Ed West Ed West

The Tories need houses, not memes, to win over the young

The Tory party has a new youth wing called Activate to try to win over the kids with ‘memes’ – I believe they’re called – similar to the way that Momentum has built a sort of cult around Jeremy Corbyn. This is in response to the dismal recent Conservative youth vote, which bodes ill for the party. As a party member rather optimistically put it, ‘we’ll only be fine when a Conservative politician can go to Glastonbury and not be booed’.

https://twitter.com/Activate_uk_net/status/902284187687780353

Yeah, I wouldn’t be too hopeful on that one to be honest. Among the under-40s there is an almost visceral dislike of Tories and Toryism, which stems from a number of cultural trends, in no particular order: mass university education, the dominance of the Left in teaching, a sort of neo-Christian obsession with victimhood, progressivism as status symbol, cultural conformity among the young, and lots of Tories being genuinely repulsive and clueless.

Conservatives are never going to be cool or counter-cultural. The traits that correlate with attractiveness and high-status qualities like artistic ability are too strongly linked with political liberalism for that to be possible. Even the extreme Right has the attraction of the Heroic Narrative, while the centre-Right essentially stems from British liberalism, which in Helen Andrews’ words is noted for its ‘pragmatism, its impatience with abstraction, its celebration of bourgeois rather than romantic-heroic virtues’ – not things that attract the young.

But there is one way that the Tories can reduce the appeal of the Left even in the short term: housing. As long as people have no hope of possessing a home, they are never going to go Tory – but if they do, they will consider voting for a party, however repulsive they find it, because once people can own their own home they are much more

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