Britain has been an ageing country for so long now that we’ve arguably almost forgotten how it feels to be anything else. Keeping older voters happy, while banking on the young and restless failing to vote, has been the secret sauce of so many Conservative victories that it’s come to feel like an immutable electoral law. Yet an unexpectedly good showing for the Democrats in last week’s midterm elections, after this spring’s defeat for the right in Australia, shines an interesting light on what can happen in countries where progressive-minded and frustrated millennials start to outnumber baby boomers – the same transition Britain is now quietly undergoing too.
Millennials are, of course, no longer the pesky kids of middle-aged imagination, but increasingly solid citizens in their 30s and early 40s. They already outnumber boomers in the global workforce and are old enough to be occupying increasingly senior jobs, from which they can start to set the office culture. In private life, they’re no longer footloose and fancy-free; plenty are parents now, wincing at rocketing nursery bills and poring anxiously over Ofsted reports. Some are homeowners worried that their mortgage is about to go through the roof, while others are renters despairing of being able to buy. And crucially, the next election will be the first at which British millennials are likely to make up a bigger share of the population than boomers.
This will remain an ageing country for years to come as those in the postwar generation work their way through from retirement into their 80s and 90s, but it’s millennials who will increasingly hold the balance of cultural and political power. Not so much a “youthquake”, perhaps, as youth hitting the age where they start to vote in reliably big numbers – just as it becomes increasingly obvious that the politics of nostalgia and resistance to change has dragged Britain down a pro-Brexit, anti-growth economic dead end. Could the so-called snowflake generation be about to start an avalanche?
The fact that 42-year-old Rishi Sunak is Britain’s first borderline millennial prime minister is a reminder not to make kneejerk assumptions about anyone’s politics based on their age. Plenty of boomers who grew up through the swinging 60s have stayed radical into retirement, and plenty of Americans under 30 still vote Republican. Nonetheless, the former Biden campaign adviser John Della Volpe calculated at the weekend that generation Z and younger millennials between them “cancelled out” the impact of boomers who would otherwise have swung midterm races against the Democrats. In Australia, where millennials and generation Z between them were expected to outnumber boomers on the electoral roll for the first time this year, younger voters’ attraction to independent and Green candidates helped trigger a swing away from mainstream parties that ultimately benefited Labor.
Whether they lean ideologically left, right, or somewhere more unexpected, this is a diverse and highly educated generation at ease with identity politics and inclined to roll its eyes at crude culture wars. They’re militantly in favour of housebuilding in their back yard, and increasingly vocal in favour of wealth taxes targeting the luxuries they can’t see themselves ever being able to afford – second homes, buy-to-let empires, share portfolios and generous pension pots – over steeper taxes on their stagnating wages. Even British millennials in good jobs, the sort who might once have turned quietly more conservative as they got older, feel more insecure financially than they might have expected to at their age. If they’re graduates paying back student loans, they’re already facing marginal tax rates of up to 50%, and Jeremy Hunt’s emergency fiscal package may leave them feeling even more squeezed. Meanwhile if house prices fall, as now seems inevitable, it’s millennials who have only recently clambered on to the property ladder who are most at risk of getting trapped in negative equity.
Boris Johnson did surprisingly well among older millennials in 2019; the average age at which people become more likely to vote Tory than Labour, which had hit 47 under Theresa May, fell to an unexpectedly young 39 at the last general election. But it has rocketed up again amid the economic fallout from Liz Truss’s disastrous six weeks in charge, and now the only age group in which the Tories have a narrow lead is the over-65s. The choices Hunt and Sunak will be forced to make this week between spending on pensioners or those of working age, taxing assets or taxing earnings, playing to the nimby gallery or pushing ahead with housebuilding and onshore windfarms, may well help determine whether 2024 is finally Britain’s millennial moment too.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
