Labour would leave young people financially worse off than the Tories would over the next five years despite the party winning overwhelming support among millennials, a new study suggests.
According to the Resolution Foundation, if Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour wins the June 8 general election, it would take £580 (about US$750) per year from young people by 2022, compared to Theresa May’s Conservatives taking £475.
Labour has repeatedly claimed its policies are aimed at supporting the younger generation.
A YouGov poll in April, which surveyed up to 13,000 people, found Corbyn would easily win the election if only 18 to 24-year-olds had the vote.
The new report, however, highlights that both Labour and the Conservatives would fail young people if they gain power, while the older generation, the so-called ‘baby-boomers,’ will be left at an advantage.
A detailed analysis of the parties’ tax and benefit proposals reveals that neither would deliver “fairness between generations,” and that people born after the 1980s, so-called ‘millennials,’ would be left hundreds of pounds worse off compared with the baby-boomers.
“Younger generations remain the big losers when it comes to tax and benefit changes planned,” said Laura Gardiner, senior policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation, according to the Independent.
While Labour would take more income from millennials on average, Gardiner explains this is because the party aims to increase overall the amount the government takes. As a proportion of what each party plans to raise in tax, the Conservatives would hit the young harder.
Labour also pledges to use money to fund flagship policies such as scrapping university fees, which would overwhelmingly benefit the younger generation.
Gardiner called on both parties to get their act together to guarantee equality across generations.
“Given our forecast for stagnant working-age incomes and rising inequality in the coming years, it’s imperative that whoever takes power next month thinks again about how it supports working families if it is to do justice to the intergenerational contract,” Gardiner wrote in a Resolution Foundation post.