“Look at me, I’ve got the youth on my side” — Jeremy Corbyn

The 2017 UK General Election was astonishing. The struggling Labour Party nearly overturned the Conservatives, and would have too, if not for an SNP implosion in Scotland, meaning the “unelectable” Jeremy Corbyn would have been in Number 10 Downing Street today. Facing a 25-point deficit in the opinion polls Corbyn showed he could galvanize young people across the country by bypassing a hostile media and launching an energetic and dynamic campaign using both social media and grassroots activism.

Now Labour must do the same with the elderly.

There are 10 million people over 65 in the UK they voted around 3 to 1 in favour of the Tories. And yet this can be a fertile hunting ground for Labour as they have been under a savage attack for years from the Conservatives, who have been savagely cutting elderly care provisions. Their manifesto, described by Tory MP Nigel Evans as “a full frontal assault on our core support” was based around removing the “triple lock” on pensions that guaranteed the elderly’s real income would not fall, ditching winter weather payments and ensured that elderly homeowners would be forced to sell their home if they required medical care in old age- the so-called “dementia tax.”

How the elderly are treated in the United Kingdom is a national disgrace. Visiting them in care homes or in private accommodation I have seen the wretched, lonely, sad lives many of them live, forgotten by the society they built which promised to look after them from cradle to grave. Many elderly people spend their lives totally alone with the TV or a copy of The Daily Mail, if they are lucky being overseen by an overworked and underpaid foreigner who they cannot understand. According to Age UK, four million elderly people agree that the TV is their closet friend, and 200 thousand have not had a conversation with family or friends in over a month. Loneliness is a killer, equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and many over 65s feel they have been thrown on the scrapheap. Put simply, the government is destroying the quality of life of its older citizens.

How the elderly are treated is a key socialist issue. Are we not trying to create a tolerant, caring society that protects its most vulnerable? And yet Labour are largely ignoring it; in their manifesto there is barely one page devoted to pensioners, who constitute a massive voting block- 18% of the population- and are famous for coming out to vote en masse.

Corbyn should publicly visit nursing homes and charities like Age UK to understand and promote the severity of the problem, which is every bit as serious and pressing as food banks and homelessness. And Labour need a bold new strategy of not leaving anyone behind and to push policies which help enrich the lives of the elderly and promote intergenerational contact and help foster a society that respects and celebrates the over 65s. Above all, Corbyn must hammer home the point that the Conservatives are attacking the elderly and outline exactly how Labour will protect them. He can even borrow some populist rhetoric about the greatest generation who fought fascism and built Britain being cast aside by the Tories. This should be done not simply as a tactic of picking up votes and cutting out the Tories’ legs from under them by splitting their core constituency, but because it is the right and moral thing to do.

Nigel Evans believes the elderly did not turn out to vote for his party last week because the Tories “shot ourselves in the head” by conducting a “full-frontal assault on our core support” and that the only thing missing from the manifesto was “compulsory euthanasia for the over 70s.” Will Labour be shrewd enough to pick up on this? Corbyn can energize the elderly as he did the young.

It was not written in stone that young people are apathetic. It is not written in stone that the elderly will always vote Tory, especially when they are kicking them in the teeth. People said Jeremy Corbyn was unelectable, but if Labour splits the elderly vote, he will be the next Prime Minister. To do that he needs to honestly and very publicly position himself as the defender of the elderly and energize the over 65s with the same zeal as he did with the youth. Let’s get to work!