Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, but any look at voting demographics shows people of your generation and older are fare more likely to vote tory and brexit than people born after the 1970s. Comparing the how people voted a generation ago, in 1997, or in 1979, and age is a far larger indicator
As is always the way when you make people vote on a specific Thursday when many people are busy juggling getting kids to/from school, themselves to work, and cooking dinner. Historically of course Thursday was pension day when the pensioners were all out to get their pension anyway.
In 1979 it was 42/45 for under 25s - 7% below average, and 47/45 for over 55s, 5% over average.
in 1997, over 65s voted 36% Tory vs 31% nationally - 16% above average. Under 24s voted 27%, 13% below average.
In 2019, over 65s voted 64% Tory vs average 45%. That's 42% above average. Meanwhile under 25s voted 19% tory, 38% under average.
That's a massive increase in age polarisation in just 22 years and increasing even more over 40. That is not a good thing.
One explanation or at least a factor I've observered is those with money (be that a house/assets or savings) tend towards voting for a Concervative goverment over a Labour goverment as they feel they better serve them financialy. Equally those less off (not hard these days) tend to lean towards Labour who they view more able to help those less off. So you get people who will lean one way and in later life, lean another way in general (not excluding other parties, mearly the CON/LAB core parties that have been the mainstay for generations).
But for the country, well, you need a full chest of tools, the hammer, the saw etc, yet stuck with a political system that offers you a limited choice of tool to pick and you can only use that for 5 years. So you end up with a flip, flop with one party in power for a while, then the other. It's how it goes.
In our local council elections, less than 50% voted and even then, voting like many others was a political voice against the current goverment over who should help run their local council and services for the next 4 years. Which again is testiment into how little accountable voice and say in what goes on that we the public have.
Personaly I would love to see an end of the party system. All MP's independent and those elected can truely voice for who they represent. Those elected then amongst themselves elect a goverment and we get the best of the best. Certainly be more demoractic and representative.
This whole party system has past it's time it's just rabble rabble playground point scoring more than doing the job right by the people they represent. They take second place to the party, which is in many ways akin to football supporters of the 80's in many ways a reflection upon the supporters today if you view the twitter landscape.
Imagine if you got to vote upon somebody based upon what they could do for you and not some sense of fan for life team supporter blindly ticking a box without a care in the world.
Would the political system be any worse if we scrapped the party system and all MP's were independant and the goverment formed via a vote amongst those elected MP's - they could even have an enclave and coloured smoke if they want some pomp , though hard to change a system that by it's very nature would mean it's own demise as it is currently. A party based political system.
I'd be more interested in why those who don't vote, didn't bother? That's the real crime today in the political system. Whoever they vote, maybe they could change the law? But focus upon why they don't vote is probably key to a fairer democratic system. That is probably the most important thing. May well be many young people feel that none of the party's fit their needs. Well even a spoilt ballet is counted and that is democracy over not voting at all.
After all - was Richard Prior wrong in the film Brewsters Millions when he said vote none of the above! As you get older, and look at the larger picture you feel it's not far off the mark, more so at times than others.
But then, watching the House of Lords is in contrast to the commons a whole level of decorum and civility and discourse without any of that political party rabble rabble. So it does show, debate can be done civil in goverment, albeiet by a group of people who are not elected by the people! Which is probably a whole level of debate that scares me at this hour.
Voting Tory is a minority position however you count it: no government has had even 50% of the votes cast (let alone the votes of those eligible to vote) for decades. Brexit meets the first 'majority' criterion, but not the second.
It is entirely possible to be pro-Tory and pro-Brexit while being anti-xenophobia. But the Conservatives have been carefully-mining the anti-foreigner vote for decades (as did New Labour) and it's not plausible to argue that Brexit would have won without that sentiment: it was too large a part of the expressed reasoning of Brexit voters as a group when polled.
The real loss here has been the AV referendum in 2011. It blows my mind how dense the electorate was for keeping the FPTP system.
Now the Tories have realized that they can spew bullshit lies and win an election with minimal consequences. They also have discovered how much easier it is to game the damn failing electoral system. (e.g. in Cam I have seen Tory pamphlets pushing for Lib Dems or Labour just to split the left vote).
New Labour mined the anti-foreigner vote? Are you actually from the UK? New Labour was famously pro open borders. They deliberately opened the immigration floodgates as much as possible, for instance, one reason there was so much immigration from eastern Europe to the UK when Poland etc joined the EU is because the UK was one of only two countries that didn't immediately utilize the 'transitional controls' mechanism to keep immigration restrictions in place. Despite the EU's rhetoric about open borders and such at the time, in reality most countries didn't want to be flooded with cheap ex-eastern bloc labour. UK under the self-proclaimed Labour party did.
Notoriously, a few years ago a former advisor to Blair went on record to say that New Labour deliberately encouraged as much immigration as possible in order to "rub the Right's nose in diversity", and:
"He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".
It's really difficult to reconcile this history with the ideas you're expressing above. Far from "carefully mining the anti foreigner vote for decades" they were explicitly undermining it by hiding the true extent of what they were doing.
Yes, they pursued migration because they considered it to be economically beneficial. But their electoral coalition also included groups which disliked it - retirees in particular, and some parts of the older white working class vote too as you note. So the action to increase 'good' migration was never really openly argued for as a public good (your quote is from an advisor, and would never have been released at the time) while being matched with Mail-placating rhetoric on asylum designed to separate the idea of deserving and undeserving migrants and demonstrate 'getting tough' on those who were sufficiently unpopular. There was a huge increase in the use of immigration detention, for example, and the deliberate destitution of many asylum seekers as a means of appearing tough. As with many New Labour policy areas, the aim was not to get the policy 'right' and leave it, but to keep the issue live to generate a steady series of headlines indicating that something was being done. Criminal justice policy was similar, with more than one reform bill a year for most of the period of the government.
So overall, I don't see deliberately increasing migration and deliberately using dehumanising rhetoric and policy changes against (some) immigrants to shore up electoral support as being at odds. The current government is strong on anti-tax rhetoric whilst presiding over heavy tax rises. Labour wanted immigration to keep wages low and increase growth. It also wanted the votes of people who wouldn't want that. So it did the former fairly quietly, while performatively stoking up the Home Office's capacity for villainy. So is modern politics.
(FWIW 'Floodgates' is itself somewhat dehumanising, I think: people aren't an undifferentiated mass threatening to overwhelm the boat, they're just people. 'Gates' would have done just fine.)
