Allister Heath

The Tories have failed to woo young voters – but Labour’s policies would leave them impoverished

Somewhat unusually, I was a Tory voter during my student days, albeit one firmly positioned on the procapitalist, libertarian fringe of the party. This riled one of my fellow-travellers, a former Marxist who took until middle age to see the light and is now an eminent professor. He used to tease me by misquoting Winston Churchill. “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain”.

Nobody really knows who first enunciated that particular pearl of wisdom, though Churchill may well have popularised it. But it was only ever half-right: yes, the young want to tackle injustices and change the world. They have little to lose and are naturally impatient with their elders’ stodgy and seemingly irrational ways: that puts them in opposition to the status quo, a sentiment that gradually wanes over time as they acquire experience, wealth and a family.

Yet that makes them revolutionary change-agents, not socialists, which is why the Tories’ utter failure to capture the youth’s hearts has been the single most dispiriting facet of this election. While it is natural for the young to turn to virtue-signalling figures who pledge to shake up the system, such politicians aren’t always on the Left. The key is to appeal to young people’s emotions, their desire to make a difference, as well as to their rational side.

The youth in communist eastern Europe were desperate for a capitalist and democratic revolution; today, Iran’s youngsters dream of Western liberalism. Centre-right parties have won the youth vote many times in the past, including in France, America and New Zealand. The Tories have done well with younger people when they have offered them a credible route to home ownership (a nightmare for under-35s today) while explaining how they would help the poor using conservative solutions.

But in the UK, right now, the radical, youth-friendly space has been monopolised by Jeremy Corbyn and his superficially attractive plan for a new socialist utopia. The astonishing scale of his success with this particular group is also partly due to the fact that he is simultaneously appealing to their apparent self-interest, of course: ruinously, he wants to scrap university fees and write off student debt, promises that have gone down well at a time of declining graduate wages. Corbyn’s policies are worse than reckless but he is appealing to heart as well as head.

There is another reason for the youth’s dalliance with the hard-left: record numbers go to university, and yet higher education is probably more Left-wing than it has ever been. A recent Times Higher Education survey of university staff found that 92 per cent would vote for a Left-wing party: 54 per cent for Labour, 24 per cent for the Lib Dems, and 5 per cent each for the Greens and the SNP. The Tories were at a pathetic 7 per cent.

Social science and humanities departments have become giant, Left-wing think tanks, spewing out reams of unreadable, ideologically monotonous “research” calling for ever more government spending and intervention. With a few honourable exceptions, free-thinkers are no longer welcome, except in the hard sciences; it probably takes the average youngster a decade or so of real-life experience to begin to grow out of the academic brain-washing.

It should be no wonder, given all of this, that young people who have no direct memory of the last time Corbynite economics was tried find it rather attractive. It’s what they’ve been taught, and it appeals to their better nature and youthful exuberance. The usual warnings that it will return us to the Seventies cut no ice: the history books they do read probably depict a version of events that many of us would not recognise.

Yet there is still time – just – for those younger voters planning to back Labour to take one final look at what actually happened when Corbynite ideas were last tried, and hopefully to think again. Consider the sorts of ultra-high levels of tax that Corbyn is advocating. We attempted much of this before – not just in the Seventies, but also during and after the Second World War – and it failed catastrophically. Money fled abroad and those who wanted to work hard were discouraged. Almost every country has experimented at some stage with confiscatory levels of taxation, including wealth taxes, and the result has been a uniformly disastrous reduction in enterprise, impoverishing all of society. Countries that do best are those that attract the best people and investors from abroad, and that encourage and entice their populations to work, invest and save.

Next, public ownership: competition between private firms may sound nasty and wasteful, and we all have our favourite tales of corporate incompetence or even downright venality. But the alternative is far worse. Allowing firms to vie for business is the best way to trigger innovation and keep costs under control. When the electricity and gas companies were state-owned, the government couldn’t afford to spend much on them, and they were run for the benefit of their staff. Public monopolies inevitably treat customers like supplicants. The answer is to enhance competition and make it easier for consumers to change providers, not to force everybody to beg a civil servant for access to energy or a telephone.

Then there is inflation: it spiralled out of control in the Seventies, wiping out savings, hammering pensioners and pushing up the cost of borrowing. Over time, Corbyn’s massive overspending and the collapse in economic growth that his policies would precipitate would almost certainly lead to the monetisation of debt. The Left has long liked the idea of a People’s QE, or the printing of money to pay for infrastructure projects – yet down that route lies economic madness and, in time, much higher inflation. The cost of housing is preposterously high but wrecking the banking system in this way would merely make mass homeownership an even more distant dream.

So yes, dear Millennials, I agree that the Tories have done a terrible job trying to woo you. But that’s no reason to entrust Corbyn’s Marxist retreads with this country’s future. You may find Theresa May uninspiring, but her way is incomparably better than Corbyn’s certain road to economic ruin.