Question

Most likely question

Reasoning

Q1(a)

Voting Behaviour and the Media (source)

Last source-level VB question was 2023 (1997 election). 2024 Q2b revisited voter behaviour but not at source level. Class-age realignment after 2024 election is a live story.

Q1(b)

Electoral Systems (source)

Electoral Systems has not appeared at source level since 2022. Pearson cycles Q1a/1b across the four UK Politics topics (VB, ES, Parties, D&P/Rights). ES is the most overdue.

Q2(a)

Political Parties

Cons vs Labour unity (2025) already done; minor parties and Reform UK emergence untouched at essay level.

Q2(b)

Democracy and Participation / Pressure Groups

Direct-vs-representative democracy or protest culture is the least-recent D&P angle (2023 deficit was source-based).

Q3(a)

Core Ideologies - Conservatism

Pair rotation: 2025 was Soc+Lib, 2024 Lib+Con, 2023 Lib+Soc, 2022 Con+Soc. Con+Soc is the most overdue pair (last 2022).

Q3(b)

Core Ideologies - Socialism

Completes the Con+Soc pair. 2025 Q3a already asked about socialism and human nature, so a society or state angle is the natural next beat.

This source considers whether class has been displaced by age as the primary driver of how people vote in UK general elections. It was written after the 2024 general election.

The Conservative collapse in 2024 and Labour's return to office cannot be explained by traditional class voting. Labour took former Red Wall seats back while also gaining in southern commuter towns. Across both, it was younger voters who delivered the majority. Polling after the election found that among voters under 30, Labour led the Conservatives by more than 40 points. Among voters over 65, the Conservatives held a lead of around 20 points even as their national vote collapsed. Age, not class, produced the clearest electoral dividing line.

This pattern continues a trend visible since 2017. Home ownership, university attendance and exposure to social media correlate far more strongly with vote choice than occupation or income. Reform UK's rise took disproportionately from older working-class and middle-class Conservative voters, scrambling any neat class analysis. Parties themselves now campaign on housing, tuition fees and pensions rather than on the old language of labour and capital.

However, class has not disappeared from the picture. Turnout among the lowest-income voters remains well below that of the professional middle class, which means that age patterns are partly an artefact of who actually votes. In Scotland, class and national identity continue to shape support for Labour, the SNP and the Conservatives in ways that age alone cannot capture. Regional and educational divides, often stand-ins for modern class, still produce sharp differences between graduate-heavy cities and less qualified towns. To argue that class is dead is to mistake a change in its shape for its disappearance.

This source examines whether First Past the Post still produces the results it was designed to deliver. It draws on the 2024 and 2019 general elections.

First Past the Post has traditionally been defended on the grounds that it produces strong, single-party government and a clear constituency link. In 2024, Labour won a landslide of 411 seats with just under 34 per cent of the vote, the lowest vote share ever recorded for a governing majority. Reform UK received more than four million votes and returned only five MPs, while the Greens took nearly two million votes for four seats. The system is now producing some of the most disproportionate results in its history. Critics argue that the link between votes cast and seats won has broken, and that the millions of voters for smaller parties are effectively disenfranchised.

The devolved assemblies demonstrate how alternative systems behave. The Additional Member System in Scotland and Wales, and Single Transferable Vote in Northern Ireland, deliver parliaments that reflect vote shares more accurately and allow smaller parties to be represented. The 2024 election showed that voters are willing to back parties outside the traditional two, but the Westminster system cannot accommodate that shift.

Defenders of First Past the Post reply that strong government is still being produced, even if by smaller vote shares, and that coalitions under proportional systems can be unstable or allow extremist parties a foothold. The 2011 referendum decisively rejected change. The constituency link, they argue, is worth more than mathematical proportionality. Yet even some Conservatives now question a system that hands a majority to an opponent on a vote share only four points above their own. Strong government is not the same thing as legitimate government.