June 16, 2023 - 1:00pm
The Tories have been tanking with young voters for nearly a decade. According to the latest Yougov poll, just 6% of those aged between 18-24 and 10% of the 25-49 range intend to vote for the party at the next election. The decline is real, and unprecedented, in modern Britain, with a Labour-Conservative age gap only emerging after 2010. What appeared to be a Right-leaning trend among Zoomers has stalled over the past two years.
On both Left and Right, there’s a crowd-pleasing narrative that young people have deserted the party because they can’t attain the markers of adulthood: home ownership, financial security, marriage and parenthood. The centre-Right think tank Onward’s latest offering suggests that all the Tories have to do to fix their woes is build homes, create jobs and wait for young people to get blue-pilled. In reality, this is a pipe dream.
Consider voters aged 35 and under captured in the latest (May 2022) wave of the 30,000-strong, long-running, British Election Study. Only 1 in 10 of this group intend to vote Tory and, as Figure 1 shows, the share varies very little between those on low and high incomes, or depending on marital status. Those who own their own home are five points more likely to vote Conservative than those who don’t, while young people in the top 15% of the income scale are two points more likely to say they will vote Tory than those in the bottom third. Even if you look at home-owning married 18-35s with children who earn in the top 15%, a mere 16% intend to vote for Sunak.
If it’s not the economy, what’s going wrong? This is not so much a matter of demography as of zeitgeist. Rising ethnic diversity or university attendance do not hold the key, since there are no significant differences among young people between white Britons and minorities, or graduates and non-graduates, in their inclination to vote Tory.
Instead, we must look to a liberal post-national drift in the culture of the West which bulks largest among young people. A 2021 YouGov poll found that just 29% of 18-24s would be willing to date someone who voted Conservative in 2019. Discrimination in dating, in which Leftist young people are far more prejudiced against the Right than vice-versa, also correlates with a willingness towards politically biased hiring policies.
The British Election Study shows that when we slice the 18-35s by their cultural views, a wider gap in voting intention emerges. As Figure 2 illustrates, the gap by Brexit vote or religious affiliation is nearly twice as large as the difference between owners and renters, or rich and poor. Even so, 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.
Left-wing parties are capturing 33-41% of culturally conservative young people, but are winning 52-57% of high-earning and homeowning Zoomers and Millennials.
In fact, the Tories have the edge among young people who want lower immigration, support Leave and affiliate as Christian, with 42% of those who fit these three criteria saying they will vote Tory compared to 29% opting for Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. Contrast this 42-29 Tory advantage with the 51-16 Left-liberal advantage over the Tories among young homeowning married parents in the top 15% of the income bracket. Youth culture, not delayed adulthood, is decisive.
The Tories were already dead in the water among young people prior to Partygate and the Truss-Kwarteng mini-budget fiasco, let alone the most recent Boris Johnson developments. 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.
Chris Clarke comes to a similar conclusion, urging the Conservatives to go woke and embrace leaky borders. In effect, he wants the Tories to dump their half-hearted attempts at being conservative and get hip with progressive Zoomers and Millennials.
Conservatives less keen on selling their soul must face the fact that only a wholesale effort to combat political indoctrination and shape the messages propounded in the education system, public sector and media can move the needle among emerging generations of voters. If today’s cultural trends go unchecked, the Tories are on track to becoming a natural party of opposition.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor at the University of Buckingham, and author of Whiteshift: Immigration, Populism and the Future of White Majorities. He is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange.
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SubscribeThey had 13 years to weed out enemy civil servants and brainwashing teachers. They have nobody to blame but themselves. It’ll be even worse for them when Labour holds the levers of power and spends the next decade ritually humiliating anyone right of centre.
It’ll be even worse for all of us; which is why – failing some successful electoral insurgency, of which one sees precious little sign – it is best to hold one’s nose and vote for Tory flatulence over solid socialist ordure.
