The great greying of the British right

Why are none of the Conservative leadership candidates talking about the economy? It’s down to a self-fulfilling cycle of pandering to pensioners and alienating younger workers, says Kristian Niemietz

The Tory Party’s leadership campaign has so far heavily focused on culture war issues. 

I don’t mean this in a pejorative way. We are in a culture war, and it matters. But given the nature of their defeat in last July’s election, I would have thought that there had to be room for at least one outspoken “It’s the economy, stupid!” candidate. 

Britain’s economic performance since the Financial Crisis has been abysmal. Real median earnings for people in full-time work have still not fully recovered their 2008 level. That is an absolutely damning statistic, even if it is somewhat balanced out by the fact that more people are in work due to strong labour market performance. If I were a Tory, it would be my absolute top priority to credibly distance myself from the policies that led to the economic stagnation of the last 14 years and come up with a prosperity-boosting agenda. 

The Conservatives have always had the problem that they were seen as less caring and compassionate than their opponents. But for a long time they were able to compensate for that because people did associate them with economic competence. You can get away with being seen as a heartless bastard as long as you are the kind of heartless bastard who delivers the goods. But when you are seen as a heartless bastard who is also a useless bastard – that’s when you have a problem. 

With that in mind: why do today’s Conservatives show so little interest in economics? 

Maybe the answer has more to do with demographics than ideology. One of the major political developments of the 2010s was that age has become the single best predictor of a person’s political views. Political dividing lines now run largely along rather across generational lines. 

In the last election, only one in five people under the age of 40 voted for a right-wing party (the Conservatives or Reform UK). Among voters over the age of 60, a clear majority did. This represents a major change compared to the early 2010s, when support for right-wing parties was still relatively evenly distributed across all generations. Back then, one in three younger voters supported the Conservatives, a share which the party could not even dream of today. 

Pandering to pensioners

The political right in Britain has become the preserve of pensioners. They are now a two-generation project: a project of the Silent Generation (people born 1928-1945) and the Baby Boomers (people born 1946-1965). 

Inevitably, this has changed the character of the right. There is some evidence (though contested and not fully understood) that ageing societies become less economically innovative. Could something similar not also be true of political projects with an ageing support base? 

Now, please don’t respond: “Oh, so what you’re saying is, pensioners don’t care about the economy??”. What I am saying is that our political priorities are affected by the stage of our lives we are at. If you are no longer part of the active workforce, or if you are already planning your exit from it, it would be quite understandable if economic dynamism was no longer your top concern. You might prefer tranquillity, stability and familiarity. Your first reaction to plans to open, say, a data centre, a film studio or a housing development in your area might not be to jump up and down with joy, in anticipation of the hustle and bustle it will bring. Thatcherism would probably not have happened in this way if Mrs Thatcher had relied exclusively on the pensioner vote. 

So how did the great greying of the British right happen?

It is probably the result of a self-reinforcing spiral. In the early 2010s, the Conservatives decided to prioritise the wishes of older Nimbys over housing affordability and economic growth. Most younger people may not have followed those political decisions in detail, but they sure did notice the results, namely, a stagnant economy with runaway housing costs. They blamed the Conservatives for this (not wrongly), and became more hostile to them. The Conservatives, in turn, started to write off younger voters as a lost cause, and retreated even further into their comfort zone: pandering to old Nimbys. Which then reinforced the problems – economic stagnation and house price inflation – that turned young people against the Conservatives. And so on. 

Whoever wins the leadership election will have to find a way to break out of that spiral – or it will become the party’s death spiral. 

Kristian Niemietz is head of political economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs