For the first election in which she was old enough to vote, Robyn Lee was dragged to a polling station by her father. “There was a bit of a scare tactic,” she says. “ ‘If you don’t vote, then we might not get in.’ ”
Now 34, Lee, the managing director of an affordable housing company, from Hale, Greater Manchester, plans to keep up the habit on July 4, but she is unusual among her friends. “Most people I speak to aren’t voting,” she says. “The more common narrative at the moment is, ‘I’m not voting because I don’t know enough, and I can’t be bothered to find out more’.”
A mother of one — with another on the way — Lee admits that she is a “selfish voter”: matters that directly affect her family, such as childcare and pay, and therefore taxation, are likely to win her vote. The problem, as she sees it, is that some of her cohort aren’t selfish enough. “There isn’t enough exposure to young people on how politics actually affects you and how you spend your money. Otherwise, more would vote,” she says.
This should be the millennial election. For the first time in a polling year, those born between 1981 and 1996 make up the biggest population group in Britain. There are now 14.7 million millennials in Britain, compared with 13.9 million Gen Xers and 13.4 million baby boomers.
The typical 35-year-old has had a rough introduction to politics: if they voted with their generation, they would have lost four general elections and an EU referendum between 2010 and 2019. The average person born in 1955, by contrast, has backed the winner in every election in which they voted, a streak that stretches back, remarkably, to 1974.
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As Lord Willetts, the president of the Resolution Foundation, writes in The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future, being a big birth cohort has brought certain advantages. When they were young professionals, baby boomers benefited from Margaret Thatcher’s tax cuts; since 2010 their pensions have been boosted by the triple lock.
Now, thanks to the steady march of time and a little boost from net migration, millennials are on top. So what does this podcast-listening, children-rearing generation want from this election?
Generation misery
A lot of it boils down to economics. The working lives of members of this generation have been bookended by the financial crash and the coronavirus pandemic. Although most millennials have seen their salaries grow as they age, the income of today’s 35-year-olds is barely more than it was in 2008, once adjusted for inflation.
Students who attended university in 2012 or afterwards have to pay an additional marginal tax rate of 9 per cent. They are now having children in one of the most expensive countries in the world. “They have had quite a lot of misery,” notes Luke Tryl, the UK director of the think tank More In Common.
Last month, More In Common asked 2,000 voters from different generations what issues would have an impact on their vote. Seventy-three per cent of millennials said “cost of living” — more than any other generation. And, unlike Britain as a whole, they are more concerned about affordable housing than levels of immigration.
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Millennials are still likely to become a generation of homeowners — more than half already are — yet it has taken them much longer than baby boomers to get there.
Many have big mortgages that were acquired during the low interest rates of the 2010s and have since seen their repayments soar. Meanwhile, nearly 27 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds and 11 per cent of 30 to 34-year-olds still live with their parents, according to the 2021 census.
Milton Keynes, a “new town” founded in 1967 and famous for its roundabouts, has become a flashpoint for housing in this election. In March, a new housing plan by the Labour-led council suggested 63,000 homes could be built in the surrounding area, including a new town of 12,000 homes near the picturesque village of Castlethorpe.
Ben Everitt, the 44-year-old Conservative candidate for Milton Keynes North, has vowed to do “everything in my power” to protect residents from Labour’s “reckless” plans.
Hoping to defeat him in the general election is 31-year-old Chris Curtis, a former pollster. “I’m part of that generation that has been let down by the Conservatives,” he says, on a busy morning of campaigning. “I haven’t managed to get on the housing ladder, and very few of my friends have.”
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Despite Labour’s national momentum, more local housebuilding can be a difficult sell on the doorstep, even in an area with a younger median age than the rest of the country. “Voters are completely right to demand from their MP that infrastructure comes alongside new houses and the expansion of the city,” Curtis adds. “The problem is, we’ve had 14 years of that failing to be delivered.”
As millennials have aged, their concerns have matured. Charlotte Nichols, 33, who is hoping to be returned as Labour’s MP for Warrington North after being elected in 2019, says: “You have this perfect storm of policies at a time when millennials are having to make decisions on whether or not they can afford to start a family. These things can’t be ignored any more. Now that this demographic of voters has come to maturity, there’s a lot more demand on what they expect from politics.”
But what intergenerational warfare often misses is that each cohort is not a homogeneous block. Some millennials have done reasonably well. Mark Guest, 30, works for a private equity fund and bought his first flat in Peckham, southeast London, last year. “Now I’ve bought, suddenly I don’t want the 20-storey flats built next door that’s going to spoil my view,” he jokes.
He has been on something of a political journey: had he been old enough in 2010, he would have “probably voted Tory” because of their aspirational message. He backed the Liberal Democrats in 2015, mainly because he thought the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, was too close to the unions, voted Remain in 2016 and for the Lib Dems a further two times, largely because he didn’t want to vote for the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. This time, though, he will vote Labour.
