Britain's Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn got strong support from voters aged 18 to 44. Photo / AP
By Adam Taylor, analysis
Historically, social class was the stark dividing line in British politics.
The right-wing Conservatives were the party of the middle class and the upper crust, while left-wing Labour was the party of the working stiffs.
In 2017, things seem to have changed.
A look at just-released data from polling firm YouGov from surveys taken after last week's election with historical Ipsos MORI polling data from the 1997 election show that shift.
That was the year that charismatic young centrist Tony Blair returned Labour to government after 18 years in the political wilderness. But even in that landslide victory, it was found that much of Britain's upper-middle-class and middle-class voters - classified as "AB" according to Britain's traditional demographic classification system - had still backed the Conservatives.
Of those voters, a total of 41 per cent were estimated to have voted for the Conservatives, compared to 31 per cent who voted for Labour. In contrast, at the other end of the socio-economic scale - "DE" voters, which means they were semiskilled or unskilled manual workers or not in work - just 21 per cent voted Conservative, while 59 per cent voted for Labour. (This wasn't a blip, by the way: Data from Ipsos MORI going back to 1974 shows a similar and at times far more pronounced trend during elections before and after Blair's victory.)
Flash forward 20 years. Analysis of last week's 2017 vote shows this political class divide no longer appears to be a major factor - the Conservatives and Labour had a relatively even split between all social classes. But now another dividing line has opened up even further.
YouGov's data shows Jeremy Corbyn's Labour was stronger the younger voters were: 66 per cent of 18- to 19-year-old voters backed Labour in last week's election, while 69 per cent of voters over 70 years old voted for the Theresa May-lead Conservative Party.
YouGov's data suggests that for every 10 years older a voter is, their chance of voting for the Conservatives increased by around nine points while the chance of them voting Labour decreased by nine points.
Ipsos MORI's data from 1997 does show that young voters favoured Blair's Labour - perhaps unsurprising due to the left-leaning "hip Britannia" movement taking place at the time - but the divide between the ages was nowhere near as pronounced as it would be 20 years later.
There are of course some caveats to the data here: We're looking at two different surveys conducted by two different companies two decades apart. The circumstances were very different too.
As unusual as the 2017 election was - an early election which produced a widely unexpected poor result for the Conservatives - Labour's centrist turn under Blair also was radical at the time. And in either election, there is also the risk of oversimplifying: Neither class or age will ever be the only conclusive factor in an election.
But the evidence we have so far is that something has shifted. As Ben Page, chief executive of British polling firm Ipsos MORI, put it last week, where Britain was once divided by class, "now we are a country divided by generations".
How did this happen? Right now, that's hard to say. Labour certainly ran a more social media savvy campaign and made promises to cut tuition fees that would be appealing to British students.
More broadly, Corbyn's underdog status and leftist credentials could be appealing to those seeking youthful rebellion, while Conservative attempts to discredit him by pointing to his past sympathy for groups like the Irish Republican Army may also have fallen on deaf ears among young voters; many were not even alive during the worst of the Troubles.
A bigger factor still may have been Britain's decision to leave the European Union. By and large, young voters had opposed Brexit in last year's referendum and voted to remain in Europe.
They had never known life outside the EU and enjoyed its perks and had no fond memories of what life was like before it like some older voters do. While Labour are not promising to reverse the decision, a vote against the Conservatives could well be a way to express this frustration.
Early signs suggest a surge in youth turnout, but slightly older voters may have also made some important switches to their behaviour.
On Twitter, London School of Economics professor Benjamin Lauderdale - a polling expert who helped craft YouGov's unusually accurate model for predicting the 2017 election results - suggested that around 30 per cent of 25- to 44-year-olds who had voted Conservative in the last election appeared to have defected to the Labour. Lauderdale noted this was "mostly the remainers".
It's too early to say if these shifts are permanent, but even in the short term, they have the potential to cause major shifts to British politics.
Outsiders should pay attention too: Leftist politicians like Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France have tended to be supported disproportionately by young voters. If British voters can forget about their class allegiances, anything may be possible.
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