Keir Starmer faced widespread political apathy at the election (Image: Getty)
New research has revealed that last week’s election saw the lowest turnout by British adults since the advent of universal suffrage in 1928.
The shocking information confounds previous claims that turnout was the lowest since 2001, which was made by measuring turnout as a proportion of those registered to vote.
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Today the Institute for Public Policy Research revealed that just 52% of UK adults went to the polling booth on July 4, something the report’s co-author describes as “shocking”.
Senior research fellow at the IPPR Parth Patel warned: “If democracy is collective self-rule and only half of us are voting, you do have to ask about the other half, who politics and policymaking are less responsive to as a result”.
While Sir Keir Starmer won a landslide majority last Thursday, Labour won just 33.7% of the popular vote.
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IPPR claim there was in fact record low turnout at the election (Image: Getty)
By contrast if non-voting were a political party, it would have won the largest share of support by a country mile.
The IPPR report also found that turnout was 11% higher in constituencies with the highest proportion of over 64-year-olds, with voters more motivated to engage in the election if they were wealthier, owned their own homes and white.
By contrast turnout was 7% lower in constituencies with the highest proportion of people from ethnic minority backgrounds.
The IPPR report concluded: “Put simply, the ‘haves’ speak much louder than the ‘have-nots’ in British democracy”.
“Those who stand to benefit most from democratic policymaking are those with the weakest voices in the room. This is one way to make sense of policy puzzles in the heart of our democracy. Why have we have allowed housing to become so unaffordable? Tolerated income and wealth inequality to rise and remain high? Protected pensions but not social security for working people?”
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It was the lowest turnout since all women got the vote regardless of their property-owning status (Image: Getty)
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It added: “The new government has the chance to break out of the democratic doom loop between political participation and policy responsiveness.”
The new Labour Government now hopes to improve voter engagement by extending votes to 16 and 17-year-olds, something blasted by the Tories as an attempt to ‘fix’ future elections in their favour.
Former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith accused Sir Keir of “virtue signalling”, adding: “This is a gimmick done by those who think their party is more likely to get the vote”.
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Until this year, the record for the lowest election turnout was in 2005 when just 59.4% went to the polling booths to back Sir Tony Blair.
The 1928 Representation of the People Act expanded the franchise to give women equal voting rights with men over the age of 21, regardless of property ownership.
Prior to this, only women over 30 who had property could cast a vote.
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