Britain’s young are giving up hope

The Conservative party faces a new challenge in the battle to win back younger voters – how to sell the party of aspiration to a generation that has soured on ambition. Articles abound on the under forties drifting towards professional apathy, from quiet quitting to abandoning the rat race entirely. Now polling has indicated a spread of this disillusionment from the working world.

It’s not that younger generations are particularly workshy or lazy, but more that they feel the prizes promised for a lifetime of graft have become a phantom. A new survey from Opinium shows that only a third of young people will achieve their career aspirations, and only a quarter think they will earn more than £30,000 (roughly the current median wage) at the end of the next decade. This creeping sense of hopelessness is bound to have political consequences.

Wages have stagnated in real terms since the financial crisis. The under 40s have never really known an era of increasing wages. At the same time, they have seen house prices become unaffordable in much of the country and the end of defined benefit and index-linked pensions. Many have paid expensive tuition fees and found the promise of professional jobs at the end of it lacking. It’s a common refrain to hear people say that on every metric they have outperformed their parents – but have ended up feeling poorer.

For the Conservative party, this represents a significant electoral problem. The party has usually relied on older voters, but the divergence between pensioners and professionals has become increasingly stark. Recent polling suggests only one in ten voters under 50 intends to vote Tory at the next election. It is a monumental collapse, and one which bodes badly for the party’s long-term survival.

Some in the party reassure themselves with the received wisdom that voters move rightwards as they age, but this is far less certain than many envisage. When the Tories have done well in the past, they have received a good number of votes from the young. Both in the 1950s and in the 1980s a cohort came of age as Conservatives and continued to back the party. Even in 2010, David Cameron was backed by around a quarter of first-time voters, several times more than Sunak might expect at the next election. 

Equally, it is not simply the case that older voters naturally become conservative. In the past, older voters leant more Tory because they had more of a stake in the things that mattered to the party. Tory voters have tended to be homeowners with families and higher incomes. Indeed, during Macmillan’s success in the 1950s voting Tory itself felt like a mark of success.

The Conservative party now faces an almost existential problem when it comes to the young. It’s hard to make a demographic which is excluded from accruing capital support a capitalist system. It’s hard to make a cohort which sees no point in ambition support a party that believes in aspiration. It’s even harder to do this when you also represent the big winners of this change – the older buy-to-let landlords who rode the property boom into prosperity and the NIMBYs who see any attempt to build more houses as an intrusion on their idyll.

Indeed, the culture of the Tory party at times feels like it is turning against the young. Universities, graduates, and people who work from home are often attacked by Tory MPs. Jake Berry even had a pop at people in flash cars with a big house in Surrey – a demographic usually considered stereotypically Tory.

There’s a bigger problem too. As younger people feel like they are losing more and more of their stake in society, there’s a chance they become more radical in their responses. When it feels impossible to win the game, or even do reasonably well from it, there is a temptation to flip the board over.

The hopelessness and lack of optimism young people feel could easily turn into anger. As the ranks of the frustrated grow, there is a chance that it spills into extreme politics, either of the right or the left. Already polling shows that the Zoomer generation are more open to autocracy than their forebears. Others will just check out of society completely. The Opinium survey revealed one in ten young people intends to never start working. For the more dynamic, emigration seems an increasingly discussed option among the country’s young.

The Conservative party needs to find a way to re-engage younger voters. More than that, however, the country needs an answer for the generations that feel more and more economically adrift. The future of the country is implicitly intertwined with their hopes and fears. At the moment many look at what is on offer – expensive housing, expensive childcare, stagnating wages and a precarious retirement – and feel they are getting a very raw deal.

Without a solution to this they are unlikely to take the political journey that gives them something to conserve, or something to aim for. The Conservative party will struggle to ever win them over, but equally their disenchantment could exacerbate the risk of a bleak, divided and stagnating nation.

It’s easy to dismiss the apathetic youth as entitled and lazy, but a generation which enjoyed an expanding middle-class, huge economic growth and a house price boom runs the risk of looking down on those who face a very different world now. Our political system is based on the idea that hard work will deliver personal enrichment and a better quality of life. When that bond begins to break, it’s hard to avoid the consequences. The Tories have around two years until the next election – if they want to deliver an answer for younger voters, they will have to act on it soon.