UNLESS SOMETHING VERY STRANGE happens over the next three or four days, Boris Johnson will win the UK General Election. One of the principal reasons he will do this is that British voters over 65 will – overwhelmingly – vote Tory. What’s more, their turnout will, almost certainly, be the highest of all the voter demographics. Certainly, Jeremy Corbyn enjoys tremendous support among 18-25 year-old English voters, but that support is unlikely to be translated into actual votes for Labour candidates. Electorate by electorate, the staunch support of elderly voters will be “wot wins it for Boris” – and Brexit.
The question that arises from this extraordinary consolidation of Tory support among the over-65s is: “What the hell happened to Labour’s voters as they aged?” For most of their lives, something approaching half of elderly Britons must have voted for the Labour Party. At some point in the last quarter-century, however, they stopped. For some reason – or clutch of reasons – they turned away from Labour (even its ultra-attenuated Blairite incarnation) and swung in solidly behind the Conservative Party. To date, there’s not been the slightest sign that any more than a handful of elderly voters are thinking of swinging back.
Is something similar happening here in New Zealand? Are elderly Kiwis turning their faces from the ideas and issues of the young? Safely tucked-up in their mortgage-free homes and retirement villages, have they simply decided that they want nothing more from politics than a rock-solid guarantee that what they have, they will keep? Politicians who insist on bothering them with tales of hardship, desperation and imminent planet-wide catastrophe – along with demands for higher taxes – should not expect to get their votes. Other people’s problems are … well … other people’s problems.
If older New Zealand voters have, indeed, swung sharply to the Right, like their British counterparts, then the unusual resilience of National Party support is explained. Acutely conscious of their financial precariousness, and baffled by the alien mindset of the young, the elderly’s enthusiasm for National’s traditional beliefs and values is readily understood. Unfortunately, for Simon Bridges, exactly the same factors are present in the equation that delivers elder support to NZ First.
In terms of political strategy, the need to retain the Senior vote more-or-less obliges National and NZ First to tailor their policies to the needs and prejudices of elderly electors. On the subject of cannabis law reform, for example, National’s leader and deputy-leader have been careful to draw a careful distinction between the consumption of marijuana for medicinal purposes, and its consumption purely for personal pleasure.
The contrast between National’s carefully nuanced approach to cannabis, and its ferocious hostility towards the gangs, is instructive. Comfortably-off members of the older generation, the people who always take great care to vote, tend to have almost no contact with – and even less sympathy for – the social and cultural milieu out of which gangs arise. Conservative politicians who promise to “get tough on gangs” have never wanted for an audience among the over-65s.
The phenomenon of social and cultural isolation is as crucial to the rightward drift of older Kiwis as it is to older Brits. In spite of the fact that so many of them have done extremely well out of the dramatic societal changes wrought by Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and by Roger Douglas, Ruth Richardson and Bill Birch here in New Zealand, those changes have, nevertheless, left a great many of those who grew up in pre-Thatcherite Britain and “Old” New Zealand feeling cast adrift, far from familiar shores.
In both countries, surging immigration has contributed mightily to the feeling many older people have of being “strangers in our own land”. Everyone who played a major role in the “Leave” campaign understood the centrality of immigration (and the cultural challenges it presented) to the outcome of the “Brexit” referendum. Similarly, National’s and NZ First’s strategists cannot help but be aware of how powerfully anti-immigrant rhetoric resonates with older New Zealanders. Their difficulty, like the difficulty paralysing the British Conservatives for the past 40 years, is how to reconcile the needs of a globalised market economy with the insular nationalism of so many older “native” voters.
The political developments of the last decade in the United States point the way for the conservative parties of the UK and New Zealand. In the US, the surge towards the populist Right, which installed Donald Trump in the White House, has swept away both the liberal and, at least rhetorically, the neoliberal, traditions of the Republican Party. To hold the elderly “Tea Party” vote (so crucial to the Trump’s electoral coalition) it has proved necessary to sanction a style of “nativist” and economically-nationalist politics not seen for many decades in the nations of the West. Even at a distance, one senses that something very similar is currently being attempted by the Conservatives. Where Nigel Farage has led, Boris Johnson looks set to follow.
Simon Bridges and Paula Bennett are thus faced with a critical strategic choice. Launch an all-out takeover bid for Winston Peters’ conservative supporters by liberating the National Party’s “inner-Trump” – a decision that would impose severe ideological strains internally. Or allow Peters to continue embarrassing and compromising his coalition partners by doing everything he can to shore up his fragile electoral base. Securing the support of older Kiwi voters, in the current political context, may turn out to be a task best suited to more than one conservative party. Easing up on Winston Peters may not make him like National any more than he does at present, but it could result in Labour and the Greens liking him a great deal less.