An intriguing article in the September 28, 1969, edition of The Sunday Times is headlined “Labour’s secret strength”. The secret strength in question? Young voters. In the piece, two pre-eminent academics run the data and show Labour voters are being born and Conservative voters are dying. The future looks bright for the red team’s electoral prospects.
Labour then, of course, went on to only win outright in one of the next seven general elections. In a tale as old as time, those young leftwingers aged into Conservatives: the ultimate defence against Labour’s secret weapon.
Today, however, Tory strategists speak in hushed tones of their fear that this age-old link may well have broken. Over the summer leadership campaign, some younger MPs expressed private concern that the candidates were on sure footing with older voters – pledging to maintain the triple lock on pensions, for example – but seemed less enthused about reaching out beyond their base. As one exhausted Westminster strategist put it this week: “Literally doing anything to show they have the slightest interest in young people would be better than the current plan.”
To try to get the ball rolling, James Cowling, a 27-year-old Conservative councillor in Greenwich, set up the pressure group Next Gen Tories. “Age is the new dividing line in politics” reads their slickly designed website homepage. “It is now a stronger indication of voting intention than class, gender or race. For every ten years younger a person is, they are nine points less likely to vote Conservative.”
The campaign aims to bring together MPs and policymakers to try to come up with ideas that will win over those in their thirties and forties. Yes, good news: if you find yourself in that age bracket, you still count as young by Conservative electoral standards. The think tank Onward found recently that anybody who was born after 1965 was more likely to be planning to vote Labour than Conservative.
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Analysis conducted by the global public opinion consultancy Deltapoll for The Sunday Times indicated if a general election were held tomorrow, 46 per cent of those over 65 would vote Conservative. Just 15 per cent of those aged 25 to 35 would do so. Rishi Sunak, only 42 himself, fares slightly better: the prime minister has a net approval rating of 19 among the over-65s, and of -6 among those aged 25-34. The voting intentions research is backed up by separate polling of 10,010by Focaldata, revealed in today’s newspaper, showing that 36 per cent of over 65s would vote Tory, compared to 12 per cent of 25-34-year-olds.
“Nobody I know my age is voting Conservative,” one party member in his early thirties told me recently, “even friends I met through campaigning for the Conservatives.” The concern that party strategists have is that these views may now be fixed: these young professionals will not age gracefully into conservatism as their 1960s counterparts did.
Only time, and more data, will tell if this fear is founded, says Deltapoll’s Joe Twyman. If the threat does turn out to be real, the party faithful are already putting forward their explanations as to why this will be. Some MPs fear that young people – who voted overwhelmingly against Brexit – will not forgive the party that delivered it.Some fret that there are those among their colleagues who are compounding the problem by creating a sense of “us versus them”. “We call young people a bunch of woke snowflakes, and then wonder why they aren’t voting for us,” was one MP’s weary verdict.
However, by far the most popular explanation among Conservative MPs is the lack of affordable housing: it is harder to feel enthusiastic about capitalism if you do not have any capital. What is more, high house prices mean that people are buying later, with some deferring having children as a result. The type of life changes that precipitate voting Tory are coming later, and so perhaps is the switch to a Tory vote.
Housing is one of the key areas Next Gen Tories want their party to focus on. Cowling suggests reforms to planning laws to allow for increased density in inner cities. He is keen to stress, however, that the group primarily exists to open up discussion, rather than to put forward specific policies. On housing, particularly, this caution makes sense. The Conservative Party finds itself engaged in a civil war on planning, especially when it comes to building in areas outside big cities. A group of backbenchers recently forced the government to U-turn on creating nationally mandated housebuilding targets. “We’ve pretty much just said to young people they should never vote Tory again,” one younger MP wailed to me at the time.
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Cowling also points to high childcare costs as one of the key factors turning younger people away from voting Conservative. A parent with a child under two in full-time nursery care can expect to see two thirds of their weekly take-home pay eaten up by childcare costs, according to recent analysis of data from the Office for National Statistics by the charity Coram.
For Cowling, it is also a broader question of shifting priorities. Next Gen Tories want to see any fiscal headroom that the government can claw back by the next election used to offer something to young people: either in the form of a tax cut, or a big and tangible policy that will improve their lives. There is limited political appetite within the Conservative Party for changes to the way that student loans work. However, some MPs hold out hope for a big intervention on childcare or housing.
With limited time before the next election, and the public sector already under financial strain, the government has limited time and resources to make radical changes. Nonetheless, Cowling is optimistic. Next Gen Tories is speaking to 35 MPs about getting on board with the group’s programme, and Conservative Campaign Headquarters have been in touch. “There are lots of naturally right-leaning young people, and this is an opportunity to unlock those votes,” says Cowling. He is sanguine about the fact that the party has been slow to act, citing the need to stabilise the economy after the financial crash, deliver Brexit and respond to the pandemic.
The group hopes to insert enough youth-friendly policies in the party’s manifesto for the next election to stave off this potentially existential threat. It is not an overstatement to say that the extent to which the group succeeds could shape UK politics for decades to come.
