Millennials have no reason to vote Conservative

For some time now, critics of the Tories’ strategy of soaking millennials to buy votes from boomers have been pointing out its fatal flaw: a generation with nothing to conserve will have no reason to vote Conservative. This argument has typically been waved away with some bromide about how everyone becomes more conservative as they get older. And with that, the Tories returned to over-taxing young workers, preventing them from owning a home and taking away their freedom of movement. 

How is this approach working out? A mega-poll of 8,000 voters aged 25 to 40 finds that 72 per cent believe the country is heading in the wrong direction. Six in ten say the Conservatives ‘deserve to lose the next election’, with 45 per cent already resolved to vote Labour. Just one in five plan to back the Tories and less than one in ten think that the party ‘stands up for people like me’.

That isn’t even the worst part for the Conservatives. The worst part is… well, take your pick. Millennials now make up one quarter of the adult population. They are the largest demographic in 51 per cent of constituencies. They outnumber boomers in 66 per cent of parliamentary seats. It’s almost as if impoverishing a large section of voters was a really bad electoral strategy. 

There are two silver linings: millennials like Rishi Sunak more than the party he leads and, despite their fondness for equity, they want to keep their taxes low. Conservatives should not feast on these crumbs. The electoral arithmetic that emerges from this poll hints at an existential crisis for the Tories.

The figures come in a new report by Onward, a centre-right think tank headed by Sebastian Payne, a millennial formerly of this parish and co-author of the analysis. As Payne points out, it’s not just that millennials are ‘the first demographic cohort not to become more right-wing as they age’, they are ‘the first generation to become more left-wing as they age’. An almighty brood of chickens, a-roosting they have come. 

As a millennial myself, my innate instinct is to respond to this report with a meme, but I can’t decide which one. Maybe Principal Skinner: ‘Am I out of touch? No, it’s the looming electoral landslide that is wrong!’ Or perhaps ‘well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own short-termist policies’. The Tories sowing: haha, 2015; yes, 2019! The Tories reaping: well, 2024 sucks.

While I’m all for gloating, it’s worth interrogating these developments a little. How has one of the world’s oldest and most electorally successful political parties managed to alienate and antagonise so many voters? While social and cultural factors are part of it, such as millennials’ exposure to higher education and their cosmopolitan attitudes, this is primarily a story of economics. Millennials are the first generation to enjoy less prosperity than their parents. They start work lower down the career ladder and have fewer opportunities for advancement. They are less likely to own a home and therefore less likely to marry and have children. In the past five years, they have lost access to one of the world’s largest markets for jobs, goods and services, and are now stuck in a country that would rather settle into its twilight years than do the hard work to restore economic dynamism. 

A generation lost to political and economic dysfunction is still only a symptom. The cause of the Conservative party’s troubles is the Conservative party and its separation from its own purpose and philosophy. The Conservative party is not merely failing to sell conservatism to the next generation. It has stopped buying into conservatism itself. 

The business of conservatism is not whining about wokeness and sneering at snowflakes, it’s fashioning a social order that encourages conservative ends. Those ends, as I understand them, are the veneration of tradition, the exercise of caution, the defence of constancy, the kindling of humility and the pursuit of beauty. A conservative recognises marriage, child-rearing, strong communities, public integrity and cultural cohesion as goods in themselves but also as the base conditions for stable societies in which people live ordered, virtuous lives. 

Not my idea of a good time but a philosophical tendency with a storied history in these islands. Yet you need not be a conservative to acknowledge that many forces and institutions of British public life have spent several generations either spurning the virtues of conservatism or working to undermine them. Chief among those institutions is the Conservative party, which has for four decades practised a hectic melange of market liberalism, statism, austerity and regressive redistribution. Britain in 2023 is a nation fractured by social atomisation, wracked by economic exclusion, and roiling in constant cultural upheaval. After 13 years of the Conservatives, the country is not only less conservative but less conducive to conservatism as a political platform. 

Nowhere is this more apparent than in polling of British millennials. What do they want? A stable job, a mortgage, a family and access to a competitive market for goods and services. They may never vote Tory but their aspirations couldn’t be more conservative if they tried. Instead of courting them, the Tories have driven them away. The Conservative party can’t win over millennial voters in time for next year’s election but it will have to find ways to appeal to them thereafter. Without them, the Tories will struggle to win another election for a long time.