MP Ben Bradley wants to ‘fix Tory image problem’ according to a massively disingenuous BBC Newsbeat article. According to the young conservative MP for Mansfield, the Tories’ problem is that they’re perceived by the young as being old, grey, and boring. He wants to appeal to ‘Young people, people from ethnic minorities who just don’t vote for us’. He’s pushing for conservatives from popular culture to get the message out. The article goes on to say that ‘any improvement in image would have to be backed up by policy.’
You can see the problem here, right? Tory policies that appeal to young voters are pretty thin on the ground. The article cites ‘The Conservatives cut housing benefits for 18 to 21-year-olds, introduced a lower minimum wage for under-25s and is the only major party against lowering the voting age to 16.’ Well, there’s a start. What else?
How about hard Brexit? Voters under 50 voted overwhelming to remain in the EU. (18-24s did so by a 3-1 margin; 56% of 25-49s voted remain.) All current evidence points to the Tories staying on that very unpopular highway despite all the signs advising them to turn off.
Brexit, like the recent US tax plan, is a boondoggle for the already very wealthy. The reason the government is pushing it so hard, despite the referendum having been clearly an advisory measure (see the first paragraph here, is because there’s so much money to be made getting Britain out from under EU regulatory regimes. It’s not as though the boot is onerous, just that it’s portrayed as such by whiny-ass bitches like Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch’s media empire was massively pro-Brexit. Why? When Anthony Hilton of the Evening Standard asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union, he replied, ‘That’s easy. When I go into Downing Street they do what I say; when I go to Brussels they take no notice.’
That’s several other articles that have already been written by folks better at this than I am. Laurie Penny, for example.
What does this have to do with what young people want? Young people want a government that acts in the interests of all citizens and does so with transparency. Simple.
What else do young people want? They want for the parties in power to act with resolve against keeping them in poverty. A fully functioning and fully funded NHS and reasonable/zero tuition fees are absolutely at the heart of this.
Reasonable secondary education tuition fees. You know, the ability to leave college not ass-deep in debt. Anywhere in the Tory manifesto? Of course not. If every second 23 year old already owes one of the banks nearly 30,000 pounds, the banks are happy. (Personal history: Tuition fees were introduced in the California public college/university system by Ronald Reagan when he was governor. Once the fee was introduced, it only went up. The CSU system’s tuition increased about 300% in the four years I attended (1985-1989) and is now almost USD 6000 per year. The UC system is over USD 12000 per year.
However, when the banks are happy, Tory campaigns are funded. One can’t expect the current government to rescind that.
And the NHS? Chronically underfunded under the Tories for almost seven years. Setting the NHS up for failure seems to be the Conservative party’s national sport. And they’re winning. They set up metrics like getting some percentage of A&E patients seen in under four hours that they then don’t fund the service to meet. And the papers all bemoan how poorly the NHS is doing. The rest of the world sees in this an obvious ploy. Set the NHS up to fail and then sell it off to the lowest bidder. Worked out beautifully for the Royal Mail as well, but the Royal Mail is only tangentially related to the real world health of its users.
What else? Safe housing estates. Because young people don’t just think only about themselves (all the stupid cracks about Millennials aside), they want for the people amongst us with the least to at least be safe in their own flats. You’d think that’d be a no-brainer, especially after the Grenfell tragedy. Nope, we’re not going to do anything to require property owners to make sure they’re buildings aren’t twenty-story fire traps. Thanks for asking.
Other things? How about a rail system that doesn’t gouge the young commuter (who may no longer be able afford to live near the city they work in) out of a large chunk of their pay packet. Well, nationalization isn’t going to happen, but rail networks that work for commuters and not shareholders? Too much to ask. I suppose the manifesto’s commitment to putting 40 billion pounds into improving Britain’s transport over the next decade is nothing to sneeze at, though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the rail companies’ revenue. In 2016 alone, one parent of Govia Thameslink (operator of Gatwick Express, amongst other services) saw revenues of 3.4 billion. And because of privatization, Govia Thameslink is only one of about 20 different rail operators in the UK.
So, to recap: The way to appeal to the young is to champion and implement policies that affect them and the people they see around them positively rather than negatively. It’s quite simple, but the Tories know who butters their crumpets, and it’s not the youth of Britain.
Joe Jots 
Okay. Yes, we[1] do have an image problem. No, turning this around isn’t as impossible or unlikely as it might appear.
First off, beware the phrase “young conservative”. Like the word “republican” in the USA, it carries particular meaning depending how you use it. There was an organisation called the Young Conservatives which got disbanded after some high-ranking members got up to sophomoric hijinks of the Frat Lodge variety (both male and female members – often very literally “both” and “members”, at the same time in the same newspaper photo with the same lack of undergarments). You used the phrase without capitals, but it still carries a meaning in the UK that you probably didn’t intend. Also, beware the term “Tory” which is still considered perjorative; its use by nationalised state broadcaster BBC and the left-leaning Guardian isn’t a good measure of balance, although some Conservatives have attempted to reclaim the word “Tory” in much the same way that the LGBT community have attempted to reclaim “queer” or the black community have attempted to reclaim the N-word; use with caution as others may infer that you have a particular agenda. Image problem, indeed.
Right, so, policies. Basically the Conservative party has been hijacked by the far right in the last couple of years, in much the same way as Labour has been hijacked by the far left. You’ll no doubt be aware that UKIP membership has decreased radically since the referendum. Those activists went somewhere, quite possibly to us.
