Running Out of People

Defusing the Conservative Party's demographic bomb

Image: Number 10 / Flickr

Even in their most difficult moments, there’s an aura of invincibility about the Conservative Party. It is, after all, one of the oldest political parties in the world, if not the oldest - depending on whether you count back to the founding of the party’s current iteration in 1834, or the Tory Party’s origins in the 1670s.

This has given political journalists plenty of time to develop hoary old chestnuts about the party’s admittedly impressive capacity to adapt to an ever-changing electorate. ‘The purpose of the Conservative Party is to win power’ (and after the last 12 years, you’d be hard-pressed to argue what else it could be). ‘The Conservative Party is an absolute monarchy tempered by regicide’. ‘The Conservative Party is the most effective electoral force in history’. And so on.

When you’re told this sort of thing enough, you start to believe you’re actually immortal. When a demographic bomb rolls your way, you might not be particularly motivated to throw it away - after all, what harm could the explosion do? You’re 180 years old! You’re the most ruthlessly adaptable electoral force the world has ever seen! You might be down for a while, but you’ll never be out! You’re immortal.

Ever since the ‘youthquake’ of 2017, it’s been clear that the Conservative Party is going to run out of people at some point in the medium-term future. Poll after poll shows the Tories on comically abysmal numbers with under-30s, or even the under-40s or under-50s, for that matter. More concerningly, millennial voters aren’t getting more right-wing as they age; in fact, they’re going the other way.

Historically, young voters have been left-leaning, and become right-leaning as they got older. The Tories appear to have stress-tested this theory to the point where the elastic has snapped: asked to drift rightwards at increasingly extreme rates, millennial voters have stopped doing so altogether.

Image: Financial Times

There are plenty of theories as to why this is the case, but to a certain extent it’s just a mundane effect of critical mass. In generations past, and as late as 2010, when you could around a third of young voters to be Tories, it was pretty difficult for young left-wing voters outside of hardcore Labour heartlands to avoid Tory voters their own age. Voting Tory might not be something you did (yet), but you probably knew, were friends with, and maybe dated people who did.

Fast forward to 2022 and, among 18-24 year olds, the Tories are on 6%. They’re on 17% with 25-49 (!!!) year olds. Millennials don’t just lean left, they’re left wing to the point of consensus. Young Tories are a tiny minority, and the ones who won’t shut up about it for the sake of a quiet life are even tinier in number. It’s easy to not have Tory friends, or not have Tory housemates, or not date Tory voters, if you don’t want to. ‘Tory’ has returned to its 17th century roots as an insulting label, as much social as it is political, which YouTubers have to disavow in bizarre apology videos.

Most millennials' social circles are left-wing echo chambers, reinforcing their existing left-wing views and thwarting the great conversion on which the Tories’ electoral logic relies. That’s just a natural consequence of the fact that there are so few young Tories, and it’s probably something the party’s hierarchy should have considered before going all-in on the grey vote.

More worrying for the Tories is the fact that zoomers are like millennials, but even more so. In the mid-to-late 2010s there was a fleeting hope among some on the right that the popularity of politically incorrect YouTubers would translate to an anti-‘SJW’ backlash among zoomers. But no. Just as they drink even less than the already-sober millennials, and have even less sex than the already-abstinent millennials, zoomers vote Tory even less than the already-socialist millennials.

If I were trying to defuse the Tories’ demographic bomb, I wouldn’t start from here. But there’s no shortage of people offering advice.

One popular theory, both on the left and among the right-wing think tanks, is that the Tories’ problem is essentially economic. The abridged version of this is that young voters have been screwed by a combination of Tory economic policies and features of the post-2008 economic system: high rents, high house prices, high taxes, benefit cuts (while the state pension skyrockets), tuition fees, stagnant wages, and so on.

This is mostly true, and addressing the problem is a prerequisite to defusing the demographic bomb - but it’s just the first wire out of many that need cutting. Millennial homeowners aren’t significantly more right-wing than the rest of their generation - they might own capital, but they’re still not sold on capitalism. And many zoomers are so young that they haven’t encountered these economic problems yet, but they’re already very left-wing. Impressionable Tory-curious 21-year-olds aren’t being converted en masse to leftism by the radioactive inferno of the rental market: that’s not how you make a Labour voter, that’s how you make a Tory YIMBY.

The Conservative Party will have to tread very carefully if it decides to make a specific economic appeal to young people. 18-29 year olds oppose scrapping the triple lock on the state pension by 53% to 12%. Outside of a small number of extremely online YIMBYs, most young voters are not going to be enthused by planning reform and many will doubt that they’ll see much benefit from it. John Burn-Murdoch has exhorted Tories to build houses “because you care, not just as a hack” - but realistically, it isn’t a hack. It’ll only bear fruit electorally after it’s worked.

Meaningful planning reform, turbocharged housebuilding, and tackling runaway state pension spending (perhaps by targeting support at less well-off pensioners) would all help restore intergenerational fairness, and improve the economic situation of young people and the country as a whole. But too little attention has been paid towards developing a marketable economic appeal that convinces at least some young voters that the Tories are on their side, or at least not actively fighting against them.

Abolishing tuition fees and cancelling student debt proved popular for Jeremy Corbyn. The latter has also helped Joe Biden to a less-than-terrible result in the American midterms. Why don’t the Tories follow suit? It’s a clear, memorable, marketable policy; and it wouldn’t be the first time the party has done a complete 180 on its Coalition-era policies.

Image: UK in a Changing Europe

The second factor driving the Tories’ woes with young voters is the culture war. This is common to homeowners and non-homeowners, and millennials and zoomers alike, and it explains the precipitous decline in the Tories’ support among younger voters since the start of the ‘Great Awokening’ around 5-10 years ago. It’s also more likely to explain why young voters in the English-speaking world are much more uniformly left-wing than their continental peers, who face similar economic challenges but vote in large numbers for right-wing populist parties.

In short, British millennials and especially zoomers are very progressive on ‘woke’ social issues like race, immigration, Brexit, historical memory, free speech, fourth-wave feminism, criminal justice, sexuality, and gender identity. They see the Tories as insufficiently committed to these causes at best, and outright ‘bigoted’ at worst, and therefore could not imagine ever voting for them.

This gives the Tories a choice of two wires to snip. One is that they should stop ‘using culture war politics’ and ‘come to terms with diversity and inclusion’. In short, the party should try to neutralise the issue by aligning itself with the ‘woke’ (which is what I’ll call it in lieu of a better word) views of most young voters.

Much of this theory rides on the idea that the Conservative Party, or even the right in general, started and is perpetuating the culture war. It isn’t. The right would have been perfectly happy for none of this to have happened. It’s the woke left that decided to make everything ‘problematic’.

The Tories’ ‘crime’ here isn’t even to have dared to fight back, because they haven’t. One of David Cameron’s first acts in office was to confirm that he wouldn’t abolish the Equality Act (2010), which provides legal drive and cover for various woke initiatives. Since then, over 12 years, they’ve presided over the spread of woke ideology throughout the public and private sectors, funded woke NGOs, done nothing to protect people against being fired or even prosecuted for saying politically incorrect things, and even almost sleepwalked into legalising gender self-ID until they were pressured out of it by a campaign led mostly by Blairite women.

The Tories have responded to the Great Awokening with a handful of ineffective gestures, and a fair amount of grumbling. Granted, that will probably annoy the maximum number of woke voters for minimum achievement; but how many potential ‘woke Tory’ voters are there?

The Conservative Party may be adaptable, but fundamentally it’s a right-of-centre conservative party (clue being in the name). The underpinning principle of wokeness is that Western society - its culture, traditions, institutions, and prosperity - is built on racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia; and is designed to perpetuate that bigoted oppression. If it has another principle, it’s that all inequality is the product of systemic oppression and social conditioning. How can you reconcile that with any potential form of conservative or right-of-centre politics? What would you even want to conserve?

This is one cultural wave that the Tories cannot ride, and the party’s terminal unpopularity with young voters, while exacerbated by other factors, reflects that. The only option is to snip the other wire - try to make wokeness less popular.

Future Tory voters? / Image: Alisdare Hickson

This is a difficult task. Most young people are exposed to woke ideas through social media or their peers, not schools. A lot of woke messaging - on social media, in traditional media, and from corporations - comes from America. A lot of wokeness within institutions is pushed by enthusiastic individuals whom everybody says ‘yes’ to for the sake of a quiet life. A British government can only do so much about any of that; but it can address the ways it is promoting wokeness, and in so doing, potentially make our cultural milieu less woke.

Here’s a short to-do list, to start: Cut the funding to political activist NGOs. Stop charity and CIC status being used by political activists (yes, this would affect the IEA; no, I don’t care). Pass legislation to protect free speech, including on social media and in employment rights. Ban ‘positive’ discrimination, including the ‘target’ loophole. Stop left-wing ‘training’ in the public sector and stop the law incentivising it in the private sector. If kids are going to encounter woke ideas anyway, make sure schools introduce them to both sides of the debate in a fair and balanced manner.

This will probably make a lot of millennial and zoomer voters very angry. But in the short term, it would likely appeal to core Tory voters upset at the lack of action on these issues. And many more middle-of-the-road voters, who aren’t ‘anti-woke’ but just find the whole culture war thing a bit tiresome on both sides, might get behind the idea of action to end the culture war rather than constantly yammering about it.

In the medium to long term, we may see wokeness losing some of its appeal to some millennial and zoomer voters. More likely, and more importantly, future generations growing up in a less woke-dominated culture may be less woke than millennials and zoomers, and therefore more receptive to conservative ideas and voting Tory. The party will have to consider how it can develop and present conservative policies as solutions to younger voters’ problems - for example, many young women feel unsafe when out after dark; a Conservative government should impose tougher sentences on repeat offenders to get them off the streets and prevent them escalating.

Right-wing philanthropists would also do well to consider ways they can put their money towards countering wokeness in the cultural, social, and judicial spheres, reaching the areas that Government cannot - after all, that’s what left-wing ‘trusts’ and individual donors do to promote wokeness with their money.

The Conservative Party has reached the point where there’s no easy way to defuse the demographic bomb that’s rolled under it. It need only look to its own history to see the potential consequences: before its current iteration was founded in 1834, the Tories had essentially been out of power for 120 years. Some politicians were called Tories, but (even in the years after 1834) they rejected that slur with all the indignation of a beleaguered YouTuber, and insisted they, like everyone who’d governed Britain since 1714, and every single MP from the 1760s (!!!), were proud Whigs. The party should never think it’s guaranteed another crack at government in its lifetime - its future has to be earned, and now is the time to start earning it.

If and when the party embarks on that mission, it should ignore the siren calls for it to compromise with wokeness; because wokeness is not interested in compromise with the Conservative Party. It needs to tackle wokeness head-on and, in tandem with right-wing donors, end the culture war to reduce support for woke ideas among current and future generations. Meanwhile, it needs to develop and execute a credible, electorally marketable plan to revive the economic fortunes of younger voters. It’s time to cut the right wires and defuse the demographic bomb, before the Tories run out of people.