Older people are a nervous, anxious bunch. We know this from the way they vote. By quite a large margin, the over-65s vote for the Conservative party.

Shoring up their wealth has become a priority during a period when Britain’s economic outlook has become more uncertain and their own finances may need to cope with years, possibly decades, of failing health. A more enlightened viewpoint might have led them to vote for governments that proposed pooling a greater share of wealth to ease these fears. But they haven’t.

Before the 2015 election they were cheered by George Osborne’s £15bn of pensioner bonds paying 4% interest. They delighted in Osborne’s pledge to raise the inheritance tax threshold for couples to £1m and his refusal to touch the triple lock that guaranteed state pension increases of at least 2.5% a year. Even Theresa May’s “dementia tax” – the bizarre reinvention of Andy Burnham’s “death tax” on estates to fund social care that was rejected by voters in 2010 – couldn’t shift older voters from their habit of voting Tory.

We know about these voting habits most recently from a study by the Resolution Foundation thinktank. It found that, back in 1974, 40% of voters supported Labour in almost every age group and that, when it came to general elections, age was a political irrelevance. But by 2017, age had become a key driver of whether someone voted Labour. For instance, a 30-year-old was almost twice as likely to vote Labour as a 70-year-old.

As the thinktank’s director, Torsten Bell, says: “Of course class still matters hugely, but in the 1970s working-class voters were three times as likely to vote Labour as Conservative. Today they are as likely to vote Tory as Labour, the party founded to represent working people. This comes despite Labour clearly aiming to have an agenda that takes the side of workers over capital, from stronger employment rights to greater employee ownership.”

In the austerity years of the last decade, means testing has come to almost every area of welfare policy, except where it concerns the old. If anything, policy measures there have worked in the opposite direction, and the current means-tested element is to be phased out in favour of a higher, flat-rated retirement income.

Labour wants to prise pensioners away from the Tories with promises to match their generosity. That’s a costly business

Then there are the handsome occupational pension scheme payouts to the better-off, as new work by the Intergenerational Foundation has documented. It has found that in the tax year 2017-18, 115,000 people in the public sector retired on incomes above the average annual salary of around £28,600 a year. This number of people was a 46% increase on 2010-11.

The private sector is no better, paying huge incomes to its better-paid staff on the ridiculous premise of pension schemes linked entirely to salaries, even though pay at the top end has rocketed.

This is not to make an attack on the old or to pass off ageism as analysis. This is about documenting the shifting demographic sands and understanding how they translate into economic policy preferences.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) thinktank is about to begin a five-year programme of research into the inequalities that now characterise British life. It is long overdue. For years, the government has benchmarked its policies against the Gini coefficient measure of inequality and declared no change: in other words, austerity was seen as having had little or no effect on the gap between the top and bottom of the income scale.

However, the Gini coefficient is a deeply flawed measure that not only fails to capture the gains of the very richest (and the plight of the very poorest), but also offsets the rise of the better-off pensioner against the declining incomes of struggling families in order to reach the same average each year.

The growing intergenerational divide will be fertile ground for the IFS. And, to be fair, it will probably show that there is a large minority of older people on low incomes and in poor health who could never be characterised as being part of a golden generation. Bearing that in mind, the voting patterns of many elderly people run in the opposite direction to what might be thought of as their own needs.

Labour’s John McDonnell has sought to prise pensioners away from the Tories with promises to match their generosity. That’s a costly business, as Osborne’s policies have demonstrated. Instead, he should look to the young, as he is doing with his plans to put climate change at the heart of Labour policies. Then he can end the triple lock and means-test the state pension for the better-off – releasing cash to fund green growth.