The Conservatives have a youth problem. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher won 42 per cent of the 18–24-year-old vote. That had fallen to 27 per cent by 1997. David Cameron raised it to 30 per cent in 2010, but it was down to 19 per cent by 2019. Polls suggest it is currently hovering around 13 per cent. One last autumn had it down to only 1 per cent. In short, young people hate the Tories.
This is good for any young Conservative coveting a regular GB News gig as the right-wing equivalent of the last Dodo. But it is terminal for their party’s future. Brits under 40 are not following the traditional path of becoming more conservative as they age. Even as young voters in the Anglosphere and Europe are turning rightwards, the Tories are facing a demographic timebomb. Why?
A common culprit has been identified: the housing crisis. As Rob Colville tirelessly explains, in 1989 more than half of 25 to 34-year-olds owned their own home. By 2019, it was only 28 per cent. Young adult homeownership has collapsed much more steeply in Britain than America, France, and Germany. Faith in the tacit compact of social mobility underpinning our democracy – work hard and be wealthier than your parents – has shattered. The Thatcherite dream of homeowning upward mobility is dead.
Why should the young believe in property-owning democracy – and the party of it – without owning property? Both Michael Gove and Policy Exchange are grappling with this. Less than a quarter of under-40s think democracy is working for them. Many want a socialist economy or a dictatorship. Budding Bolsheviks will not vote for a party of parliamentary democracy and market capitalism. But ministers only have themselves to blame for nurturing an anti-democratic generation with a loathing for Conservatives.
Cameron won in 2010 promising “a property-owning democracy where everyone can own their own home”. But getting onto the property ladder has become vastly more difficult. As wages have stagnated, house prices have increased by 84 per cent. The target of 300,000 homes a year has been missed for 14 years, as immigration has soared. Unsurprisingly, under-24s who backed Cameron in 2010 were voting for Jeremy Corbyn by the time they hit their 30s, radicalised by their precarity.
Swerving generational wipeout is a top priority for those of us mad enough to have a stake in the Conservative Party’s future. Step forward the Adam Smith Institute, which has launched its new Next Generation Centre. Headed by Sam Bidwell, occasionally of this parish, it aims to “develop policy by young people, for young people”, to convince under-40s that markets can deliver prosperity.
Housing is just the start. The cost of raising a child increased by 65 per cent between 2003 and 2016. 4 in 10 graduates are not in jobs requiring degrees yet must pay off student loans. The tax burden is at record levels to finance public expenditure disproportionately focused on the elderly. High rents are preventing saving for deposits, and family formation is delayed. If the facts of life for under-40s are not becoming more conservative, it’s no surprise that neither are their votes.
Bidwell knows what to blame: “risk-averse policy-making…protecting the interests of established economic stakeholders through state intervention”. A socialist planning system, an over-regulated childcare sector, Ponzi universities: young people are at the sharp end of our undynamic economy. Facing immiseration and robbed of upward mobility, they have naturally soured on the Tories.
But help is at hand. By tackling these barriers, Conservatives can win young voters over, by delivering an economy geared to their interests. Thatcher and Cameron successfully mobilised young voters. Canada’s Conservatives and New Zealand’s Nationals are doing so today. Both are reaching 40 or more per cent of the youth vote by being ardently pro-housebuilding. The Tories must swap defending our stagnant status quo and pandering to homeowning retirees for an aggressive pro-growth agenda.
Music to YIMBY ears. The pro-development movement has been successful in making support for more housebuilding a common interest of young right-wingers and their allies. It has the obvious attraction of boosting Britain’s anemic growth rates and helping us onto the property ladder. I’m sympathetic. Being 24 in a gerontocracy isn’t fun. I want nothing more unreasonable than the same opportunity to settle down my parents had at my age.
But where our depart from Bidwell, and what I term Tory YIMBYism more widely, is the suggestion that an economic pitch alone will be enough to get the young voting Conservative. My title references Keith Joseph’s 1976 lecture. He argued that monetary control was the first step towards Britain’s economy, not the last. I use YIMBYism in a broad sense, as he did monetarism, to refer to a pro-liberalisation, pro-building, pro-ownership agenda. Such an approach is necessary but not sufficient to avert demographic disaster.
