ELECTION 2024
Politicians will soon be polishing their best shoes and dusting off their soapboxes for a general election. But what exactly are they promising and who really has the interests of older voters at heart? Senior MPs from the three main UK parties tell us their plans
This is an ‘election year’ although, curiously, by law it doesn’t have to be. The 2022 Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act lays down that a Parliament can sit for a maximum of five years. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak could therefore legally wait until the fifth anniversary of the 2019 election, on 12 December, to call a general election for – at the latest – 28 January 2025.
That would certainly put a dampener on the festive season for everyone involved, and it’s not very likely he will wait that long. Autumn is hotly anticipated, so by the time summer wanes and the last of the garden’s harvest is gathered in, manifestos will be published and campaigning will begin in earnest.
Every manifesto will have a whole section specifically directed at older voters, because the older a person is, the more likely they are to take the trouble to vote. At the last election, almost 80% of the over-65s voted, compared with barely half the under-35s.
The over-65s make up an estimated 23% of the total UK electorate of around 46 million. This matters, particularly for the Conservatives, because the ‘grey vote’ is overwhelmingly a Tory vote. Two out of three over-70s backed the Conservatives in 2019, according to a survey by YouGov. So, this year, Conservatives will battle very hard to hold on to the older vote, while the Liberal Democrats – the runners-up in 80 Tory-held seats in 2019 – will do their best to prise some of it off them by making social care a central theme of their campaign. Labour’s big challenge is to motivate the young to vote.
Both the Tory and Labour manifestos will be strong on themes but light on detail because the desirable outcomes they dangle before the voters’ eyes come at a cost, which is something they would prefer not to mention in an election year. Experience has taught politicians that the more precise they are about what they plan to do, the more they leave themselves open to attack.
A glaring example is the failure by either Labour or the Conservatives to come up with a solution to the ‘demographic time bomb’ that is social care. At a time when increasing numbers of us are living to a grand old age, there is a chronic shortage of staff to look after people.
In 2017, Theresa May led an ill-fated attempt to resolve this enormous problem by including in the Conservative manifesto an announcement that anyone with assets of more than £100,000 would have to contribute to their social care, which had serious implications for those with long-term conditions like dementia. It went down like a lea
