Young people led surge for smaller parties but no Reform ‘youthquake’, says UK election survey

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Stuart Fox, University of Exeter

One of the defining features of contemporary electoral politics in Britain is the age divide. Young people are far more likely to support Labour, and older people to support the Conservatives. This divide is still apparent following the 2024 election – but it hides the complexity of how young people in particular choose to vote.

To the extent that there is a “youth vote” in Britain, it is characterised not by support for a single party, but by a particularly fierce rejection of the Conservatives – alongside greater enthusiasm than their elders for left-wing, socially liberal alternatives to Labour.

YouGov surveyed 2,182 adults of all ages between July 5 and 8 for my research team at the University of Exeter. The sample was selected to be representative of the British adult population.

The data from this survey – published here for the first time – gives a snapshot of how people of different ages say they cast their votes. Five per cent of our respondents under 30 didn’t tell us how they voted so we don’t know how their votes might have changed the overall picture. More research in the coming months may give a fuller account.

As the graph below shows, it’s only among the over-65s that the Conservatives won more support than Labour (by around 26 percentage points). They trailed Labour by around 8 points among the 51-64 age group, 26 points among 30- to 50-year-olds, and 35 points among the under-30s. Almost incredibly for Britain’s oldest and most successful political party, the Conservatives won barely 7% of the vote of under-30s in the survey.

Parties voted for by age group:

Bar chart showing vote choice by age group. Source: YouGov for University of Exeter, 5-7 July 2024., CC BY-NC-ND

Another key characteristic of the 2024 election is the record-low combined vote share for Labour and the Conservatives, and concurrent record-high vote share for smaller parties. This was not a blip. Voters have been steadily shifting away from the two major parties for years. But in 2024, the extent to which they did so was unprecedented: overall, the combined Labour/Tory vote share was just 57%.

The rejection of the major parties is most profound among young voters. Their support has become fragmented to such an extent that it is not really accurate to speak of a singular “youth vote”. Less than half (49%) of under-30s surveyed voted for Labour or the Conservatives. This compares to 54% of 30- to 50-year-olds, 55% of 51- to 64-year-olds, and 60% of over-65s.

The combined vote share for smaller parties among the under-30s was greater – at 46% – than the 42% who voted for the Labour party. The most successful challengers to the major parties for the youth vote were the Greens and Liberal Democrats, each of whom were backed by 15% of under-30s in the survey.

“Others” – including the Scottish National Party, Plaid Cymru and independents – won a combined 10% of votes from young respondents aged under 30. But the young people surveyed were not simply casting around for any alternative to the major parties. Just 6% of under-30s in the survey said they backed Reform UK (compared with 17% among the over-50s).


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No Reform youthquake

In the closing days of the campaign, there was some suspicion that Reform might achieve a “mini youthquake” in this election or the next. A JLPartners poll found that Reform appealed strongly to soon-to-be-enfranchised 16- and 17-year-old voters, and mock school elections apparently saw Reform winning a great deal of support among schoolchildren across the country.

Our data suggests this did not materialise in 2024. Reform has had some success in appealing to young voters: among under-30s from poorer households, for example, 13% said they supported Reform, compared with 4% for those from wealthier households.

However, similar proportions of under-30s from poorer households also said they voted for the Liberal Democrats (11%) and the Greens (14%). While voters in older age groups who were fed up of Labour and the Conservatives were more likely to switch to Reform and may do so again in future, among the under-30s such voters appeared more likely to switch to the Liberal Democrats, Greens and nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales.

Turnout

Turnout is a crucial issue when considering how young people vote. They have always been less likely to vote than their elders in any particular election. This owes primarily to lower levels of political interest, as well as circumstances associated with early adulthood such as being financially precarious and being less settled in one location. This was true in 2024 as well.

The graph below shows self-reported turnout by age group. The figures are substantially higher than the true turnout numbers, reflecting the long-established tendency of people to exaggerate their voting behaviour in surveys, but they clearly illustrate the age divide: under-30s were the group most likely to say they hadn’t voted.

Turnout by age group:

Bar chart showing turnout by age group and socioeconomic group
YouGov for University of Exeter, 5-7 July 2024., CC BY-NC-ND

The graph shows not only was the turnout of under-30s lower than that of older age groups, but that of under-30s from poorer households was particularly low. Young people from poorer backgrounds are less likely to vote than their predecessors were 30 years ago, and so are under-represented in elections to an even greater extent today.

People who vote during early adulthood establish habits that make them likely to vote for the rest of their lives. Those who don’t form such habits by their late 20s are likely to remain serial abstainers.

Younger generations are becoming increasingly unlikely to vote in their first election, leading a greater proportion of them to develop lasting habits of non-voting.

It is this tendency that lies behind one of the major democratic challenges facing the UK: rising levels of disengagement with politics and with voting, as younger people age but continue their youthful pattern of avoiding the ballot box.

Stuart Fox, Lecturer in British Politics, University of Exeter

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingYoung people led surge for smaller parties but no Reform ‘youthquake’, says UK election survey

Renationalising water could fix sewage crisis – but no major party will do it

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Dead fish on the Silchester Brook in Hampshire, England following the release of sewage by a water treatment works. Rob Read/Alamy Stock Photo

Kevin Grecksch, University of Oxford

Privatised water companies discharged raw sewage into rivers and the sea around England and Wales for 3.6 million hours in 2023 – double the previous year’s total. For a sense of how bad the problem is today, check this map of the south-east of the UK which shows how much sewage water companies are dumping right now and for how long.

As a water researcher, I am happy to see water quality high on the political agenda but aggrieved that it is because of the sewage scandal that has engulfed the UK, and especially England and Wales, in the past couple of years.

Companies have discharged more raw sewage than they are legally allowed to and the Environment Agency, as responsible regulator in England, has been unable to monitor and control offenders as its environmental protection budget was halved between 2010 and 2020. Water firms have neglected to invest in new and enlarged wastewater treatment works for decades and so the ageing system is struggling to meet demand.

An angry public demands cleaner water and changes to how water companies are regulated and run. All major political parties have at least something to say about it in their pitch to voters ahead of July 4 general election.

No clear blue water between Tories and Labour

The Conservative party doesn’t mention the word “sewage” in its manifesto. The party instead highlights what it sees as the government’s achievements in reducing leaks from water pipes, preventing supply interruptions and raising the proportion of designated bathing water sites classified as “good” or “excellent” from 76% in 2010 to 90% in 2023.

These “achievements” are misleading, however. Most of the 451 designated bathing water sites are around the coast, not rivers. Bathing sites only occupy a small stretch of a river (of which many are rated poorly) and most sewage dumpings take place elsewhere along the river, which is not accounted for in the statistics the Tories present.

The party would ban executive bonuses if companies commit a serious criminal breach (dumping sewage, for example) and use fines to invest in river restoration. The Tories evidently expect pollution to keep increasing. Forget working on the cause of the problem and preventing “serious criminal breaches” from happening in the first place.

A river with a murky surface.
Surface pollution on the Leeds and Liverpool canal. AlanMorris/Shutterstock

The Labour party has said it will force water companies to “clean up our rivers” by putting them under “special measures” but does not explain what this means. Like the Conservatives, Labour wants to impose fines on water companies, block the bonuses of executives and improve independent monitoring. Again, Labour offers no further detail on what that would entail.

This is in stark contrast to election campaigns fought under Jeremy Corbyn, when Labour argued for renationalising the water industry.

Both Labour and the Tories propose fines which have proven to be no deterrent. The Environment Agency fined Southern Water – the company that provides water and wastewater services to more than four million people across Hampshire, Sussex and Kent – a record £90 million in 2021, yet illegal sewage discharges by water companies have only increased since then.