13 years to confront what the author rightly terms as political indoctrination in schools; the Left have like Jesuits had the children for way more than 7 years. 13 years of total failure to challenge their power. The warped worldview of those child abusing Teacher Union scum who betrayed thousands of vulnerable children in the lockdown scandal is wholly alien to conservative values – not just the Tory Scum politicians. The Equality mania and climate hysteria propogated by them & the BBC has made the poor porn battered young into deranged proto Red Guard End of Timers. It is Game Over for political diversity & the Tories…even the wet Fake knee bending Remainer turdy ones who deserve to get flushed down the latrine of history extra fast.
”The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
”The Children’s Crusade”
“”The Greal Lemming Stampede”
Stupid children – they are on a mission to destroy themselves utterly, and Society with them. The Postmodernists have done their job well.
This destruction of the Christian West was laid out in 11 points at the Goethe Institute during the Wiemar Republic in a group called ‘The Frankfurt School‘. It sheltered in USA for WWII, returned, then in 1980 moved permanently to Columbia University USA where it captured the entire education industry, and thus spread its evil.
Foucault and Derrida took the Frankfurt philosophy based on existentialism (modernism and structuralism), Atheism, Freudian Analysis, Marxist Dialectic and Communism, created Neo-Marxism, and established the goal of destroying the family to destroy Western Society and created the even more virulent pathologies of postmodernism and post-structuralism, Identity Politics and Intersectionality, and so have captured the West and gave it a death wish to destroy its self -with the simple Trotsky trick of ‘Entryism’.
Either God saves us, or the Satan of AI they created will finish us.
But no one cares about why – silly little articles yammer on about nothing like the above… people are so stupid.
It’ll be even worse for all of us; which is why – failing some successful electoral insurgency, of which one sees precious little sign – it is best to hold one’s nose and vote for Tory flatulence over solid socialist ordure.
13 years to confront what the author rightly terms as political indoctrination in schools; the Left have like Jesuits had the children for way more than 7 years. 13 years of total failure to challenge their power. The warped worldview of those child abusing Teacher Union scum who betrayed thousands of vulnerable children in the lockdown scandal is wholly alien to conservative values – not just the Tory Scum politicians. The Equality mania and climate hysteria propogated by them & the BBC has made the poor porn battered young into deranged proto Red Guard End of Timers. It is Game Over for political diversity & the Tories…even the wet Fake knee bending Remainer turdy ones who deserve to get flushed down the latrine of history extra fast.
”The Pied Piper of Hamelin”
”The Children’s Crusade”
“”The Greal Lemming Stampede”
Stupid children – they are on a mission to destroy themselves utterly, and Society with them. The Postmodernists have done their job well.
This destruction of the Christian West was laid out in 11 points at the Goethe Institute during the Wiemar Republic in a group called ‘The Frankfurt School‘. It sheltered in USA for WWII, returned, then in 1980 moved permanently to Columbia University USA where it captured the entire education industry, and thus spread its evil.
Foucault and Derrida took the Frankfurt philosophy based on existentialism (modernism and structuralism), Atheism, Freudian Analysis, Marxist Dialectic and Communism, created Neo-Marxism, and established the goal of destroying the family to destroy Western Society and created the even more virulent pathologies of postmodernism and post-structuralism, Identity Politics and Intersectionality, and so have captured the West and gave it a death wish to destroy its self -with the simple Trotsky trick of ‘Entryism’.
Either God saves us, or the Satan of AI they created will finish us.
But no one cares about why – silly little articles yammer on about nothing like the above… people are so stupid.
They had 13 years to weed out enemy civil servants and brainwashing teachers. They have nobody to blame but themselves. It’ll be even worse for them when Labour holds the levers of power and spends the next decade ritually humiliating anyone right of centre.
I think you will find it is because the Tories are no longer conservatives.
I’m not going to vote for them, and I say that as high earning, home owning, former card carrying member of the Conservative party.
Nailed it in one.
The Tory party are total SCUM!
The commie Labour are at least honest in how they hate the country – but the Conservatives pretend they love Britain wile they sell it to globalists for a few pieces of silver, like Judas, they are wicked betrayers. And Boris and Sunak are the worst of the worst. They actually are evil.
haha
”Awaiting for approval”
Unherd is protecting your purity of essence from my unclean thoughts.
There are no Conservatives in the ranks of the MPs and there are no traditional Labout MPs either.
