The concept of divide and rule has been an effective tool of governance since ancient times. This is what came to mind as I sat in a break-out session entitled “Tackling the challenges faced by older women” at this year’s Labour women’s conference. The fact is that the struggles those of us on the left hold dear – tackling inequalities in health, education, income and housing – are a worry for us all, young and old, working- and middle-class, black or white. We will have to bust the myths that pit us against each other when, in truth, we share a common enemy – the 1% and a government that is happy to brazenly transfer public wealth into private hands.
We often discuss the “generational divide” in a polarising way. Young and old are presented as having incompatible and conflicting interests, the issues that affect us as necessarily separate. The reality is that they are connected and the distinctions are false.
When, for example, we look at the crisis in housing and care together, we can see that they are two sides of the same coin. Both are rooted in Conservative policies of privatisation. Between 1979 and 1990, Margaret Thatcher presided over the sale of 1.5m council homes. Now, though UK landlords constitute only 2% of the adult population, they own one in every five of our homes. We are in the midst of unprecedented rent rises. The picture is not dissimilar when we look at care. A proposed 40% cut to local council budgets has speeded up the contraction of state provision. Care is a sector already overrun with private companies and will become more so. The not-for-profit organisation Paying for Care estimates that on average families can expect to pay £28,500 a year in residential care costs. This amount rises to £37,500 a year for nursing care. And yet the average pay for a care worker is £6.79 an hour: we are reminded that care is a cost-cutting, profit-making business. As with housing, it is those of us at the middle and bottom of society that lose out.
Older voters have been presented as sacred cows left unscathed during a painful period of austerity. As a result, the young are supposed to resent them for their free university education, pensions and dirt-cheap homes. It’s a generational divide further reinforced by our suspicion that Conservative policies cynically serve an elderly population with a 78% voter turnout.
Jeremy Corbyn’s rise may well have been propelled by a groundswell of support from the young: those previously disaffected who are now hopeful of seeing real change. Yet galvanising votes from this age bracket should include a discussion of how their particular austerity woes are linked to those of others.
Headlines such as “How baby boomers screwed their kids – and created millennial impatience” and “Did the over-45s ruin life for the rest of us?” abound. They represent the sort of misdirection that enables the right-left divide to be viewed as largely determined by age. It shouldn’t be. The over-55s are not a homogeneous blob of the financially secure and comfortable. Twenty-four per cent of households headed by someone aged 55 to 64 are renting. There is room for solidarity here.
So though the Tories have an 18-point lead among women over 55, it doesn’t mean that Labour policies will always meet with resistance. Known as the “sandwich” generation, taking care of grandchildren to help with the steep cost of childcare, while also caring for elderly parents, this is a group well placed to understand the impact of closing council-run homes, day centres for the elderly and, of course, SureStart centres. They make up two-thirds of people who work beyond their retirement age. As their unemployment rates rose by 45% over the last government, then this is a demographic that has been hit hard by Tory austerity.
When times are hard, as they have been these last five years, it’s easy to hunker down and focus on your own troubles. It is understandable yet counterproductive, particularly where the state is involved. We know that austerity is affecting us all, young and old, low and middle income. We do not deserve it. It’s time to ditch the divide and rule politics. We the 99% are in this together.