Ultimately, fines are a capitulation before the real problem of preventing illegal sewage discharges.

Lib Dems a bit bolder

Banning water companies from dumping raw sewage into rivers and giving them a duty to protect the environment is the goal of the Liberal Democrats.

The Lib Dems want to transform water companies into public benefit companies (but there’s no explanation of how these would differ from their present privatised form) and would ban bonuses for water company executives until rivers are clean (but there’s no definition of “clean”).

Ofwat, the economic regulator for the water industry, would be replaced with a new regulator with powers to prevent sewage dumping. The party also wants a sewage tax on water company profits to enforce existing regulations more effectively, set legally binding targets on the reduction of sewage dumping, create wetlands to stymie flooding and strengthen local authorities monitoring water quality – it’s unclear how this would meld with a “tough new regulator”, though.

Greens are pro-nationalisation

The Green party wants to bring water services back into public ownership along with Britain’s big five energy companies.

The Greens are the only ones putting numbers to the problem. The party estimates renationalisation would cost £5 billion and investment into water and sewage infrastructure a further £12 billion.

The experiment of privatisation has failed, they argue, and water should be treated as a public good.

Reform’s 50% offer

Reform UK does not mention the sewage scandal directly, but its manifesto proposes bringing 50% of each utility back into public hands. According to the party, this would save £5 billion across all utilities over five years.

Welsh water for Wales

Plaid Cymru wants more public control of Welsh resources, including water.

Lots of water stored in Welsh reservoirs goes to England, especially Birmingham and Liverpool. Plaid Cymru would align legislative competence over water with the geographical boundaries of Wales. In other words, Wales wants to fully take care of its water and improve its quality.

Drought in 2022 made the case for more reservoirs. EPA-EFE/Tolga Akmen

What about Scotland and Northern Ireland?

The SNP does not mention freshwater in its manifesto. Sewage dumping appears to be less common in Scotland, where the water industry is publicly owned. However, reports suggest official estimates are too low.

Northern Ireland’s Sinn Féin does not discuss water in its manifesto. The DUP acknowledges pollution in the UK’s largest inland lake, Lough Neagh, and asks for a concerted effort to preserve its water quality.

Watered down

The smaller parties have my sympathies for bringing forward bolder plans for water management in the UK. Unfortunately, both the Conservatives and Labour are very uninspiring in their hesitance to prevent pollution.

If better regulation, monitoring and enforcement is the most a new UK government will do then this will require a bigger budget for the Environment Agency, at least. Measuring the volume and composition of sewage outflows, not just the duration of pollution events, would also provide more accurate information.

Ofwat, the economic regulator for the water industry, needs reform too. The UK water industry is slow to innovate and misses opportunities to do so. As I have written before, the UK water industry is a small sector with a revolving door that leads former regulators to join the regulated, and vice versa. This creates obvious conflicts of interest and stymies change.

The experience of England and Wales implies that privatised water utilities are a bad idea. Margaret Thatcher believed this model would find admirers globally, but since the late 1980s, no other country has followed suit. In fact, the opposite has tended to happen: after a failed privatisation, Paris returned its water supply services to public hands.

Privatisation has excluded the public from discussing water management in the past 35 years. It is time to reconnect people with the very resource we all need to survive. Capping a CEO’s bonus does not go far enough.


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Kevin Grecksch, Departmental Lecturer and Course Director MSc in Water Science, Policy and Management, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Continue ReadingRenationalising water could fix sewage crisis – but no major party will do it

Manifesto Scorecard: Environmental groups slam Tories’ green plans

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Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil's You May Find Yourself... art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.
Image of InBedWithBigOil by Not Here To Be Liked + Hex Prints from Just Stop Oil’s You May Find Yourself… art auction. Featuring Rishi Sunak, Fossil Fuels and Rupert Murdoch.

https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4326141/manifesto-scorecard-environmental-slam-tories-green-plans

… UK political parties’ plans for climate and the environment have been jointly assessed by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth in a new election scorecard published today, which ranks Labour far ahead of the Conservatives across all key green policy categories.

