Has Vince Cable lost his marbles? I ask this coyly, as I’d initially sat down to write about how the general election and EU referendum had exacerbated already questionable attitudes to older people in this country. But some of the Lib Dem leader-in-waiting’s comments got me wondering whether there wasn’t something to them.

I’d initially welcomed Sir Vince’s opening pitch in the now-moot leadership election. The 74-year-old Yellow Knight announced he would slay the ‘irrational cult of youth’ in politics and follow the example of William Gladstone and Winston Churchill; both in their eighties by the time they resigned from high office. Good on him, I thought. Too many young whippersnappers around who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Then I remembered Theresa May is 60 and Jeremy Corbyn is 68 and neither seem to have much idea what they’re talking about. And, although I can’t help but disagree with Cable on economic matters, there’s no denying he was a good interim leader ten years ago when, fittingly, Ming Campbell was shuffled off for being too old and doddery. Surely this crusader against the dragon of ageism can show the world that politics isn’t just a young man’s game, and older people are to be valued in politics?

Oh, how naive. Last week Cable told a parliamentary press gallery lunch that Brexit voters “were overwhelmingly elderly people who were obsessed by the worry of 80 million Turks coming to their village.” It’s incredible — you might say bordering on demented — that a man who pitched his leadership on respect for older politicians should write off his entire generation for being irrational, nostalgic, racists. You’d expect it from entitled millennial Remainers who, ironically, are nostalgic for a golden age of high wages and rock-bottom house prices that never really was; but it makes no sense for Vince to join in. History may well judge him as the reverse William Hague — a man who arrived at the leadership a decade too late.

But this ageism quagmire aside, it’s worth picking apart why what he said was so stupid, because the standard narrative of ‘racist, xenophobic, pensioners sold us down the river’ just doesn’t add up. As in, literally, the numbers just don’t add up. Lord Ashcroft Polls found those aged under 50 were highly likely to have voted Remain, while those over 50 were much more likely to have voted Leave. Pretty clear cut. But what seems to have been missed from this assessment is that more than 67% of people voted Yes (i.e. Remain) in the 1975 referendum on our membership of what was then the European Economic Community. And, if you had just turned 18 in 1975, you would have been 59 last year. Meaning it’s likely that most of those ‘racist, xenophobic, pensioners’ actually wanted us in Europe first time round.

So what happened in the intervening four decades to make those people change their minds? Was it the oft-repeated trope that people get more right-wing and prejudiced as they get older? Or could it be that the EEC morphed beyond all recognition from the simple free trade area people were sold in the 1970s into today’s overreaching, amorphous, wannabe superstate?

June’s general election was also remarkably dominated by age. But here, too, the results were revealing. Lord Ashcroft found every age decile from 35-44 downwards was progressively more likely to have voted Labour, while every decile from 45-54 up was progressively more likely to have voted Conservative. Unsurprisingly, once you plot alongside these deciles the age at which voters reached the age of 18, it correlates closely with whether they are likely to have had a working memory of the economic and industrial chaos of the 1970s. In the case of the 45-54 threshold, for example, the years are 1981 and 1990 — either end of the Thatcher revolution. It follows that, having witnessed the illness and the cure, you’re far less likely to want to go through it again.

The lesson? Respect your elders and listen to what they have to say; they’ve amassed decades of wisdom and experience and have likely seen it all before. But remember, too, that there will always be a few of them, like Vince, who’ll never know what they’re talking about.

Photo: Dave Radcliffe – Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic 

‘In the end, the Labour party could cease to represent labour. Stranger historic ironies have happened than that.’ So predicted Enoch Powell in 1968, a time when Harold Wilson’s party had just begun to introduce right-on luvvie liberalism alongside its rapidly dating economic socialism. Fast-forward half a century and YouGov now says age is a more reliable indicator of whether a person will vote Labour than class. In fact, if anything, you’re more likely to vote Tory these days if you’re a low-skilled or unskilled worker.

