The young aren’t Marxists, just frustrated

The middle ranks of society are now struggling with insecurities that once afflicted only the poor

The Conservative conference in Manchester isn’t really about the PM’S authority or Boris’s red lines or the merits of different leadership candidates. That is displacement activity. The real issue is much deeper. It is the breakdown of the promise to younger generations.

This is not a matter of winning the youth vote – though they certainly add zest to any political party. A party can get away with not attracting many votes from 20-year-olds provided that it is getting solid support from 40-year-olds. But what if 10 years later it finds that it is only getting support from 50-year-olds with no new recruits coming along behind?

Once we could assume that people would increasingly vote Conservative as they settled down and raised their kids. But that aspiration is becoming harder to fulfil. That is the challenge Tories now face. We have made it too hard for the younger generation to get the very things which previous generations have benefited from.

These disenchanted young people are not after Marxist revolution – they want to own a decent house near a good school and to enjoy a job with some prospects of promotion. Tories ought to be able to understand that aspiration and deliver it.

More and more families are bringing up children in private rented accommodation with little security and facing the prospect of having to move them from school to school. Research by the Resolution Foundation has found that today’s 30-year-olds are four times more likely to live in the private rented sector than my generation was at their age. There are also too many young people working for firms that don’t invest in training and where you have little prospect of promotion. Yes, we should celebrate record employment. But we should be worried that the young are not moving jobs – and up the career ladder – as frequently as previous generations.

The bulk of Tory support has always come from those groups in the middle, the flywheel of society, with a decent job, their own home, and some time and money to spare to help their local community as school governors or councillors. They were the bedrock of the party and, Tories believed, of society. It was the social basis for a Conservative coalition linking the middle and the prosperous. But being in the middle is increasingly associated with the insecurities that have always tragically afflicted the poor. That is the social basis of the Corbyn coalition.

The Conservative Party can’t just be the party of possession. We have to be the party of opportunity, too. That means getting more houses built. The extra funding for Help to Buy will just drive house price inflation unless there is a supply response. We need to improve the incentives for builders to get on with building on their land banks – including working with local employers to agree wholesale purchase of the houses in advance.

It also means boosting pension saving. We have the vehicle in auto-enrolment – how about a government savings top-up for the under-40s? It means a boost for adult training with public support for parttime students and for “returnships”. And, yes, it should mean the affluent older generations accepting we use some of our wealth to pay for our own social care. We cannot transfer the cost to younger taxpayers, many earning less than we did.

Conservative policy making should be based on one simple, powerful proposition: younger generations should have a decent chance of owning their own home, building up a funded pension and obtaining a secure job. That is a battle Conservatives can fight and win. There is a big prize because political loyalties are not so fixed now – so even if people voted Labour before, they can be won back.

There is a deeper reason, too, and why I wrote The Pinch about this nearly a decade ago. We are an increasingly fractured society where it is harder to appeal to shared beliefs. But there is one argument that unites people of every background. We want our kids to have better lives than we have. That is the promise on which modern society rests. At the moment we are failing to deliver that promise. Committing ourselves to doing so is the great unifying cause of our age.