Tom Collins currently works as a City headhunter. He is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He is a former Conservative Party candidate.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / but to be young was very heaven.”
Those words, written by William Wordsworth as he reminisced the pregnant possibilities of the French Revolution – a romanticism presumably not shared by the thousands who met their ends courtesy of Madame Guillotine – could not have been written in 2026. To be young today is, if not Hell, then certainly like being stuck on a packed Bakerloo line service waiting on a red signal whilst desperately needing a wee.
Because, if you are young, you are probably unemployed. Not because you are lazy – you’ve probably applied to every vacancy within a 60-mile radius – but because next to no-one is hiring. National Insurance contributions – the jobs tax – have risen to 15 per cent since last April, whilst Labour’s Workers Rights Act has made it harder to fire – so riskier to hire – staff.
In Godalming, one shoe shop reported that they would need to sell precisely 828 pairs of shoes to afford just one full-time employee. Consequently, the number of vacancies today are at their lowest level since the peak of the pandemic in 2021.Speaking of tax, it has now risen to the highest levels in British history. Across the economy, higher taxes mean that more people are forced to make trade-offs when deciding how to spend their hard-earned money – with non-essentials the first to go. Spending less in shops, restaurants and retail services means that those industries which once reliably gave young people their first experiences in the workplace must too cut spending – generally in the form of either reducing staff, trading hours, or closing down. As a result, the hair and beauty sector lost one-fifth of employees last year, whilst youth unemployment rose from 9.3 per cent in July 2021 to 16.4 per cent in July 2026.
Meanwhile, the number of advertised graduate vacancies has fallen from a peak of more than 55,000 in 2017 down to 8,383 in July 2026. There were 981,000 NEETs – or people aged between 16 and 24 neither in employment, education, nor training – in the second quarter of 2026. Likewise, the number of entry-level graduate jobs has fallen 45 per cent since 2025, which had itself nearly halved year-on-year from 2024.
It should not surprise the reader to learn therefore that the welfare bill has risen from £264 billion in 2016 to £329 billion today – and is forecast to soar to £408 billion in just four years time.
Even if you’re employed – having made maybe two hundred applications, passed several rounds of assessment centers, online tests, one-way video interviews and endless form-filling – it will now take you a decade to save for a deposit on a house.
Torn between high taxes, eye-watering student loan interest payments, and astronomical rents, you may struggle to save anything at all. That is why one-in-three young men between 18 and 34 still live with their parents – whilst the average age for young women giving birth to their first child has risen from 26 in 1980 to 31 today.
No wonder the number of Young Conservatives at Party Conference rose 50 per cent this year compared to last.
We understand that the challenges our country faces have been almost entirely self-inflicted: our high-tax, high-tape, high-energy cost economy has made it nearly impossible to start a business, hire staff, find a job, buy a house, take risks – and feel that hard work pays off.
Because young people know what they want. They want to own their own home. They want to raise children knowing they’ll enjoy a better life than the one they had themselves. They want safe streets, reliable public services, and for tomorrow to be better than today – and they want a job to pay for it all.
To us, Andy Burnham’s promises to fix all our problems with higher spending – and higher taxes – make him sound like the economic equivalent of a flat-earther. Because only the Tories understand that when Labour talk about taxing the rich, they mean anyone with a job.
If the answer is a return to Seventies socialism – when Labour delegates voted to nationalise the City of London, Jim Callaghan’s government watched-on powerlessly as nearly ten million working days were lost to strikes in 1978, and Liverpool Council advised families to bury their own dead as picketers blocked cemetery gates – God knows what the question is.
Having pledged to save graduates thousands of pounds by abolishing above-inflation interest payments on student loans, to cut house prices by £50,000 through deregulating the planning sector, and to cut the jobs tax in half for 21 to 24 years, no wonder young people mobbed Kemi Badenoch at Conference like a thaumaturgical prince. Under Kemi, the Conservatives are not just the party of the property-owning democracy again, but they are once more a conservative party again – and they’re loud and proud about it too.
As Wordsworth understood, being young should mean believing that tomorrow can be better than today. The promise of 1789 was that ordinary men could change the world they inherited rather than accept it as their fate. The magic of Mirabeau, Sieyès, even Robespierre, was that they were not born revolutionaries. They were provincial everymen from up and down the country who became revolutionaries because they knew that rather than hoping for a better future, they had to roll up their sleeves and build it for themselves.
Today’s Young Conservatives share that conviction. We are not the pinstripe-wearing Yuppie sons of privilege of yesteryear, but ordinary people from up and down the country who understand that the facts of life are conservative.
With every leaflet delivered, with every door knocked, with every conversation had, with every ankle gnawed by a defensive chihuahua – we are fighting for that future. A future in which everyone willing to work hard will be able to get a job, own their own home, believe that tomorrow can be better than today – and feel proud to be British.
We believe that the Conservatives are the only party with a plan to build that better future – by offering a hand-up and not a handout.