Oddly, I yearn for the Benns, Healy’s, Skinners, Foots who had something to say, some integrity and above some articulate adult debate even if you disagreed with them. They had ideas, a working moral compass and they weren’t flying false flags. Debate and ideas are messy and a voice of the electorate. What a quaint idea. If Corbyn was not sidelined I’d even give him a go, at least he believed in something and I’d get what it said on the tin.
And I vote serially conservative.
Rishi and Starmer say and stand for nothing.
Everywhere are false flags with the token posturing. Who knows what these people represent?
All that truly stood for either end of the spectrum are now retired by age or their relevant central offices for asking awkward questions and rocking the boat.
We need some more rocking not comfortable consensus. What either stand for is anyone’s guess. Both have lost the plot and blow with the wind of the fashionable.
Theres a surreal scenario where people will never admit to voting conservative or having covert conservative direction but have voted in the conservatives again and again for over a decade.
Rather like people don’t want to admit voting for Brexit but don’t wish the stigma from frantic social justice warriors foaming at the mouth at them.
The ground swell and problems that brought about the brexit protest vote that shocked a complacent political class haven’t gone away and the progressives (oxymoron) think that people being tired of the conservatives is the same as agreeing to whatever nonsense is being promoted this week.
Parents want their kids being taught to read and write not having drag queen shows in schools, people.
I’m not a fan of Boris but the insanity of what has started as a coup without the tanks in the streets and now turned into a Maoist MacCarthist Salem witch hunt is sickening to watch and does not bode well for either side in the long term.
It’s degrading belief in politics and process and will come back to bite those who initiated it.
It infantiles a very serious business. God knows where we will be in a year’s time, a plague on both their houses.
You have nailed it.
Moreover there are no true Labour politicians either.
Both side’s central HQs have pursued culling anyone from the party’s who rocks the boat (wants to move away from smug complacency) so now we split hairs to define one from the other and the globalist middle ground sellouts are the only option.
The electorate and the paying card carrying Conservative & Labour members are excluded from the above process as messy democracy via adult debate is binned for smug complacency and consensus behind closed doors.
Did no one actually learn the lesson from Brexit and the fall of the red wall that there is an angry dispossessed electorate who are tired of being ignored by the Islington and Westminster bubbles?
Neither side seems to of paid attention.
I vote conservative but I yearn for debate from the Skinners, Healy’s, Foot’s and heavy weights who could do adult cohesive argument of some weight rather than sound bite politics. Everybody gained from this and it makes the house work at getting things done properly.
I’m kind of missing Corbyn, at least he was what he said on the tin. His dismissal from Labour was abhorrent and a sign of the times.
The conservatives and Labour Party are all false flag entities who aren’t up front about anything and don’t represent anything but Islington cosmopolitan nonsense.
Both sides MPs seem focussed on their pensions, a cushy quango role for themselves and the wife and a retirement to House of Bores where they can prevaricate and do nothing meaningful like they did in Parliament.
I have no idea what to put on my ballot paper next year.
Nailed it in one.
The Tory party are total SCUM!
The commie Labour are at least honest in how they hate the country – but the Conservatives pretend they love Britain wile they sell it to globalists for a few pieces of silver, like Judas, they are wicked betrayers. And Boris and Sunak are the worst of the worst. They actually are evil.
haha
”Awaiting for approval”
Unherd is protecting your purity of essence from my unclean thoughts.
There are no Conservatives in the ranks of the MPs and there are no traditional Labout MPs either.
Oddly, I yearn for the Benns, Healy’s, Skinners, Foots who had something to say, some integrity and above some articulate adult debate even if you disagreed with them. They had ideas, a working moral compass and they weren’t flying false flags. Debate and ideas are messy and a voice of the electorate. What a quaint idea. If Corbyn was not sidelined I’d even give him a go, at least he believed in something and I’d get what it said on the tin.
And I vote serially conservative.
Rishi and Starmer say and stand for nothing.
Everywhere are false flags with the token posturing. Who knows what these people represent?
All that truly stood for either end of the spectrum are now retired by age or their relevant central offices for asking awkward questions and rocking the boat.
We need some more rocking not comfortable consensus. What either stand for is anyone’s guess. Both have lost the plot and blow with the wind of the fashionable.
