A hooded youth bursts out of the shadows, swinging an axe. Even through the grey CCTV, you can sense the panic and vulnerability of the victims. Next it’s security footage of an Asian scam gang spending money with a pensioner’s credit card. Then a reconstruction of a burglary: the music makes the Jaws soundtrack seem pallid.

By now breakfast is almost over in the home of my elderly relative and it is time to switch from Crimewatch to Jeremy Kyle. Here, two obese people with tattoos, accompanied by an entire ITV security team, are non-spontaneously combusting into the face of a close relative: “You’re telling me this child is yours but you don’t want anything to do with him?” Kyle shouts. He is the only one in control of his emotions.

By the time we get to lunchtime the news seems positively boring. A drain has burst, the prime minister is in trouble, some pandas have arrived at a zoo. But don’t worry: it will soon be time for Neighbours, where one orange-skinned man is confronting another about their love triangle, while Terese prepares to tell Gary about her cancer.

If you want to understand what made age the key political divide in the 2017 general election, start with daytime TV. When it’s not about cakes and antiques its recurrent themes are violent crime, family breakdown and terminal illness, which is to say its over-arching theme is insecurity, and the failure of the political system to mitigate it.

Oh and poverty. The highlight of mid-afternoon for the housebound viewer is Judge Rinder, where close relatives haggle over pitifully small amounts of money, all sponsored by Patient Claim Line – on hand to help you sue your GP for medical negligence.

According to YouGov, 69% of voters over the age of 70 voted Conservative last month. And they voted enthusiastically: more than 80% of that age group turned out, compared with 59% of those between 20 and 24, a figure that was hailed as a breakthrough for democracy. The same figures reveal that 63% of retired people voted Tory.

There’s a lot of soul-searching going on among the progressive parties about the swing to the right that took place across a band of working-class England starting in Staffordshire and continuing up the Pennines, across North Yorkshire towards Teesside. It has prompted a discussion inside the Labour Party about a package of measures aimed at male, manual workers. But the determination of older people to vote Conservative is the fact that should be troubling political strategists on the left.

We are told that age has replaced class as the central divide. But if you study the Brexit and the 2017 votes together it is more accurate to say the divide is about security and power. People in “routine manual” jobs, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, backed Brexit in numbers even greater than the over-70s backed the Tories. What the two groups have in common is something not obvious to the urban white-collar worker: the fear of violence or coercion, the fear of being scammed, and of being powerless in the face of bureaucratic public services.

The highlight of mid-afternoon is Judge Rinder, where relatives haggle over money, all sponsored by Patient Claim Line

Although older people are among the least likely to experience violent crime, according to the Office for National Statistics, images of it proliferate in the TV and print media they consume. It is men under 30 who are most likely to be victims of crime, but the threat is greater if you are single, greater if you rent your home and greater if your income is low.

According to Age UK, more than half of all people over 60 believe they have been targeted by scammers. Of those who get caught out, 70% say they lost money as a result. The dodgy builder, the fake gardener, the courier who needs to take away your credit card and your pin number, the kindly young girl cold-calling to help with your computer. These are the everyday bogeymen for older and vulnerable people.

But older people are not the only victims. For the last year in which the National Fraud Authority produced statistics, it estimated £9.1bn was scammed from individuals. Of this, prepay electricity meter fraud and private rental scams are big enough to merit their own separate line on the spreadsheet, and seem designed to target the poor, the single, the cash-dependent.

The longer you spend with an older person reliant on health and social care, the more you realise how closely their experience of insecurity mirrors that of young, poor welfare recipients and manual workers. It is a world of waiting patiently, tightly rationed time, of reliance on experts – where the constant fear is that the system malfunctions, that you are forgotten, that your money or medicine or carer will not arrive.

Looked at this way, it is neither class nor age but powerlessness that is driving these people to the right.

For the left there are no easy answers. So the starting point is to stop looking for them, either in increased police numbers or health spending or the pensions triple lock. These will help. But none addresses the feeling of insecurity that makes fears dramatised on daytime TV seem plausible.

We are an ageing society where just to avoid making the state go bankrupt and the healthcare system collapse, major reallocations of cash need to happen over the coming century. The electoral power of older people is immense. Unless the left works out a way to engage, empower and enthuse people over 65, its default strategy will have to be intergenerational warfare on behalf of the young, which – on current demographics – it can only lose.

For the new intake of Labour MPs, my advice would be to take their eyes off the BBC’s Parliament channel and Daily Politics, and switch over to Crimewatch and Jeremy Kyle. That’s what you’re really up against.