James Kangasooriam has explained the trends turning the young away from the Tories. Homeownership is among them. But others involve profound demographic and value shifts: rural depopulation, university attendance, growing ethnic diversity, and Brexit.
Young Britain looks very different from the white, non-university-educated, rural retirees that make up the Tory base. Attending university and moving to cities are associated with shifting outlooks and voting patterns to the left. Single, university-educated 20-29-year-olds now make up almost half the population of our cities– areas now emptying of Conservatives.
In 2019, only two in 100 voters aged 85 or over were black or from an ethnic minority, compared to around 20 per cent of those aged 29 or under. They voted against Johnson by 64 points to 20. The white British will be a minority in the United Kingdom within the next half-century based on 2010 levels of immigration – a third of what we have recorded in the last two years.
Lying beyond these material changes is the biggest challenge Conservatives have with young voters: a divergence in values. Tory YIMBYism hopes that making young voters family-rearing property-owners will encourage them to vote Conservative. But as Eric Kaufmann has highlighted, even those young people who have bucked the economic trends to become homeowning, married, and in the top 15 per cent income bracket are still more likely to vote for left-wing parties than the Tories by 51 per cent to 16.
Let me spell that out: even those under 40s for whom the facts of life are conservative are failing to vote Conservative. Their aversion to Toryism is not only based on material circumstances but what Burn-Murdoch calls a “growing misalignment on values”. Brexit crystallised a value seperation between young voters and their parents and grandparents.They might not smoke, drink, or bonk like previous generations. But don’t kid yourself that they are budding social conservatives.
For them, EU membership was as progressive a cause as gay marriage, abortion, or action on climate change. Accordingly, three-quarters voted to Remain. The share of British 18–34-year-olds saying they “strongly dislike” the Conservatives doubled after the EU referendum, driving a 40-per cent gap in willingness to vote Tory at the last election.
Young people are far more progressive than ever before, having grown up in a political culture – across education and the workplace – trending rapidly and institutionally to the left. With high-status professions and institutions now left-leaning, the young have a career incentive to be progressive. The ‘woke aristocracy’ is self-perputating. The long march through the institutions has succeeded.
This value shift is a phenomenon comparable to paganism’s replacement by Christianity and cannot be ignored. Simply deriding the young as ‘woke snowflakes’ is emotionally satisfying, but will only further alienate them. They cannot be our enemy.
What is to be done? One option is accommodation. Pierre Poilievre combines pro-housing rhetoric with supporting abortion, immigration, action on climate change, and marijuana legalisation. Matching social liberalism with economic liberalism updates David Cameron’s pitch for 2024. Don’t drop the T in LGBT. A future Tory leader may follow the voters and advocate re-joining the EU, fitting nicely into our party’s long tradition of shamelessly swapping principles for political expediency.
But for those of us who would hope that the Conservatives might at least aspire to make Britain more conservative, unilateral cultural surrender is not an option. The objective should not be to start thinking like the voters, but to get them thinking like us.
In the short term, the alienation of the Cameron generation means the easiest route back to a majority lies in once again reuniting the Vote Leave coalition. Once in government, Conservatives must embrace Tory Leninism, and use the state to change Britain in a more Conservative direction. Ministers have failed to do since 2010. In the culture war, Tories must side with Julian the Apostate.
For personal reasons, I hopes this involves mass housebuilding, cheaper childcare, and lower taxes. But it also requires radical action to stall or reverse the trends making younger voters more left-wing: Net Zero immigration, closing universities, abolishing the Equality and Communications Acts, and defunding the Blob and activist NGOs. If you believe the culture milieu is becoming ‘woke’, change the culture. We cannot leave left-leaning children’s authors to fight our battles for us.
A fantasy? Perhaps. But it seems no more outlandish to me than the prospect of buying a house at the same age my parents did. Rage, rage, against the dying of the right.