Coherent stories feel truer than messy reality.
More quotesIn 1974, a British voter’s class told you a great deal about their likely ballot. White-collar professionals leaned heavily Conservative; manual workers and the unemployed leaned heavily Labour. By 2017, that division had flattened and age separated the parties far more sharply. The numbers describe a major change. They do not grant permission to replace one lazy cartoon with another.
“The working class” once allowed politicians to flatten millions of people into one type. Now “the young” and “the old” perform the same cheap trick. A 70-year-old renter in poor health, a 70-year-old landlord with three houses and a 70-year-old caring for a spouse share a birthday range. Their material interests differ. The same goes for a 30-year-old graduate in London, a parent working shifts in Hull and somebody who inherited a mortgage-free house in Surrey.
Age often carries other facts with it: property, pensions, debt, education, geography, media habits and memories of previous governments. Those are possible causes. Treating age itself as the cause stops the analysis at a convenient correlation.
Cohorts also carry their history forward. A person turning seventy in 2057 will have lived through different housing costs, jobs, technologies and crises from somebody who was seventy in 2017. The birthdays match; the accumulated conditions do not. Any campaign built from “people over sixty-five want X” needs to specify which people, living where, owning what, relying on which income and facing which immediate decision. Those answers vary across constituencies and change over time.