Theres a surreal scenario where people will never admit to voting conservative or having covert conservative direction but have voted in the conservatives again and again for over a decade.
Rather like people don’t want to admit voting for Brexit but don’t wish the stigma from frantic social justice warriors foaming at the mouth at them.
The ground swell and problems that brought about the brexit protest vote that shocked a complacent political class haven’t gone away and the progressives (oxymoron) think that people being tired of the conservatives is the same as agreeing to whatever nonsense is being promoted this week.
Parents want their kids being taught to read and write not having drag queen shows in schools, people.
I’m not a fan of Boris but the insanity of what has started as a coup without the tanks in the streets and now turned into a Maoist MacCarthist Salem witch hunt is sickening to watch and does not bode well for either side in the long term.
It’s degrading belief in politics and process and will come back to bite those who initiated it.
It infantiles a very serious business. God knows where we will be in a year’s time, a plague on both their houses.
You have nailed it.
Moreover there are no true Labour politicians either.
Both side’s central HQs have pursued culling anyone from the party’s who rocks the boat (wants to move away from smug complacency) so now we split hairs to define one from the other and the globalist middle ground sellouts are the only option.
The electorate and the paying card carrying Conservative & Labour members are excluded from the above process as messy democracy via adult debate is binned for smug complacency and consensus behind closed doors.
Did no one actually learn the lesson from Brexit and the fall of the red wall that there is an angry dispossessed electorate who are tired of being ignored by the Islington and Westminster bubbles?
Neither side seems to of paid attention.
I vote conservative but I yearn for debate from the Skinners, Healy’s, Foot’s and heavy weights who could do adult cohesive argument of some weight rather than sound bite politics. Everybody gained from this and it makes the house work at getting things done properly.
I’m kind of missing Corbyn, at least he was what he said on the tin. His dismissal from Labour was abhorrent and a sign of the times.
The conservatives and Labour Party are all false flag entities who aren’t up front about anything and don’t represent anything but Islington cosmopolitan nonsense.
Both sides MPs seem focussed on their pensions, a cushy quango role for themselves and the wife and a retirement to House of Bores where they can prevaricate and do nothing meaningful like they did in Parliament.
I have no idea what to put on my ballot paper next year.
I think you will find it is because the Tories are no longer conservatives.
I’m not going to vote for them, and I say that as high earning, home owning, former card carrying member of the Conservative party.
This is the inevitable result of conservative complacency and or complicity with the leftward drift of culture over the last thirty years. The process was initiated in the wake of the war and accelerated over time, witness the fate of Powell. The cowardly recommendation of “Chris” Clarke that the party repeat, yet again, this miserable process of lumbering insincerely after the red horizon will merely make it partly responsible for the agonies, losses and missed opportunities supplied by socialism.
The better solution is to have the courage of conviction; to tell the truth and shame the devil as people said in more gracious days. For it is courage which attracts people; slimy Clarke-like squirming offers nothing more than an addictive but debilitating kind of life support, which makes the leadership of authentic, transformative and redemptive political movements impossible. And in the gathering collapse and darkness of a divided, impoverished, resettled west, already the theatre of low level wars against its originating cultures, it is that sort of movement we will need.
Apart from that, the young in particular are the victims of tic-toc and twitter, swept by electronically swarming contemporaries into positions they have barely considered. Add to this the left’s dominance across culture – another “conservative” own goal – and that same left’s penchant for venomous hectoring and ostracism and the cowing of the young is complete.
And “Chris” Clarke wants us to underwrite these abominable iniquities? What a shameful, squalid creature he must be.
Why “Chris”?
Because the proper form of the name is Christopher. If he wants his familiars and intimates to use the diminutive, that’s up to him; but to foist it on the rest of us is an intrusion.
I like your commitment to formality.
I like your commitment to formality.
Because the proper form of the name is Christopher. If he wants his familiars and intimates to use the diminutive, that’s up to him; but to foist it on the rest of us is an intrusion.
Why “Chris”?
