Why Boris Johnson’s grey army is bad for growth

CLIVE THINKS immigration has overwhelmed the health service. Pat says her town is swamped by new housing. Elizabeth voted for Brexit, but doesn’t want a trade deal with America, “especially the pharmaceutical side of it, Trump and his chickens.” So did Kathleen, but she now thinks a no-deal exit will mean shortages of groceries and medicines. “I’m prepared to do without stuff,” she says.

They are part of a focus group organised by NatCen, a social-research institute, studying “affluent eurosceptics”, a Conservative-leaning middle-class tribe. Nearly half the group is over retirement age. They lament their children’s europhilia, their grandchildren’s idleness and the decline of Britain’s industrial prowess. Yet the thread that links their views is a preference for policies that harm growth, and an aversion to those which boost it.

Older voters have long leaned Tory, but in the past decade politics has polarised dramatically along age lines. In 2019, 36% of Tory voters were pensioners, up from 29% in 2010, when the Tories came to power; 56% were over 55.

The Conservative Party used to worry about being hip. In 1977, a 16-year-old William Hague told its conference that it faced extinction without first-time voters. Now, he notes, the party has increased its share of the vote in six successive elections without their...