Last weekend (9-10 August), the Metropolitan Police arrested more than 500 people on Parliament Square for displaying signs supportive of Palestine Action, a group the government has recently categorised as a proscribed terror organisation. One of the things that has led coverage of these mass arrests is the average age of those involved: of the 519 people who provided the police with a date of birth, just under half were over 60, with 15 octogenarians detained. On my Instagram feed, among the blur of holiday pictures, a video of a woman in her sixties or seventies being carried across the grass plays again and again. “That could be your grandma,” an offscreen voice tells the police who are carrying her.
The surprise shown by BBC bulletins and various newspapers about the protesters’ ages suggests that the demographic composition of Palestine Action supporters was novel. But this is not a silent cohort at last moved to action, some slumbering conscience of the nation. The old maids haven’t ditched their bikes mid-misty cycle to Holy Communion to rush to Parliament Square and get arrested for terror-related offences. Or if they have, it shouldn’t surprise us: these statistics describe no more than the demographic in the United Kingdom that does politics.
People of every age have political beliefs, of course, and polling can tell you that the young are more concerned about events in Gaza, or more sympathetic to Jeremy Corbyn’s new party, than the old. Age (along with education level) is a good predictor of political opinion, but it’s a less useful metric when you consider not what people are thinking about politics but who is actually doing it.
The average age of the Labour Party membership after the surge when Corbyn was elected leader was 51. Councillors are the base unit of political activism in this country, and only 16 per cent of them are under 45 (on average, they’re 60). More than half of trade union reps are over 50, and anyone who has ever run a local Labour branch knows that retired public-sector workers are the party’s most dogged foot soldiers. I’m sure the same goes for the Conservative Party and retired private-sector workers, or the Liberal Democrats and retired biologists who play the French horn. Politics is an old person’s game.
I have spent much of this year writing a book about the anti-Brexit movement – a serious political force between 2017 and 2019, and arguably the biggest protest movement since the campaign against the war in Iraq. The People’s Vote marches – lampooned as the “longest Waitrose queue in history” – pulled in hundreds of thousands. Its base was what you’d expect. A survey of Remain activists by the political scientists Adam Fagan and Stijn van Kessel found 87 per cent were 45 or older, with 41 per cent over 65. Part of what allows for such engagement, of course, is free time: whether you’re becoming a councillor or standing outside parliament with Steve Bray every Wednesday, retired or retiring people generally have more of it than younger people.
But when it comes to protest that brings with it significant legal jeopardy – such as that undertaken by Palestine Action protesters – we can think a little more deeply than “they have the time”. While the Extinction Rebellion protests were cross-generational, over-65s were over-represented among post-protest defendants. A criminal record is not damaging to the prospects and future of a retiree who is more likely to own their home outright in the way it is to a 21-year-old who likely rents. As with anti-Brexit protesters who talked about rights they enjoyed being taken from their grandchildren, older people who took the legal risk over climate protests often did so with inter-generational fairness on their minds. A similar calculation played out this weekend.
Protest and activism are downstream from the most important bit of political engagement that older people reliably do at much higher rates than younger people – vote. One can post up a storm about youthquakes and Gen-Z radicalism, but in assessments of activity rather than of disposition, it’s the old who are more relevant and more engaged, in all kinds of ways. Our political system acknowledges this – two-child limit, acceptable; winter fuel means test, unacceptable – but culturally it’s not something we seem to grasp.
That the political activist in our collective mind’s eye looks more like Phoebe Plummer, the 23-year-old Van Gogh soup-thrower, than Alice Oswald, the 58-year-old poet who was among the Palestine Action arrestees, is one of our many national failures of perception. It is probably helpful for Palestine Action’s supporters that we have a media environment that tends to take the concerns of people with grey hair more seriously than those with pink. But who actually does politics is a fact of public life that Government strategists would do well to reckon with, instead of doubling-down on the “hippy-punching” stance that got it into this mess in the first place. That could be your grandma; and she definitely votes.
[See also: Palestine Action and the distortion of terrorism]
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