This is the inevitable result of conservative complacency and or complicity with the leftward drift of culture over the last thirty years. The process was initiated in the wake of the war and accelerated over time, witness the fate of Powell. The cowardly recommendation of “Chris” Clarke that the party repeat, yet again, this miserable process of lumbering insincerely after the red horizon will merely make it partly responsible for the agonies, losses and missed opportunities supplied by socialism.
The better solution is to have the courage of conviction; to tell the truth and shame the devil as people said in more gracious days. For it is courage which attracts people; slimy Clarke-like squirming offers nothing more than an addictive but debilitating kind of life support, which makes the leadership of authentic, transformative and redemptive political movements impossible. And in the gathering collapse and darkness of a divided, impoverished, resettled west, already the theatre of low level wars against its originating cultures, it is that sort of movement we will need.
Apart from that, the young in particular are the victims of tic-toc and twitter, swept by electronically swarming contemporaries into positions they have barely considered. Add to this the left’s dominance across culture – another “conservative” own goal – and that same left’s penchant for venomous hectoring and ostracism and the cowing of the young is complete.
And “Chris” Clarke wants us to underwrite these abominable iniquities? What a shameful, squalid creature he must be.
I have been reading articles like this since the 1980s. And yet here is the share of the vote that went Conservative at the last 4 GEs:
2010: 36%
2015: 37%
2017: 42%
2019: 44%
People become conservative as they get older and the more radical the kids get, the more conservative the adults get in reaction. And people are living longer and fewer are having children which means more elderly voters.
It takes a special talent inside the Tory Party to lose in the face of those advantages.
Yes, my take on it is that as they get older they will wise up to how hood-winked they’ve been by left-wing politicians. I think this upcoming generation in particular will lean the furthest right since the Second World War, especially as they become increasingly disenfranchised by the hyper-sophisticated mass propaganda and surveillance systems being built to control and manipulate them.
Yes but what’s different is the drawbridge been pulled up on home ownership, decent pensions, job security etc to that we generally experienced as Boomers (or near Boomers). Some of course will find Bank of Mum/Dad helps, but that’s inequity perpetuation, and furthermore those Banks likely to melt down with social care costs if parents live long enough and we do nothing about how that’s funded.
So Right Wing will reap what it sowed, although it’ll deflect yet again onto Woke-ism and some Blob B/S no doubt. You can do an awful lot of long term damage in 13 years by focusing on the wrong things and that’s where we are
Yes but what’s different is the drawbridge been pulled up on home ownership, decent pensions, job security etc to that we generally experienced as Boomers (or near Boomers). Some of course will find Bank of Mum/Dad helps, but that’s inequity perpetuation, and furthermore those Banks likely to melt down with social care costs if parents live long enough and we do nothing about how that’s funded.
So Right Wing will reap what it sowed, although it’ll deflect yet again onto Woke-ism and some Blob B/S no doubt. You can do an awful lot of long term damage in 13 years by focusing on the wrong things and that’s where we are
I suspect that might not hold now. That’s nothing more than me talking to a few people now in their mid-late 30s – and I may be wrong. But this does feel different. I suppose that it raises a question of what does a ‘millennial conservatism’ (for want of a better term) look like. At its bluntest to be a conservative one usually needs to have something to conserve and it’s hard to see a lot of today’s late 30s people as in that position.
It is certainly possible to be a millennial eurosceptic, but electorally that boat has sailed.
We might have had some clues. There is much to complain about when it comes to Theresa May’s time as PM, however in her better moments she did have some worthy ideas, particularly on the relationship between property wealth and social care. Few Conservatives before her really talked about wealth in that context. Surely is conservative to think that those who have seen property windfalls should look to fund elderly care from that windfall rather than looking to the taxpayer?
Similarly Jeremy Corbyn was able to get some enthusiasm around corporate governance. I would say there is a certain conservatism about wanting to reign in big corporate interests.
Perhaps things like wealth taxes and an active stance on corporates are ideas that were conservative and a bit ahead of their time?
Deep down most people want the same thing: a home.
The one area studiously ignored by all politicians is immigration, which drives up the price of property. Between 1970 and 2000 the UK population grew by 1M a decade and houses cost 3x average salary. Since 2005 the population has grown by 1M every 2.5 years and houses cost 5-6x salary (and many more times in London and the Home Counties).
