Generational War
Reform is posited as the ‘radical right,’ a new direction for Britain. If you look at its voters and what their policies would mean for them, you’ll see that they’re anything but. They are a continuation of over 40 years of government policy and would strengthen the divides that tear the country apart right now. The rich and enfranchised will continue to get richer at a continually increasing rate and the poor will see their social safety nets further gutted as the wealth in the country flows upwards to unsustainable levels. The interesting thing about those who are wealthy is that they overlap with those who vote for reform in one specific way – they’re very old.
A stunning statistic has been making the rounds as of late, that the Green Party is the most popular with the entire under 65 population. If the election was held with only 18-64 year olds eligible, the Green Party would win the popular vote! When you look at the voting intentions of over 65s, however, the Green Party would only secure 3% of their vote, less than one seventh of the proportion of working age people. Reform climb from 21% to 33%. Even the famously underperforming, waning Conservative Party grow from 15% to 26%. The combined 35% for the major right wing parties going up to 59% among pensioners shows a clear difference in priorities between those who are of working age and those who are not. When looking at the major divides between these two cohorts, other than size, the two that stick out are wealth and mood. Through an analysis of these we can see the true nature of the Reform Party and why real economic radicalism is required in the form of a turn left.
The generational wealth divide between ‘Boomers,’ the 61-80 year old cohort and the rest of society has become so apparent that it is now the stuff of memes and derision. We all talk about how lucky they were to buy cheap housing, come into a glut of jobs once they reached maturity, and are now entering into retirement with healthy triple locked pensions, but the snowball of wealth accumulation it has enabled is truly remarkable. The wealth contained within the UK is now 7.5x GDP compared to 3x GDP in the 1980s, totalling £17 trillion. 32% of this is contained within property and 48% in pensions, a combined 80% of all wealth in the nation is split between these two. Home ownership is obviously concentrated in the older sectors of the population and property prices have seen a more than 340% increase since 2000, with seemingly no change in this long term trend in sight. Quoting the Resolution Foundation, the research organisation from which much of this data was taken:
“In 2020-22, those in their early 60s had nearly £150,000 more wealth in real terms than the typical person of the same age group in 2006-08. In contrast, the typical person in their early 30s in 2020-22 had just £8,000 more wealth than those of the same age in 2006-08.”
This means that the wealth gap between your average 60-something and early 30-something has more than doubled to over 300 thousand pounds in 14 years. The gap between have and have nots has never been so intrinsically linked to the year in which you were born. The growth in the economy and the ‘system’ itself has worked fantastically for people who are middle aged and over. The growth in wealth disparity has become impossible to save your way out of, especially if you are born into a less wealthy family with minimal or no inheritance expected. Furthermore, as most growth is so passive in the UK, it encourages a rent seeking economy, one which is unproductive and restrictive for any actual growth in meaningful terms. This is how you see green numbers on a spreadsheet but everyone feels poor and everything seems to only get shitter. The goal shifts from making new, potentially great things, to prioritising profit extraction at all costs.
If you are a person with a large amount of money in the bank, shares, and assets, you want a high growth environment in all three categories of asset and a lower tax rate on the spoils you passively accrue through ownership alone. This is what Reform promises in a vague and sparse policy page by cutting both private and business tax rates dramatically. This is not a turn away from the orthodoxy, it is reinforcing the economic status quo by entrenching economic divisions. If housing continues to increase in price with low interest rates and other ‘buyer friendly’ policies in place, how can the people without passively increasing capital in their ownership possibly expect to join in on this path to wealth? It’s no wonder you see young people, facing wage stagnation and a shockingly bad white collar jobs market on top of this, predicting they’ll never be able to buy a house and stop giving 52% of their post tax income to a wealthy landlord (London average according to Trust for London).
The reason Reform are radical is clearly not economic then, they are evidently a slightly more rich-biased version of the economic model that has left so many Britons feeling so hopeless. Where they are radical in their beliefs is in their bigotry. Without new answers to the economic crises of the country that are economic in nature, they must instead pretend that it is the ‘trans-ing’ and Islamification of Britain that has led to its failings. These immigrants are simultaneously taking all of our jobs and also scrounging all our benefits and the children are gay and trans because of ‘woke ideology’ being taught in schools. These are not coherent answers to Britain’s biggest questions, they aren’t even particularly relevant. If anyone feels compelled to vote for Farage in 2029, I would ask that they outline their biggest qualms with the country, what Reform plans to do about it, and how that will fix it. I think that is the least I can ask of anyone in a country with an educated populace who wishes to take part in democracy.