Published just 10 days before voters head to the polls on July 4th, the scorecard assesses the LabourConservativeLiberal Democrat and Green Party manifestos released in the past fortnight against 40 policy recommendations set out by the two environmental campaign groups.

Overall, the Green Party topped the league table with a near-perfect 39 score out of a possible 40 recommended policies, ahead of the Liberal Democrats in second place with 31.5.

Labour, meanwhile, scored 20.5 against the 40 green policy recommendations, over four times higher than the Conservatives’ which scored only five points.

https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4326141/manifesto-scorecard-environmental-slam-tories-green-plans

Rishi Sunak on stopping Rosebank says that any chancellor can stop his huge 91% subsidy to build Rosebank, that Keir Starmer is as bad as him for sucking up to Murdoch and other plutocrats and that we (the plebs) need to get organised to elect MPs that will stop Rosebank.
Rishi Sunak on stopping Rosebank says that any chancellor can stop his huge 91% subsidy to build Rosebank, that Keir Starmer is as bad as him for sucking up to Murdoch and other plutocrats and that we (the plebs) need to get organised to elect MPs that will stop Rosebank.

Continue ReadingManifesto Scorecard: Environmental groups slam Tories’ green plans

BRITAIN SPENDS £12,000 A MINUTE ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS

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https://www.declassifieduk.org/britain-spends-12000-a-minute-on-nuclear-weapons/

Britain tested nuclear weapons in the Pacific in the 1950s. (Photo: Yui Mok / Alamy)

The lavish spending would continue under Labour.

Britain spends a larger portion of its military budget on nuclear weapons than any other state, a major report published today reveals.

Rishi Sunak’s government is putting 12 per cent of defence expenditure – equivalent to £12,000 every minute – towards the UK’s arsenal of at least 225 warheads.

Sunak increased spending on nuclear weapons last year by 17 per cent to £6.5 billion – a greater increase than any other nuclear power except the US. 

Over the last five years UK expenditure rose by a staggering 43 per cent.

The startling figures appear in new research by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a widely respected group that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

ICAN calculates that Britain is the world’s fourth highest spender on nuclear weapons after the US, China and Russia.

Nuclear Starmer

The group’s report comes at a time when the Labour leadership is championing nuclear weapons. The party’s manifesto states: “Our commitment to the UK’s nuclear deterrent is absolute.”

This spending commitment is in stark contrast to Keir Starmer’s extreme caution when it comes to investing in public services. 

The party describes the “independent nuclear deterrent” as “the bedrock of Labour’s plan to keep Britain safe”.

However, it is far from independent. Regular flights from the US carry material that are essential ingredients of Britain’s Trident nuclear missile system.

A Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA) between Britain and the US enshrines Whitehall’s reliance on the Pentagon for essential technology. 

The agreement, which is due to be renewed this year, is incorporated in US law. Yet it has no legal status in Britain and has never been the subject of a substantial debate or vote in parliament.

The Liberal Democrats’ policy is identical to those of the Conservatives and Labour, saying they will “maintain the UK’s nuclear deterrent with four submarines providing continuous at-sea deterrence”. 

The Scottish National Party has a long record of being opposed to nuclear weapons, which it says are “wrong strategically, morally and financially.” 

It adds that it supports long-term investment in the Trident submarine base in Faslane as a conventional military base.

The Green party says it would “dismantle Britain’s entire Trident nuclear deterrent and remove all foreign nuclear weapons from UK soil.”

https://www.declassifieduk.org/britain-spends-12000-a-minute-on-nuclear-weapons/

Continue ReadingBRITAIN SPENDS £12,000 A MINUTE ON NUCLEAR WEAPONS