What a very slanted view of old people to presume they dislike foriegners! As somebody who is close to 60 and with many old friends, I feel qualified to object to that blanket untruth. Honestly you will find most old people dislike the under 30's more than foriegners based upon my observations and experiences being part of this older demographic.

That all said, my faith in any goverment to address issues in technology is very much lost when they still can't manage to deal with and handle spam calls and texts, let alone emails. It's a crime of block and deny at best with no bite or drive to chase/track them down to the stage that society is normalised that it's a thing and you just deal with the effects instead of addressing the issues which is the root cause of most online fraud. Most know to spot and ignore such frauds early on, but enough do not and why it prevails.

But this isn't about one generation and whilst I find the whole flipped on the head "think of the children" angle amusing, it is not the case here and to distill it down to that ignored the real issues underlying here. Which is once again another poor solution to a poorly defined problem.

In 1979 it was 42/45 for under 25s - 7% below average, and 47/45 for over 55s, 5% over average.

in 1997, over 65s voted 36% Tory vs 31% nationally - 16% above average. Under 24s voted 27%, 13% below average.

In 2019, over 65s voted 64% Tory vs average 45%. That's 42% above average. Meanwhile under 25s voted 19% tory, 38% under average.

That's a massive increase in age polarisation in just 22 years and increasing even more over 40. That is not a good thing.

But for the country, well, you need a full chest of tools, the hammer, the saw etc, yet stuck with a political system that offers you a limited choice of tool to pick and you can only use that for 5 years. So you end up with a flip, flop with one party in power for a while, then the other. It's how it goes.

In our local council elections, less than 50% voted and even then, voting like many others was a political voice against the current goverment over who should help run their local council and services for the next 4 years. Which again is testiment into how little accountable voice and say in what goes on that we the public have.

Personaly I would love to see an end of the party system. All MP's independent and those elected can truely voice for who they represent. Those elected then amongst themselves elect a goverment and we get the best of the best. Certainly be more demoractic and representative.

This whole party system has past it's time it's just rabble rabble playground point scoring more than doing the job right by the people they represent. They take second place to the party, which is in many ways akin to football supporters of the 80's in many ways a reflection upon the supporters today if you view the twitter landscape.

Imagine if you got to vote upon somebody based upon what they could do for you and not some sense of fan for life team supporter blindly ticking a box without a care in the world.

Would the political system be any worse if we scrapped the party system and all MP's were independant and the goverment formed via a vote amongst those elected MP's - they could even have an enclave and coloured smoke if they want some pomp , though hard to change a system that by it's very nature would mean it's own demise as it is currently. A party based political system.

I'd be more interested in why those who don't vote, didn't bother? That's the real crime today in the political system. Whoever they vote, maybe they could change the law? But focus upon why they don't vote is probably key to a fairer democratic system. That is probably the most important thing. May well be many young people feel that none of the party's fit their needs. Well even a spoilt ballet is counted and that is democracy over not voting at all.

After all - was Richard Prior wrong in the film Brewsters Millions when he said vote none of the above! As you get older, and look at the larger picture you feel it's not far off the mark, more so at times than others.

But then, watching the House of Lords is in contrast to the commons a whole level of decorum and civility and discourse without any of that political party rabble rabble. So it does show, debate can be done civil in goverment, albeiet by a group of people who are not elected by the people! Which is probably a whole level of debate that scares me at this hour.

Ok, maybe the assumption of xenophobia is unwarranted, but restricting of immigration was one of the main selling points of Brexit.

Also, the point about age holds - under 45's voted heavily in favour of Remain (as did London, Scotland and Northern Ireland)

The bizarre bit is that they are also perfectly OK with immigration from the EU its the "other kind" (direct quote) of immigrants they don't want.

Edit: This is about 4 people in total so entirely possible its not representative.

It was a majority opinion of old people sure.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/1...

https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-...

The tory party has realigned itself since 2016 to the same values of the leave campaign, one heavily based on fear of foreigners

https://hyperallergic.com/310631/the-visual-propaganda-of-th...

The BSA31 performed in 2013 shows a strong age correlation with sentiments towards immigration: https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/38190/bsa31_immigration.p...

The BSA34 in 2016 shows similar trends in the age distribution: https://www.bsa.natcen.ac.uk/media/39148/bsa34_immigration_f...

It is entirely possible to be pro-Tory and pro-Brexit while being anti-xenophobia. But the Conservatives have been carefully-mining the anti-foreigner vote for decades (as did New Labour) and it's not plausible to argue that Brexit would have won without that sentiment: it was too large a part of the expressed reasoning of Brexit voters as a group when polled.

Now the Tories have realized that they can spew bullshit lies and win an election with minimal consequences. They also have discovered how much easier it is to game the damn failing electoral system. (e.g. in Cam I have seen Tory pamphlets pushing for Lib Dems or Labour just to split the left vote).

It was a travesty that No won the AV referendum.

Notoriously, a few years ago a former advisor to Blair went on record to say that New Labour deliberately encouraged as much immigration as possible in order to "rub the Right's nose in diversity", and:

"He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to "open up the UK to mass migration" but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its "core working class vote".

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/641845...

It's really difficult to reconcile this history with the ideas you're expressing above. Far from "carefully mining the anti foreigner vote for decades" they were explicitly undermining it by hiding the true extent of what they were doing.

