Zack Polanski, Mothin Ali, and Rachel Millward of the Green Party

Polling from YouGov has shown that the Green Party has a decent lead with voters under 50:

🗳POLL | Greens lead amongst under 50s 👇

{ 18-49 }
🟢Grn: 25% ( +14 )
🔴Lab: 20% ( -23 )
➡Ref: 16% ( +5 )
🔵Con: 15% ( +2 )
🟠Lib: 14% ( – )

{ 50+ }
➡Ref: 32% ( +14 )
🔵Con: 23% ( -11 )
🔴Lab: 16% ( -11 )
🟠Lib: 12% ( +1 )
🟢Grn: 8% ( +4 )

Via YouGov, 22 June (+/- vs '24) pic.twitter.com/O6lFoxTnvR

— Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️‍⚧️ (@LeftieStats) July 9, 2026

It’s a further sign that people in Britain are chiefly divided by the ‘have mortgages’ and the have nots.

Division

It was once a common truism that people become more conservative as they age. Usually, you’d expect this to kick in around middle age. The reason it’s happening less and less is that people have less and less to conserve.

To give you the broader picture, this is the latest polling on overall voting intention from YouGov:

Education and the Green Party

YouGov also showed voting intention by education:

🗳POLL | Voting intention by education level (%)

Low Medium | High

➡ Ref: 40 | 27 | 14
🔵 Con: 21 | 20 | 18
🔴 Lab: 12 | 15 | 23
🟢 Grn: 8 | 15 | 20
🟠 Lib: 8 | 8 | 17

Via @YouGov, 2-22 June 2026 pic.twitter.com/Tsx2AADui6

— Stats for Lefties 🍉🏳️‍⚧️ (@LeftieStats) July 10, 2026

While it’s tempting to say people support Reform because they don’t know any better, the truth is they do know something – namely that they’ve been shafted. Right now, Reform have proven to be the most successful when it comes to convincing voters that:

  1. They have indeed been screwed over by the establishment.
  2. Reform is the party to turn their fortunes around.

Educated people are more likely to benefit from the status quo. Even with that group, though, things are looking less and less rosy. As the Independent reported in January:

A leading UK university vice-chancellor has warned that a degree no longer guarantees a good job for graduates, citing a crowded market and the impact of artificial intelligence.

And as professor Shitij Kapur explained:

The competition for graduate jobs is not just all because of AI filling out forms or taking away jobs.

It’s also because of the stalling of our economy and it’s also because of a surfeit of graduates.

So I feel that that simple promise [of a good job] has now become conditional on ‘Which university did you go to? What course did you take?’

The personal equation of the university as a vehicle for social mobility, almost as a passport to social mobility, meant that if you got a degree, you were certain to get a job as a socially mobile citizen.

But now I think it has become a visa for social mobility, it means you’ve got a chance to go and visit that place called social mobility.

Maybe you’ll make it there, maybe you won’t.

When things gets harder; when your prospects dry up; when your life doesn’t compare to your parents at the same age, you become angry with the establishment, and you vote with your feet.

Working

For under-50s and the highly educated, the party convincing the most people is the Greens; for over 50s, it’s Reform. We disagree that Reform represents an actual change to the status quo, and that much is obvious by who’s funding them. The party certainly sells itself as an alternative, though, and it’s working.

Working to an extent, anyway.

Although Reform has led in successive polls, it’s still far off achieving the numbers which delivered Labour a majority in 2024 and the Tories a majority in 2019. And the way things are going, we can’t see Farage & .co ever reaching those heights.

For the Greens, though – or to whichever party can best harness the desire for progressive change – it seems the future is on their side.

Featured image via the Canary

By Willem Moore


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