So it was probably never much of a stretch to ponder, at the Liberal Democrats’ birth in 1988, whether there could come a time when they would cease to be either liberal or democratic. If they ever were, their cover was blown on the democracy bit following a referendum they sought to deny the British people, and the result of which they vowed to overturn. On the liberal bit, they finally broke ranks in their disgraceful treatment of their former leader and evangelical Christian, Tim Farron. Hounded out of his position for failing to have the ‘correct’ opinions on abortion (which is always subject to a free vote in Parliament for the reason it is a matter of conscious which cuts across party lines) and the morality of homosexual relations (an issue unlikely ever again to grace the pages of Hansard and therefore an entirely private affair), his colleagues have shamed a party once known almost exclusively for its radical heterodoxy.

Lord Paddick, as it turned out, was not even the worst of them when, in a manner reminiscent of the innuendo of Victorian prejudice, he stuck the knife in by resigning as the party’s home affairs spokesman, citing concerns about Farron’s ‘views on various issues that were highlighted’ during the general election. No, the worst came from David Laws, a man I had always had a great deal of time for due to his classical liberalism and political bravery – most notably in calling for the NHS to be replaced by a private insurance system in the party’s fabled Orange Book. But Laws’ reaction to Farron’s resignation, which seemed to be said exclusively ‘as a gay man’, was devoid of any such liberalism. ‘Tim has propagated the dangerous myth,’ he said, ‘that our society can respect and embrace people in same-sex relationships, while believing their activities and character to be in some way immoral.’

I picked up this quote from a piece in The Times which was headlined ‘Farron was prejudiced and illiberal, says gay Lib Dem’. I don’t know whether Laws actually spoke the words in the headline, as they didn’t appear to be in the article, but what strikes me is that ‘prejudiced’ and ‘illiberal’ describe pretty well what he did say. In fact, the quote above explicitly rejects the second word of the party’s latest catchline – ‘Open, Tolerant and United’. Tolerance, if it means anything at all anymore, means just what Laws condemned; the ability to ‘respect and embrace’ people with which you have profound differences. And that’s a beautiful thing. It means you don’t have to agree with everyone – you don’t even have to like everyone – but you treat each other with respect regardless. This has essentially defined English liberalism for hundreds of years and is a modern British virtue if ever there was one.

How sad that ‘tolerance’ now means compelling people to agree on liberal dogma as the only morality. The appalling treatment of the Democratic Unionist Party since its MPs emerged as likely props to a Conservative minority government is another timely case in point, particularly regarding the party’s policies on abortion and same-sex marriage. Almost everywhere in the media, these positions were painted as somehow beyond the pale, regardless of the fact the DUP’s policies represent many voters in a highly religious region of the United Kingdom (illustrated by the fact Labour’s sister party in Northern Ireland, the Social Democratic & Labour Party, takes an even more stringent view on abortion than the DUP), or that opposition to what pro-life activists see as the wholesale murder of defenceless children is a legitimate political opinion.

There is also the insidious inference that politicians, of all people, cannot distinguish or in any way separate their personal beliefs from their politics. That Tim Farron cannot consider homosexual relations as a sin and vote for same-sex marriage. Even though he did. That men like Ron Paul in the United States and recently-appointed Brexit minister Steve Baker here at home cannot hold robust Evangelical Baptist beliefs and be leaders of a libertarian world view which essentially exists to leave people alone, whatever their lifestyle, orientation, or beliefs. Such two-dimensional thinking ought to be the preserve of Corbynista children on Twitter, not seasoned politicians.

Bizarrely, though, Farron reflected upon his political defenestration by taking aim at the ills of society. ‘I seem to be the subject of suspicion because of what I believe and who my faith is in,’ he said, with his permanent ‘kicked puppy’ expression somehow turning even more kicked. ‘In which case we are kidding ourselves if we think we yet live in a tolerant, liberal society.’ I don’t think your average man on the street gives a damn, to be honest. The intolerant, illiberal, culprits are Farron’s fellow travellers in ‘progressive’ politics and the media. That he will probably never see that is perhaps saddest of all.

Paul is Creative Editor for Conservatives for Liberty. Follow him on Twitter: @Whiggery

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The views expressed in this article are that of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Conservatives for Liberty