Pollsters are obsessed with age and how it affects voting patterns. Trite observations about age and conservatism are common. So is it true that the way we vote changes in our golden years changes? I don't think so, and here is why. As has been pointed out in Andrew Neill's recent program Posh and Posher Britons used to vote based on deference. Public school educated, plummy types did well because of an innate respect people had for them. Since the 60s all that has changed. People are no longer so deferential, and very few people accept that they have 'social betters' at all. Instead voter memory is the way we should be thinking about future intentions. The over 40s remember the three-day week and the election of Mrs Thatcher. They also remember Labour's disastrous manifesto of 1983, and the Sun headline asking the last person leaving Britain to turn off the lights if Neil Kinnock won the general election. This age group votes in much greater numbers for the Conservatives than Labour. A very different story prevails among the under 35s. This group remembers the tail end of the last Tory government, Black Wednesday, and the Labour landslide of 1997. More importantly, under 35s remember the years of prosperity under New Labour. The next vivid memory of this age group will be spending cuts and higher taxation; under 21s particularly will have this particular memory of the coalition. Polling on who is to blame for the cuts increasingly suggests that the narrative that they are Labour's (or the banks') fault is wearing thin and the public blames the coalition.
Cameron's narrative of the election was of spendthrift Labour who were in thrall to bureaucrats at local councils and quangos. This doesn't really tally with voters' experiences of 1997-2010 and may be one possible reason for the lack of a conclusive Conservative victory. The detoxification of Labour's brand under Tony Blair may be another. The Conservatives still have a long way to go on this front, but Labour, who have gained the image of a party who are genuinely able to govern, may benefit greatly from voters' positive memory of their time in power. Despite the move to distance the party from New Labour under Ed Miliband, voters do take Labour seriously as a party of government: this may be the greatest legacy the party has been left by Blair and Brown. Conventional wisdom holds that voters' memories are short, this is false. They are selective, not short. However, people will remember when times were good and when times were bad. If Labour wins a few key strategic victories in the next two years, in the way Thatcher did before 1979, then it could entrench its image as a safe governing party in a way it has never been seen before.
I think you look over just how bad Labour's later years in office were and how negatively they were perceived. They do currently get a boost because the coalition is engaged in the seldom-popular activity of reigning in public spending, but your narrative of what voters remember doesn't actually include a bad memory of Labour after the 1980's, which is a bit over-generous. Predictions are also very hard to predict from this model, as the coalition still has over four years left in which to engender an economic recovery. Finally, there's Ed Miliband's continued leadership doldrums: the fact is that whatever people think of his party, Cameron (a posh public school type) remains consistently greatly more popular than Labour's leadership, and that could cost them dear.
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