The Tories shouldn’t worry about losing the youth vote

There was publicity last weekend for a report (Generation Why?) by Onward, the think tank of semi-young ‘mainstream’ Tories. Its survey seemed to confirm the widespread belief that hardly anyone young supports the Tories, which may not matter quite as much as Onward thinks, since it also showed that the young have astonishing difficulty in working out how to get to a polling station and write a cross on a ballot paper.

Although the results collected by Hanbury Strategy were obtained via ‘an online smartphone poll’ of 10,031 voters, I found myself losing confidence on page 46. There it was stated that ‘In our poll younger people seemed to be less supportive of the idea that abortion should be legal — although this appears to be an aberration driven by confusion between “illegal” and “legal”. For this reason we have excluded this result from our aggregate measure of social conservatism.’ If Generation Y has a problem in distinguishing the difference between the words ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’, it might be unwise to build anything much on what it thinks it thinks about anything.