A Conservative Party that made home-ownership its key policy and which linked it explicitly to immigration control would clean up with younger voters. It would also be popular with older voters who wish to avoid Labour’s promise to build on the Greenbelt.
The problem for the Tories is: who would believe their promises on immigration?
Precisely. The brand has been all but broken over the last fifteen years. I fear that 2019 was a last chance, wearily handed to the Conservatives from a hope that they had at last learned to include a nationalist and traditionalist strand in their policy package. The fact that they have not; that they have opened the borders even more, squandered billions on HS2, raised taxes and trashed the economy through the neo-communist policy of “lockdown” means that few will give them the time of day for many years. It may take several defeats for them to live this down and frankly – to use a Faragism – the party is now so void of purpose or conviction that those defeats will probably see its final eclipse and collapse.
Yes to all that. Both the electorate and the card carrying Conservative Party members are at odds with what the Conservative MPs want. It’s toast.
I really don’t understand Tory MPs motivation. Why join a party to not follow its underlying nature. Weird?
Yes to all that. Both the electorate and the card carrying Conservative Party members are at odds with what the Conservative MPs want. It’s toast.
I really don’t understand Tory MPs motivation. Why join a party to not follow its underlying nature. Weird?
Precisely. The brand has been all but broken over the last fifteen years. I fear that 2019 was a last chance, wearily handed to the Conservatives from a hope that they had at last learned to include a nationalist and traditionalist strand in their policy package. The fact that they have not; that they have opened the borders even more, squandered billions on HS2, raised taxes and trashed the economy through the neo-communist policy of “lockdown” means that few will give them the time of day for many years. It may take several defeats for them to live this down and frankly – to use a Faragism – the party is now so void of purpose or conviction that those defeats will probably see its final eclipse and collapse.
Deep down most people want the same thing: a home.
The one area studiously ignored by all politicians is immigration, which drives up the price of property. Between 1970 and 2000 the UK population grew by 1M a decade and houses cost 3x average salary. Since 2005 the population has grown by 1M every 2.5 years and houses cost 5-6x salary (and many more times in London and the Home Counties).
A Conservative Party that made home-ownership its key policy and which linked it explicitly to immigration control would clean up with younger voters. It would also be popular with older voters who wish to avoid Labour’s promise to build on the Greenbelt.
The problem for the Tories is: who would believe their promises on immigration?
People aren’t going to become Conservative if they’ve got nothing to conserve though. If they’ve been priced out of owning a family home, stuck in poorly paying insecure employment while trying to pay off a large student debt and handing over half their wages to unscrupulous landlords why are they suddenly going to vote to keep the status quo?
Yes, my take on it is that as they get older they will wise up to how hood-winked they’ve been by left-wing politicians. I think this upcoming generation in particular will lean the furthest right since the Second World War, especially as they become increasingly disenfranchised by the hyper-sophisticated mass propaganda and surveillance systems being built to control and manipulate them.
I suspect that might not hold now. That’s nothing more than me talking to a few people now in their mid-late 30s – and I may be wrong. But this does feel different. I suppose that it raises a question of what does a ‘millennial conservatism’ (for want of a better term) look like. At its bluntest to be a conservative one usually needs to have something to conserve and it’s hard to see a lot of today’s late 30s people as in that position.
It is certainly possible to be a millennial eurosceptic, but electorally that boat has sailed.
We might have had some clues. There is much to complain about when it comes to Theresa May’s time as PM, however in her better moments she did have some worthy ideas, particularly on the relationship between property wealth and social care. Few Conservatives before her really talked about wealth in that context. Surely is conservative to think that those who have seen property windfalls should look to fund elderly care from that windfall rather than looking to the taxpayer?
Similarly Jeremy Corbyn was able to get some enthusiasm around corporate governance. I would say there is a certain conservatism about wanting to reign in big corporate interests.
Perhaps things like wealth taxes and an active stance on corporates are ideas that were conservative and a bit ahead of their time?
People aren’t going to become Conservative if they’ve got nothing to conserve though. If they’ve been priced out of owning a family home, stuck in poorly paying insecure employment while trying to pay off a large student debt and handing over half their wages to unscrupulous landlords why are they suddenly going to vote to keep the status quo?
