Pensioner poverty is at a new high – so why are older people still voting Tory? | Polly Toynbee

To solve this crisis, we need to share some of the unearned wealth of richer pensioners with those who need it most

It’s happening again: elderly people suddenly getting poorer. Since the dawn of time, to be old was to be poor. Workhouses were abandoned not out of revulsion at their practices, but because virtually everyone in them became too old and sick to work. William Beveridge’s state pension was universal partly because many old people were too poor to be worth means-testing.

An under-heralded success of the Brown and Blair years was to lift so many older people out of poverty that by 2010, for the first time ever, pensioners were less likely to be poor than the rest of the population. Some still fell below the threshold, but the number was too small to tilt the statistics. Still, there’s no gratitude in politics, so it didn’t stop them voting Tory in ever greater numbers with each year of ageing. In 2019, 64% of over-65s voted Tory, compared with just 19% of under 24s. Age only became the strongest predictor of voting after 1980, when those two-thirds of older people turned less generous and redistribution-minded than older cohorts before them.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist