Young people don't vote Conservative because the party is crap and out-of-touch not because it isn't 'woke' enough

Right now there is nothing at all about the Conservative Party brand that connects with the policy heuristics - the shortcuts - in young people’s thinking

Opinion polls are fickle things that we have come to rely on too much for our understanding of our world. It isn’t just that getting the sample right remains more art than science or that people routinely lie to pollsters but that people give the answer that is expected of them even when the response is anonymous. Why wouldn’t you, there is no downside cost to polling and you are not anticipating doing anything as a result of responding to a poll. Just as importantly, people responding to polls don’t know that they are dissembling or lying, they believe they give an honest answer.

Let’s take an extreme example of a poll asking whether, in the event of a NAZi-style regime invading and rounding up Jews you would cooperate with the authorities and shop your Jewsih neighbours, keep your head down, or actively resist the evil regime’s crimes. How are you going to answer? I don’t know about you but I’m guessing that lots of people who would probably cooperate won’t tell the poll this and lots more people than is the case in reality would become resistance heroes. Now we, sadly and terribly, have plenty of evidence of actual human behaviour faced with these situations, enough that a poll doesn’t really add very much to our understanding.

“Former Bailiff Sir Geoffrey Rowland said the wartime government was effectively powerless to protest.

"We had two Germans to three Guernsey people - total domination," he said.

Mr Bebb said: "We're the only British soil to have deported people to death camps.

"To mark and to remember and to never forget that dreadful past is something we should have to do to ensure we never repeat those mistakes."”

If we want to understand future human behaviour, we are always better off looking at revealed preference (what people actually did) than stated preference (what people say they will do). Mail order people learned this a long time ago by testing again and again. What we discovered was that a random list of people who had bought anything through the post would nearly always generate more sales than a carefully curated list of people who told us ‘of course we’ll buy what you sell, it is just what we need’.

All of this is by way of a long preamble to my attempt to understand why it is that opinion polls conducted among similar audiences can produce such different results. I’m not talking here about different answers to the same questions but rather differently framed research providing a very different vibe from the audience. Britain’s younger people are not going to vote Conservative (even allowing for shyness and deceit) but the exploration of the reasons for these young people making this choice rather depends on which part of the elephant we have in our hand right now.

Political scientist, Eric Kaufman approaches the elephant of youth voting and concludes that:

“The party’s problems are rooted in deep-seated aspects of modern British culture rather than short-term factors such as the cost of living or structural problems like housebuilding.”

Kaufman observes that even culturally conservative young people are not as inclined to vote for the Conservative Party as their expressed opinions might seem to indicate: “...only around 20% of young people who want lower immigration or think black, gay and women’s equality has gone too far intend to vote Conservative.” Which rather raises the question as to what this problematic (from a Conservative Party perspective) ‘deep-seated aspect of modern British culture’ might be?

For Kaufman, the problem is that young people are indoctrinated with concepts such as ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender’ or ‘queer’ theory. Presumably this means that young people are not merely being told as impressionable teenagers about things like ‘white privilege’ and ‘many genders’ but that they are also told that the Conservative Party is against all these good things. I agree that the uncritical teaching of critical theory is a real problem, I don’t think (especially given the revealed choices of Conservative Party led governments since 2010), however, that this is what drives the antagonism to that party among young people.

The Centre for Policy Studies provides us with another perspective in the form of some polling undertaken by American researcher, Frank Luntz. This research isn’t framed in terms of political choice but tests a series of ‘values’: freedom, security, prosperity, opportunity, equality, fairness. Luntz observes, in talking about young people (18-29 rather than the 18-35 used in the British Election Study cited by Kaufman), that:

“Demographically, young people aged 18-29 care less about freedom, security, and prosperity. That’s the reason why they don’t vote Conservative -- they don’t prioritise the values Conservative prioritise”

The ‘values’ that distinguish Conservatives from Labour in Luntz’s polling give us a somewhat different narrative to the one Kaufman gleans from the British Election Study. What CPS/Luntz show is that the divide hinges around ideas of ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’ as opposed to ‘prosperity’ and ‘security’. Rather than it being indoctrination that drives people away from the Conservative Party, it is a perception that the party is ‘unfair’ and that it doesn’t care about ‘inequality’. And, while fairness and equality are features of the critical theory Kaufman sees as the problem, these values stretch a lot further, indeed the distinction has perhaps always been a feature of left/right discourse.

It is too simple an argument to claim, as Kaufman does, that all the Tories problems are down to the ‘woke’ agenda. Some of them are without question down to the perception that grumpy old boomers are stopping young people from realising their best life. As New Statesman editor Rachel Cunliffe observed:

“The party that has been in power for 12 years is now trying to guide the nation through an NHS crisis, a social care crisis, an economic crisis, an energy crisis, a sewage crisis, a migration crisis, and just about any other crisis you care to name – to say nothing of Brexit and the demographic factors at play there.”

To make matters even worse the Conservative Party has conspired to have an internal crisis all by itself - from trying to stop Parliament punishing Owen Patterson for breaking rules on interests through ‘Partygate’ and the defenestration of Lizz truss, to the latest episode in the soap opera that is Boris Johnson. Wash over this with a cost-of-living crisis brought on by the necessary but cavalier borrowing to fund lockdowns and the energy crunch, and we get a perfect storm – why on earth would anyone arriving blinking and innocent into the world of voting choose to vote for such a Party?

Kaufman, in his analysis, stresses the falsity of James Carville’s famous maxim - “It’s the economy, stupid”. Like many writers in the developing world of National Conservatism, Kaufman thinks that cultural factors are driving political opinion in the UK rather than, as has traditionally been the case, factors bedded firmly in economics and betterment. Yet if there’s any truth in the Luntz polling then the fundamental reasons remain, as least as much, about economics - the ideas of fairness and equality that we see young people preferring are as much about peoples’ material lives as they are about such things as gay rights, racial equality and trans recognition.

This brings us back to what I call Disraeli’s bargain, the offer of betterment for ordinary people while conserving the great institutions of society. The question for Conservatives isn’t whether this is the right bargain but what we understand by betterment. There’s no doubt that part of making peoples’ lives better lies in giving a greater sense of fairness and equality. And we should start with fairness: it isn’t fair that, as I wrote recently, it isn’t possible for…

“...a 27 year old with a good professional job or an established trade (to) afford to buy a home on that wage while still affording holidays, cars and nights out”

The unpleasant ‘ooh boomer’ trope doesn’t exist because young people are any more nasty these days but reflects this sense of it being profoundly unfair that a generation - my generation -  is sitting enjoying huge unearned increases in personal assets while young people are paying out £1,000 or more each month for the dubious privilege of living in a badly maintained one-bad flat (usually owned by one of those ‘boomers’). The problem is that most of my generation, the ones who put ‘prosperity’ top of Luntz’s values list, already have that prosperity and want to keep it that way, even to the point of preventing others - migrants and young people - from getting any.

The coming UK general election will not be won or lost on issues of culture or by being ‘woke’ or ‘anti-woke’. The election will be fought around issues such as the cost-of-living, jobs, health and the competence of those we’re asked to choose from. I can’t see much prospect of the Conservative Party, even if it manages to recover from repeatedly stabbing itself in the head, presenting an agenda for a government that responds to this wider economic and social agenda. For young voters the Conservative Party brand is simply too damaged -old-fashioned and elitist, typified by the  ‘I’m all right Jack’ outlook that tells young people that they can’t buy a house because they had a cheap holiday in Florida or Turkey and paid £3.50 for a fancy coffee last week. Plus, of course, for the last seven years the UK’s media elite has attacked Conservatives and conservatism but this isn’t because they are personally hyper-liberal but rather because they blame the Tories for Brexit. I’ve a feeling the media attitude to Brexit is a much bigger factor in young people’s anti-tory outlook than anything they got taught in PSHE classes at school.

People, in the final analysis, vote on the basis of perceived self-interest (what is best for me) and they buy politics on the basis of what us old marketing sorts call ‘choice architecture’ or ‘brand heuristics’. Right now there is nothing at all about the Conservative Party brand that connects with the policy heuristics - the shortcuts - in young people’s thinking. Going back to that Frank Luntz research, what we see is a party offering ‘security’, ‘stability’ and ‘continuity’ to an audience who see the world as unfair, unequal and judgemental. Until this changes, until the Conservative Party stops looking like one of its old northern clubs, filled with old people grumbling about change, there is no prospect of anything but a 1997-style thrashing. It can change.