I have been reading articles like this since the 1980s. And yet here is the share of the vote that went Conservative at the last 4 GEs:
2010: 36%
2015: 37%
2017: 42%
2019: 44%
People become conservative as they get older and the more radical the kids get, the more conservative the adults get in reaction. And people are living longer and fewer are having children which means more elderly voters.
It takes a special talent inside the Tory Party to lose in the face of those advantages.
“Instead, we must look to a liberal post-national drift in the culture of the West which bulks largest among young people. A 2021 YouGov poll found that just 29% of 18-24s would be willing to date someone who voted Conservative in 2019. Discrimination in dating, in which Leftist young people are far more prejudiced against the Right than vice-versa, also correlates with a willingness towards politically biased hiring policies”.
I don’t understand how the statistics cited are evidence of a liberal post-national drift. It seems more like the bulk of the young, who have grown up/come of age in time of aggressive, abusive zero-sum social media arguments now find it totally acceptable to flaunt their intolerance of political views other than those constantly reinforced on said social media.
While vastly different political views might be a red marker for relationship difficulties further down the road – the openness with which younger people (aged 40 or under) state online that (to state an example I saw recently) they think it’s OK to get up and leave a date if they find that their partner is conservative, is quite staggering.
I suspect this intolerance goes both ways, but lefties do tend to be a bit more mouthy about it in public forums.
The problem with this trope about dating and party affiliation is that it is hard to believe there are any young people that identify as conservative. So I don’t believe this situation ever arises in reality.
In my day (thirty years ago) this was equally true. There might have been the odd (in both senses of the word) William Hague Young Tory figure but people in their 20s were either not interested in politics or else vaguely leftish. All young people I knew were liberal about sex and drugs and other lifestyle issues. Now all those same people are in their 50s and are vaguely right-ish on woke issues regardless of their voting intentions.
When I was 20 I dropped out and lived on the road homeless for half a decade with all the weird flotsam of the 60s and 70s counterculture – But I was as Conservative as I am now. My thing is I never minded how mad lefty, or what ever insanity the rest held – it never bothered me. I hung with the Hippies, the Jesus Freaks, the criminals, addicts, broken people, crazies, red-necks, cults, sickkos, and down and outs – and we did not get much bothered by what the other’s political beliefs were.
People were quite tolerant compared to now.
When I was 20 I dropped out and lived on the road homeless for half a decade with all the weird flotsam of the 60s and 70s counterculture – But I was as Conservative as I am now. My thing is I never minded how mad lefty, or what ever insanity the rest held – it never bothered me. I hung with the Hippies, the Jesus Freaks, the criminals, addicts, broken people, crazies, red-necks, cults, sickkos, and down and outs – and we did not get much bothered by what the other’s political beliefs were.
People were quite tolerant compared to now.
The problem with this trope about dating and party affiliation is that it is hard to believe there are any young people that identify as conservative. So I don’t believe this situation ever arises in reality.
In my day (thirty years ago) this was equally true. There might have been the odd (in both senses of the word) William Hague Young Tory figure but people in their 20s were either not interested in politics or else vaguely leftish. All young people I knew were liberal about sex and drugs and other lifestyle issues. Now all those same people are in their 50s and are vaguely right-ish on woke issues regardless of their voting intentions.
“Instead, we must look to a liberal post-national drift in the culture of the West which bulks largest among young people. A 2021 YouGov poll found that just 29% of 18-24s would be willing to date someone who voted Conservative in 2019. Discrimination in dating, in which Leftist young people are far more prejudiced against the Right than vice-versa, also correlates with a willingness towards politically biased hiring policies”.
I don’t understand how the statistics cited are evidence of a liberal post-national drift. It seems more like the bulk of the young, who have grown up/come of age in time of aggressive, abusive zero-sum social media arguments now find it totally acceptable to flaunt their intolerance of political views other than those constantly reinforced on said social media.
While vastly different political views might be a red marker for relationship difficulties further down the road – the openness with which younger people (aged 40 or under) state online that (to state an example I saw recently) they think it’s OK to get up and leave a date if they find that their partner is conservative, is quite staggering.
