeezed middle’ more than a decade ago, but largely sidelined when it came to actual policies that might help.

Not rich enough to allow the cost of living not to bite into the Ocado budget, not poor enough to be reliant on state benefits to top up minimum wage zero hours jobs, on we plod. Whilst financial matters pre-occupy us, other concerns shared by all, parents or not, definitely include the failings of the NHS, the environment and whether the UK was right to leave the European Union.

Those of us with kids worry about education, then about post-16 options, with the cost of a university education and the paucity of student loans a constant concern, then about where our adult offspring might afford to live.

Whilst both main political parties promise to build millions of houses (or so it seems in the white noise of housing policy), there’s a strange hush over affordability, mortgage interest rates, the sheer difficulty many first-time buyers face even attempting to secure a mortgage, and the failings of the private rented sector.

What’s more, an earlier pledge to reduce student loan repayments seems to have been jettisoned from the Labour party’s manifesto. Meanwhile, it’s reported that university leaders are already squaring up for a fight with the prospective Labour government, arguing that student fees must rise to “stabilise the ship” that is the higher education funding crisis.

At the same time, many of us in middle age are fighting on two fronts, looking after elderly parents, battling local council and NHS bureaucracy to secure adequate social care (no mention of that either, from any party) and accepting, with resignation, that we’ll never have it as good as our ‘boomer’ elders with their triple-lock pensions and paid-off mortgages.

Really, we middle-agers are the lynch-pin, but instead of recognising that we hold everything together, increasingly polarised politics are set up to appeal to either old or young, with nothing much in between.

With every grey hair we spot or creaking joint we try to ignore, we Generation Xers are reminded every day that we’re running out of time. So, it would seem, are the politicians who take our support for granted.