So overall, I don't see deliberately increasing migration and deliberately using dehumanising rhetoric and policy changes against (some) immigrants to shore up electoral support as being at odds. The current government is strong on anti-tax rhetoric whilst presiding over heavy tax rises. Labour wanted immigration to keep wages low and increase growth. It also wanted the votes of people who wouldn't want that. So it did the former fairly quietly, while performatively stoking up the Home Office's capacity for villainy. So is modern politics.

(FWIW 'Floodgates' is itself somewhat dehumanising, I think: people aren't an undifferentiated mass threatening to overwhelm the boat, they're just people. 'Gates' would have done just fine.)

I guess one could also make arguments about the structure of the system which feels a bit more specific to the U.K. eg rural–urban constituency differences or FPTP.

Many of these people you now hold in contempt were once just the same as you are now and changed as they became older and wiser - just like you will.

People can also vote for people (MPs), who later renege on their promises.

Democracy is a mess, but be careful before disenfranchising your compatriots. If you succeed with that, 10 years down the line you may find out that someone managed to turn the same weapon against you. Politics is rotten enough as it is.

Income and national insurance (also income, not sure why it has a different name) has always made the lion's share.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/budget-2020-docum...

It serves the same role as the US social security scheme with a different accounting treatment.

(Does raise the question of whether student loan repayments, which are also linked to income unlike other loans, and have been called a "graduate tax" by some of their advocates, are also an income tax that applies only to people born after a particular date ...)

That and the fact that a graduate tax would at least have been predictable, unlike, say, the soaring interest rates on student debt at the moment.

Anyway, many voters quite literally spoke into camera saying directly that they voted leave to “stop Muslims” and things like this. If you point this out, or point out that all racists and extremist nationalists supported Brexit they’ll further deny and claim it’s just an extreme minority that doesn’t matter. Or they’ll say “what about antifa!” Or some other strange comment.

Anyway here’s one example of a voter clearly saying why they voted

https://youtu.be/SFjfbL1KWNI

Also Tory party voting is a minority in the uk. The uk “democracy” gives a party with 40% vote share absolute power and absolute parliamentary majority.

Obviously from the economists outlook the UK business elites are skeptical, so at least there is some pushback from a group with clout.

The elderly voters are likely indifferent maybe even mildly positive but theyre not really pushing either way on this theyre being led by the nose.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/05/how-uk-house-p...

If you're happy to accept mass migration, that's one of the effects as is bigger class sizes in schools, more traffic on roads and an overburdened NHS.

The BoE's mandate is particularly salient as it is for maintaining 2% inflation: the official measure of which excludes house prices and includes wages. It is very much the way it is by design.

"The population rate of increase has been pretty constant since 1945" is actually a problem. This kind of eternal increase is not sustainable on a smallish island whose northern and western half isn't very suitable for housing.

Great! When do we start?

All countries tend to have polarisation around the topic of "immigration". Statistically the UK is one of the most welcoming and least racially prejudicing countries in the world. There are numerous independent studies and reports that you can find to support this. You do need to pay though; the visas and healthcare surcharges ain't cheap. The same as any top tier country though.

There are indeed many indications of the UK being welcoming to foreigners relative to other countries For example, the UK government's recently announced plan to export refugees at great expense to Rwanda with seven days notice doesn't have majority support in any group except the pensioners the policy is designed to appeal to...

The triple lock has been temporarily suspended (with the wages element removed, so becoming a double lock) for 2022-23. The government has repeatedly said, and it was re-stated again by Sunak just the other day, that after this year the triple-lock will be reinstated for the rest of the parliamentary term.

Critically, the consumer price index part of the lock is still in place, so pensions will still rise in line with inflation (as measured by CPI) in 2022-23.

Besides, British pensions are lower because British pensioners paid much less pension contributions than other European pensioners.

It is a fact that the current government stance on Brexit is both exacerbating the labour shortage and damaging the country’s supply chains. And it would be totally disingenuous to claim that this doesn’t stem from an idiotic stance on migration from the EU, that has been part of the Conservative manifestos/programmes since at least 2008 and that lead to their last N electoral victories.

The British business oligarchy are now pretty keen to take Johnson down and replace him with starmer - the wages, inflation and supply chain damage has infuriated them. Hence the british medias obsession with boris's parties.

I assume you just mean the state pension here. Occupational pensions have long been a significant part of our pension system that tends to get ignored. The auto-enroll workplace pension introduced in 2008 seems to have been very successful too.

Overall, if I remember correctly, the UK actually has the second total pension assets in the OECD, and one of the highest per capita.

This was mitigated for a few decades with the import of foreign labor and automation, but presumably this is no longer happening at a sufficiently rapid rate to be able to prevent labor prices from rising. Also, who really wants to change bedpans?

So the political question is: Who in society is entitled to the decreasing amount of labor and how will it be divvied up?

I find it remarkable that this is the metaphor of choice, given that bedpans are merely the final remaining situation where chamber pots have not been replaced with mechanism-clearing flush toilets.

Which countries do you count as “top tier”? I migrated to Germany, I pay the same healthcare costs as anyone else here. I can’t remember exactly what my combined ID card and work permit cost, but it was a 2-digit number. I think naturalisation here is about a tenth the cost of the U.K. also.