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“[Labour] did the opposite of the Tories: they have come back from their fringes towards the centre. I don’t think it’s going to be all sugar rainbows and happy valleys — [Sir Keir Starmer] has got some big problems to solve, and I don’t really know if he can — but on balance it’s an absolute drop in the ocean compared with how Boris [Johnson] behaved during Covid.”
A blown majority
If generations were political parties, then, on population alone in England and Wales, millennials would be the largest in the Commons, with 238 seats, compared with 123 baby boomer constituencies.
Yet from national service to quadruple pension locks, the campaign has yet to reflect that. There are two main reasons.
First, because Labour is so far ahead in the polls, the “front line” of marginal constituencies that could swing either way is now much higher up the age gradient. Whereas Johnson’s Tories were at least competitive among voters in their thirties and forties, the crossover point — at which ageing voters become more likely to back the Conservatives over Labour — has risen from 45 to about 68.
Experts normally talk about key constituencies rather than age cohorts, but a higher crossover point affects election strategy. Rather than make a hopeless plea for millennial voters, Sunak must shore up his older, baby boomer base — and he may even lose that too.
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For millennial would-be Labour voters, though, the campaign can feel alienating. Billie Dee Fortune, 34, from Walthamstow in northeast London, will break her family’s Labour-voting habit this time and back the Greens. “I cancelled my membership a few years ago because [Labour] no longer felt like a left-wing party,” says the PR consultant.
But she calls herself a reluctant Green voter. “I will do so begrudgingly in the hope of doing something to try to shift the ridiculously two-party system that has seen British politics descend into corruption, laziness and apathy,” she says.
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Indeed, the second, bigger reason why this may not be the millennial election after all is that they are set to throw away their electoral advantage. At the 2019 election, only 54 per cent of millennials voted, compared with 73 per cent of baby boomers.
If that pattern is repeated at the next election, millennials — the most populous generation — will be only the third-largest voting group. The early signs are not great: only 74 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds are registered to vote, according to the Electoral Commission, compared with 96 per cent of over-65s. Or, put another way, the number of 60-year-olds registered to vote is 20 per cent higher than the number of 30-year-olds, according to the Resolution Foundation.
Participation rates have scarcely improved since the first millennials voted in 2001 and 2005. One theory is that turnout is usually low in elections when a landslide is expected, but then those practices become embedded among voters who simply did not vote at their first opportunity.
Yet another voting gap might help explain why millennials are less likely to vote. Using British Election Study data, if we adjust for homeownership, the turnout age gap drastically shrinks. Homeowners aged 18 to 39 are much more likely to vote than renters aged 40 or over.
Could lower homeownership rates really prove a barrier to voting? Private renters move around more frequently than homeowners and must do more administrative work to get on the system. Only 65 per cent of private renters are registered to vote, compared with 88 per cent who own their home with a mortgage.
But there may also be a social element: as well as securing stability, studies show that when people buy a home, they naturally feel more attachment to their area and their community.
Representation
Millennials may not be able to make their generational advantage this time — yet with homeownership rates rising and the slow passage of time, their dominance will surely come.
And among younger would-be MPs, there remains hope that pro-childcare and housing policies may be front and centre of any new government’s offering.
For one thing, because the age of the typical MP often falls after a landslide, the Commons is about to get a whole lot more millennials.
Getting them in the room is “hugely important” for representation, says Nichols, who was something of an outlier when she was elected aged 28. “If you’re an MP in your sixties and that’s the age of your social circle, you’re more likely to be focused towards the issues that affect them.”
At some time during the past five years, “millennial” went from a byword for wayward youth to a large army of disenchanted grown-ups. Millennial voices are being taken seriously in a way they were not ten years ago, says Bobby Dean, 34, who is hoping to become the Lib Dem MP for Carshalton & Wallington in southwest London (his dog, Chester, he jokes, has received more attention on the campaign trail than he has).
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“Sadly, we have a weird political thing about being quite dismissive of young people and I think, actually, the emergence of Gen Z as a proper cohort has helped lift the millennials away from being just these young people we can ignore,” he says.
Even before the election, there were tentative signs of a changing generational focus: the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, targeted £900 in tax cuts aimed at working people rather than pensioners. A Conservative spokesman said that the party was delivering for “hard-working people of all ages” and had delivered the “largest ever expansion” of childcare, adding: “We are delivering a brighter and more secure future for you and your children.”
If the polls are correct, millennials’ losing streak will end on July 4. Well over half will back Labour — and a new government is expected to be more millennial-friendly than its predecessors. Just don’t expect millennials to dominate the next five weeks.
Millennials won’t be talked about as “targets”, says Professor Tim Bale, of Queen Mary University of London, and won’t get as much attention as Gen Z or baby boomers. “They are who most of any potential government’s bog-standard, bread-and-butter policies are aimed at helping. Millennials are hiding in plain sight.”