Tom Collins currently works as a City headhunter. He is a graduate of the University of Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He is a former Conservative Party candidate.
“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / but to be young was very heaven.”
Those words, written by William Wordsworth as he reminisced the pregnant possibilities of the French Revolution – a romanticism presumably not shared by the thousands who met their ends courtesy of Madame Guillotine – could not have been written in 2026. To be young today is, if not Hell, then certainly like being stuck on a packed Bakerloo line service waiting on a red signal whilst desperately needing a wee.
Because, if you are young, you are probably unemployed. Not because you are lazy – you’ve probably applied to every vacancy within a 60-mile radius – but because next to no-one is hiring. National Insurance contributions – the jobs tax – have risen to 15 per cent since last April, whilst Labour’s Workers Rights Act has made it harder to fire – so riskier to hire – staff.
In Godalming, one shoe shop reported that they would need to sell precisely 828 pairs of shoes to afford just one full-time employee. Consequently, the number of vacancies today are at their lowest level since the peak of the pandemic in 2021.Speaking of tax, it has now risen to the highest levels in British history. Across the economy, higher taxes mean that more people are forced to make trade-offs when deciding how to spend their hard-earned money – with non-essentials the first to go. Spending less in shops, restaurants and retail services means that those industries which once reliably gave young people their first experiences in the workplace must too cut spending – generally in the form of either reducing staff, trading hours, or closing down. As a result, the hair and beauty sector lost one-fifth of employees last year, whilst youth unemployment rose from 9.3 per cent in July 2021 to 16.4 per cent in July 2026.
Meanwhile, the number of advertised graduate vacancies has fallen from a peak of more than 55,000 in 2017 down to 8,383 in July 2026. There were 981,000 NEETs – or people aged between 16 and 24 neither in employment, education, nor training – in the second quarter of 2026. Likewise, the number of entry-level graduate jobs has fallen 45 per cent since 2025, which had itself nearly halved year-on-year from 2024.
It should not surprise the reader to learn therefore that the welfare bill has risen from £264 billion in 2016 to £329 billion today – and is forecast to soar to £408 billion in just four years time.
Even if you’re employed – having made maybe two hundred applications, passed several rounds of assessment centers, online tests, one-way video interviews and endless form-filling – it will now take you a decade to save for a deposit on a house.
Torn between high taxes, eye-watering student loan interest payments, and astronomical rents, you may struggle to save anything at all. That is why one-in-three young men between 18 and 34 still live with their parents – whilst the average age for young women giving birth to their first child has risen from 26 in 1980 to 31 today.
No wonder the number of Young Conservatives at Party Conference rose 50 per cent this year compared to last.
We understand that the challenges our country faces have been almost entirely self-inflicted: our high-tax, high-tape, high-energy cost economy has made it nearly impossible to start a business, hire staff, find a job, buy a house, take risks – and feel that hard work pays off.
Because young people know what they want. They want to own their own home. They want to raise children knowing they’ll enjoy a better life than the one they had themselves. They want safe streets, reliable public services, and for tomorrow to be better than today – and they want a job to pay for it all.
To us, Andy Burnham’s promises to fix all our problems with higher spending – and higher taxes – make him sound like the economic equivalent of a flat-earther. Because only the Tories understand that when Labour talk about taxing the rich, they mean anyone with a job.
If the answer is a return to Seventies socialism – when Labour delegates voted to nationalise the City of London, Jim Callaghan’s government watched-on powerlessly as nearly ten million working days were lost to strikes in 1978, and Liverpool Council advised families to bury their own dead as picketers blocked cemetery gates – God knows what the question is.
Having pledged to save graduates thousands of pounds by abolishing above-inflation interest payments on student loans, to cut house prices by £50,000 through deregulating the planning sector, and to cut the jobs tax in half for 21 to 24 years, no wonder young people mobbed Kemi Badenoch at Conference like a thaumaturgical prince. Under Kemi, the Conservatives are not just the party of the property-owning democracy again, but they are once more a conservative party again – and they’re loud and proud about it too.
As Wordsworth understood, being young should mean believing that tomorrow can be better than today. The promise of 1789 was that ordinary men could change the world they inherited rather than accept it as their fate. The magic of Mirabeau, Sieyès, even Robespierre, was that they were not born revolutionaries. They were provincial everymen from up and down the country who became revolutionaries because they knew that rather than hoping for a better future, they had to roll up their sleeves and build it for themselves.
Today’s Young Conservatives share that conviction. We are not the pinstripe-wearing Yuppie sons of privilege of yesteryear, but ordinary people from up and down the country who understand that the facts of life are conservative.
With every leaflet delivered, with every door knocked, with every conversation had, with every ankle gnawed by a defensive chihuahua – we are fighting for that future. A future in which everyone willing to work hard will be able to get a job, own their own home, believe that tomorrow can be better than today – and feel proud to be British.
We believe that the Conservatives are the only party with a plan to build that better future – by offering a hand-up and not a handout.