This is where the YouGov mood polls come into play. If someone is voting for a party that paints themselves as a radical change to fix a country in disrepair you would expect that to be visible in how that cohort feels about their lives. I personally would expect them to feel frustrated or stressed or even sad in greater degrees than the average person. This isn’t represented in the data. In fact, over 65s, Reform’s most loyal base, are Britain’s most content people. The most stressed and scared segment of the population, funnily enough, is the 18-24 demographic which has rejected the Reform Party so roundly that only 4% of young people support them according to latest polling. This same group pledges 49% of their support to the Green Party, by far the most that any party has in any age demographic. In that analytical framework it becomes apparent to me that the group most liable to vote for a radical change supports the Green Party overwhelmingly.
The proof is well and truly in the pudding when considering the party donation totals for the final quarter of 2025. Reform tops the donation totals with £5.4m while the Green Party languishes with £294,000 despite each party boasting similar membership totals. Christopher Harborne, a Thai based British crypto billionaire donated 3 million pounds during this period, following a record 9 million last summer. The Reform party is a party backed by the wealthy, by those who wish to wring yet more out of a country they already strip for all it’s worth. Does anyone believe he is paying 12 million out of pocket to prop up the party’s anti-immigration stance, or is it more likely that he would earn far more back from heavily cut taxes that Reform would bring too? Far from the party of the champagne socialist, it would appear that the voter base of the Green Party are the broke, the disenfranchised, and the (relatively speaking) radical. Bringing this country back to some semblance of greatness will require investment, a collective effort, and care that Reform does not possess the will to enact.
This is an inflection point, the Brexit of the 2020s. In 2016 it was the cultural anxieties of the older sectors of society that hamstrung the future economic opportunities of the country, a vote of comfortable selfishness. If one had retaken that Brexit vote only 5 years later with only the original voters Remain would have won. Why? Because Leave’s older support base had died off at a fast enough rate since. They chose and then did not have to live with the fallout when we eventually did sever our European ties and stop international cooperation. The economy hasn’t recovered, we lost 6-10% off GDP and investments are also far slower to reach here, all in the name of xenophobia and keeping out the Poles and Romanians–the same people the right now views as the good guys because of their relative whiteness and Christian majority populations.
Voting for Reform is the same cultural, fear-based voting from our society’s elderly that led to Brexit, why else would a population who lives off of benefits in the form of pensions and requires far more socialised medical care vote for a party which stands for cutting benefits and privatising the NHS? It is against their material benefit and as such must be ideological. Voting reform to stick it to the Muslims and asylum seekers will be a doubling down on this regressive, destructive decision making that got us here and the young will be permanently harmed by their election. To fix what’s been done to our under-40s, keeping the course isn’t even enough. Why go steps backwards when serious efforts to rebalance our economy and society are clearly so desperately needed? According to ONS 43% of 25 year old single men in the UK live with their parents, is this acceptable? Clearly not -- I'd wager it isn’t the fault of that demographic not working hard enough, but clear evidence that the deck has been stacked dramatically against them.
If you do want a MAGA-lite, racist continuance of the country that has made your rent exorbitant and your wages stagnant and the culture ever more toxic and hateful then be my guest, the numbers say you’ll be dead before their term is done anyway.
“Before the fall: The distribution of household wealth in Britain and the impact on families” Resolution Foundation, 2025
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/before-the-fall/
YouGov Polling, YouGov, 2026
Mood measured weekly https://yougov.com/en-gb/trackers/britains-mood-measured-weekly
Voting intention https://yougov.com/en-gb/trackers/voting-intention
“Rent Affordability by London Borough” Trust for London, 2025
https://trustforlondon.org.uk/data/rent-affordability-borough
“Crypto investor based in Thailand donates further £3m to Reform,” Rowena Mason, The Guardian, 2026
“Young adults living with their parents,” ONS, 2025