Political

People aged over 55 are likely to make up the majority of voters at next general election

Older people in a park
It’s traditional for politicians to talk about the importance of young people – and hence the fact that many Lib Dem leadership hustings have gone past with Norman Lamb and Tim Farron talking about young people yet mentioning pensioners not once.

There is, however, the inconvenient double whammy of older people being both numerous and more likely to vote.

As The Daily Telegraph reported:

People aged over 55 are likely to make up the majority of voters for the first time at the next general election.

House of Commons research shows there are likely to be three times as many voters who are over 55 years old, as those who are under 35, by the 2020 election.

Liam Byrne, a member of Labour’s Cabinet under Gordon Brown, who commissioned the research, found that there are likely to be 16.2 million over-55s – an increase of 1.5million.

Liam Byrne’s political answers to that fact may be anathema to many Liberal Democrats, but the fact applies just as much to vote-seeking Lib Dems as it does to vote-seeking Labour supporters.

Or rather, nearly as much but perhaps not quite so much, given that the possible core vote for the Liberal Democrats which David Howarth and I have identified in our recent pamphlet does skew notably towards younger people.

Even so, the less fashionable older person is best not forgotten. After all, Labour’s support shot up amongst young voters in 2015 and look where that left Ed Miliband.

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