However… bear in mind that our manifesto at the Brexit referendum and at the 2015 general election was to campaign for a REMAIN vote. This was the manifesto I supported, campaigned and canvassed for. Most of the MPs currently in our party supported that manifesto.
Implying that Brexit Leave is a particularly Conservative policy is just plain wrong. Both the Conservatives and Labour have accepted the result of the referendum. I strongly suspect that both the Conservatives and Labour are attempting to implement the result in the least damaging way possible. Both the Conservatives and Labour have MPs and front-benchers who supported Leave and who are spearheading their parties’ Brexit approach, but the majority of MPs in both parties backed Remain.
Brexit is not a Labour vs Conservatives issue, it’s just an almighty cock-up.
The British sense of Fairness (which we value in the same way that Americans value Freedom) means that we cannot simply ignore the referendum result. We had a vote, we lost, and it would be unfair to ignore it.
Being “Unfair” is the absolute worst thing a British politician can be accused of. British MPs will accept accusations of sexual molestation before they will accept accusations of unfairness.
Brexit is also clearly not a win for the wealthy. All analyses of the voting cohort show that Leave voters were predominantly poor and working-class. Leave voters were predominatly rich and middle-class. All analyses of economic impact show that Leave will disadvantage almost all British industries with the exception of trawler fishing. Normally there is almost zero commercial involvement in British politics, but Brexit was notable for having many large corporations send out memos to their staff warning that the company and their jobs would be negatively impacted by a Leave vote. The number of high-profile companies advocating Leave were so few that I can name 100% of them; JCB. Age was a far bigger factor than wealth in Brexit.
Extremist infiltration is a very difficult ship to turn around – and here I could be taking about the far left infiltration of Labour, just as much as the far right infiltration of the Conservatives.
For the Conservatives this presents a far bigger problem to our basic existence than Labour’s problem. Labour have been infiltrated by the young, the Conservatives have been infiltrated by the old. Our membership is quite literally dying out. (One option, and the one, to be honest, that I expect will work, will be simply to wait. The question is, whether there will be much of a party left by the time that happens.)
We can’t change Brexit. There was a vote. We lost, not by a little bit, but by more than a million votes. Then we won an election – we got 317 MPs, Labour got 262. We were 8 seats short of a majority, but compared to the coalition governments elsewhere in Europe, a win with only an 8-seat coalition was a huge win. So we have to implement Brexit despite the vast majority of our MPs having campaigned against it. We have to make the best of a bad job.
So that leaves a bunch of mostly minor policies to play for. Here’s where we can make quite a difference with regards to policies to attract young people.
First off, and our biggest seller, is that young people are today paying for the mistakes of the elderly generation, and we are keeping a lid on that, compared to Labour who want to tax the young more. In previous decades, taxpayers moaned about paying for the unemployed on welfare. Today the situation is that unemployment benefits cost only £9 billion a year whilst state pensions cost £90 billion, all of which is coming from current tax revenue, nothing was saved up. State pensions are not pensions, they are not a saved up pot, they are a welfare benefit just like unemployment. Added to that, Labour want to increase the state pension far faster than the Conservatives do, meaning that the younger generation will be paying even more for the older generation’s failure to plan for their retirement. Labour had 13 years to correct that balance and failed to act.
Related to that, we have overseen the highest employment rate in our history. We’re also starting to tighten up on “light touch” employment regulations that were brought in by Labour, although there’s more to do there. We’re also an easier fit with modern tech jobs and service industry jobs, than Labour’s union financers. Britain under the Conservatives is a very good place to be a young worker.
Secondly we have our surprisingly liberal social values. Labour had the opportunity to legalise gay marriage, but refused to do so. We legalised gay marriage within six months of coming to power. We had the first Muslim in the House of Lords, and I think we still have the only Muslim female in the House of Lords. We had the first Muslim cabinet minister and we still have a Muslim cabinet minister to this day. We had the only Jewish Prime Minister. We had the first, second and only female Prime Ministers. We had the first gay Prime Minister. Labour has never even had a female leader nor a gay leader, and the possibility that they would ever have a Jewish leader is perhaps something you might ask Naz Shah or Ken Livingstone, although I’m not sure whether they’re still in the Labour party following their suspension for antisemitism in 2016. We also recently banned a neo-fascist group in the UK and their leadership got sent to prison because of our action.
Thirdly we have the environment. It is a very, very easy sell to our elderly membership, to have policies that we can dress up, on the one hand, as saving the “countryside”, whilst selling those same policies to a younger population as saving the “environment”. Being environmentally friendly is an easy fit for a party that describes itself as conservative. We are conservationists. We introduced fees for plastic bags, which Labour refused to do. We’ve cracked down on diesel. We’ve invested, heavily, in electric cars and especially invested in huge grants for battery research. We have an extremely proactive Environment Minister. We recently reaffirmed our comittment to the “green belt” laws which prevent urban sprawl. Only yesterday we announced plans to completely phase out non-biodegradable packaging, although I admit that plan could be more aggressive. Most Conservative local councils recycle plastic, most Labour councils do not.
There’s a lot of work to do, but it’s not as unlikely as it might first appear.
[1] New readers start here: I’m Joe’s British brother-in-law and a lifelong One Nation Tory, meaning I’m on the moderate centrist wing of the Conservative party. From a US perspective this means I’m slightly left of Bernie Sanders, for example I support far stricter gun control laws than the Bern. The centre of British politics is massively to the left of the centre of US politics.