The House Opinion Article | The Professor Will See You Now: Ageing

Illustration by Tracy Worrall

4 min read16 min

As politicians get older, they talk less about the future. That’s the key finding from an article forthcoming in the Journal of Politics, based on analysis of parliamentary debates in Australia, Canada, Ireland and the UK.

Sentences spoken in debate were classified depending on whether they focused on the past, the present, or the future. To do this, a team of researchers initially coded a sample by hand, and then – using the data from that exercise – trained a computer program to code the rest automatically. This allowed an impressive scale of analysis: the British data alone draws on 709 million words spoken in the Commons, back to the 1940s; there are around 900 million words of text from the other three countries.

Overall, politicians mostly talk about the here and now; 64 per cent of all sentences spoken in the Commons since the 1940s have been about the present. The past accounts for 23 per cent, with the future just 13 per cent. But the future focus of speeches declines with increasing age. The decline is shallow before a politician hits 65, but it becomes much steeper thereafter. The effect is at its most extreme in Australia, and less sharp in Ireland, but it was evident in all four countries.

Yet although older legislators talk less about the future, it’s not because they are banging on about the glories of the past. If we take the UK as an example, the proportion of past-focused speech increases until roughly 45 and plateaus after that.

And some good news, I think: “Ministers in our data tend to talk more about the future than backbenchers.” That’s all those targets and missions.

As someone who recently pondered how many general elections he might have left in him – like a psephological J Alfred Prufrock measuring out my life in parliaments – I wonder whether this effect is specific to politicians or more general; perhaps we all become less future-focused once we’ve realised that most of the sand is in the bottom of the hour glass.

Either way, interesting as it is, I’m less convinced it matters hugely in substantive terms, because although the effect is clear it isn’t all that large. At its maximum, there’s about five percentage points difference comparing the oldest politicians to the youngest. Plus, the percentage of parliamentarians over 65, when the effect becomes steepest, is relatively small, at least in the UK. Still, if we want more politicians who look to the future, rather than the short term, then we need fewer oldies.

Relatedly, some research published recently in the Policy Studies Journal shows that when a politician talks about the short term, the British public thinks that means around a couple of years; “long term” typically means something in the range of five to 10 years. Those figures vary little across party lines, age groups, and such like.

In electoral terms, then, the public’s view of the short term is roughly the first half of any parliament; the long term is two parliaments. This government‘s short term is therefore coming to an end very soon.

You are a bright bunch, and so you will see the broader issue here. Lots of public policy takes a lot longer than even 10 years to come to fruition. To take one example: the government recently announced new reservoirs, the first to be built since the 1990s; the initial two are planned to come online in 2036 and 2040, with nine by 2050, some 25 years after the announcement. Another example: the all-England coastal path inaugurated by the King last month was initiated during the government of Gordon Brown; it took 18 years and seven prime ministers. This is less a case of jam tomorrow, rather jam at some point in the far-off distant future. 

Further reading: C Hanretty et al, Legislators talk less about the future as they age, The Journal of Politics (2026); M Barnfield et al, Long-Term Time Horizons and Support for Public Investment. Policy Studies Journal (2026)