What's good about Help to Buy? It will make young people Conservatives

At a party in Bethnal Green recently I found myself at the receiving end of an impassioned lecture about government policy. My lecturer was 28-year-old Londoner Sam who works in production, has little interest in politics and hasn’t voted before. He’s saving, he tells me, to put down a 5 percent deposit on a place and the Government will guarantee another 15 percent to help him secure a mortgage. Good for him, I thought. But I’d rather not talk about government policy at a party so I wished him luck and moved on.

Yet the conversation stuck with me. When people my age (I’m in my early twenties) hear that I work in Westminster there are two common reactions: either their eyes glaze over or I get an earful about uni fees, wages or once from an artist, during an otherwise pleasant dinner, an hour-long rant about cuts to the arts. But this time, Sam was excited by a politics that was speaking his language and a policy that would help him get out of the room he rents for £600 a month somewhere in Zone 2.