I suspect this intolerance goes both ways, but lefties do tend to be a bit more mouthy about it in public forums.
For thirty years both political parties have bought middle class boomer votes by artificially inflating house prices. The result is the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.
You expect this sort of thing from the bourgeois left, who are past masters at disguising their greed as altruism, but there is absolutely no excuse for conservative parties to go along with these toxic aspiration-destroying policies. They deserve everything they get.
I agree with your assessment of the massive failures of government over the past few decades. But it is a failure of the whole of government, one in which the system is inherently resistant to the kinds of reform that the Tory Party traditionally supplied, but the Left usually does not.
I’m not saying poor-tories-the-nasty-sir-humphreys-won’t-play-ball obviously: Parliamentary majorities exist in order to deal with that sort of nonsense. But it is a point worth observing anyway, given that Labour will indeed lead the country from the end of next year, and the reforms the country needs will still fail to get done, because we’re back to a time once described so well by Ronald Reagan in which government isn’t the solution to our problem, it IS the problem.
Can’t argue with that.
Can’t argue with that.
I agree with your assessment of the massive failures of government over the past few decades. But it is a failure of the whole of government, one in which the system is inherently resistant to the kinds of reform that the Tory Party traditionally supplied, but the Left usually does not.
I’m not saying poor-tories-the-nasty-sir-humphreys-won’t-play-ball obviously: Parliamentary majorities exist in order to deal with that sort of nonsense. But it is a point worth observing anyway, given that Labour will indeed lead the country from the end of next year, and the reforms the country needs will still fail to get done, because we’re back to a time once described so well by Ronald Reagan in which government isn’t the solution to our problem, it IS the problem.
For thirty years both political parties have bought middle class boomer votes by artificially inflating house prices. The result is the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.
You expect this sort of thing from the bourgeois left, who are past masters at disguising their greed as altruism, but there is absolutely no excuse for conservative parties to go along with these toxic aspiration-destroying policies. They deserve everything they get.
So we’re going to end up in a dystopia where everybody is voting for everyone else to pay for everything?
The wealthy taxpayers are fleeing already, I note in other news today. By “wealthy” I refer to people with more than £1m in investable assets – hardly anything these days, so we’re not talking rich, just people with a modest ability to invest. I’m not at that level myself, but if the trend continues, I with my comfortable-but-not-remotely-flashy lifestyle will be next for the punitive taxman’s axe.
I have ended up a landlord in the past year too, as a result of buying a new house and finding that I couldn’t bid from a proceedable position if I was in a chain, so I arranged a BTL mortgage on my existing flat instead of selling it. This makes me, according to an emerging consensus, a rapacious extractive sociopath who ought to be in prison rather than stealing the hard-earned wages of my tenants. That this view is demented hardly matters; that trying to repair the housing market by responding to such political attitudes will merely hammer the last nail in its coffin isn’t the point. The point is that we really do appear to be heading for another Marxist experiment, and if repeated by other Western nations which looks likely, is of course going to make the 21st century the final end of the West’s global dominance.
So we’re going to end up in a dystopia where everybody is voting for everyone else to pay for everything?
The wealthy taxpayers are fleeing already, I note in other news today. By “wealthy” I refer to people with more than £1m in investable assets – hardly anything these days, so we’re not talking rich, just people with a modest ability to invest. I’m not at that level myself, but if the trend continues, I with my comfortable-but-not-remotely-flashy lifestyle will be next for the punitive taxman’s axe.
I have ended up a landlord in the past year too, as a result of buying a new house and finding that I couldn’t bid from a proceedable position if I was in a chain, so I arranged a BTL mortgage on my existing flat instead of selling it. This makes me, according to an emerging consensus, a rapacious extractive sociopath who ought to be in prison rather than stealing the hard-earned wages of my tenants. That this view is demented hardly matters; that trying to repair the housing market by responding to such political attitudes will merely hammer the last nail in its coffin isn’t the point. The point is that we really do appear to be heading for another Marxist experiment, and if repeated by other Western nations which looks likely, is of course going to make the 21st century the final end of the West’s global dominance.