The Aging of the Class Alignment

Abstract

The class alignment has, as we have seen, supplied British politics its dominant motif for half a century. Much of the electoral history of this period can be presented in terms of a process of realignment on class lines that is in some respects still under way. It may therefore seem paradoxical to suggest that the class basis of party allegiance was becoming weaker in the 1960s. After all, the working class was at least as heavily Labour in the youngest age-group as in the older cohorts. Indeed, the 1960s continued a long process of evolution.