We are witnesses to the death of aspiration among an entire generation
The Tories have broken the link between hard work and economic success – and young people have got the message, writes Stewart Mcdonald
nly one in ten under-40s plan to vote for the Conservative Party at the next election. I am frankly surprised it is so high. People under 40 today have come of age in a country that more closely resembles a shrine to Margaret Thatcher than a functioning modern society, with crumbling public infrastructure, a desiccated public realm and an economy stacked in favour of an asset-owning minority.
It is a country where the Conservative Party has almost entirely succeeded in severing the link between hard work and economic success.
These are not just my own ramblings. Ben Ansell, a political scientist at the University of Oxford, has found that young people in Britain today – in stark contrast to their older compatriots – overwhelmingly believe that hard work will not guarantee them a dignified, peaceful and meaningful life. “To the degree there is a ‘British dream’”, Ansell writes, “the mostly retired think it exists and those entering the workforce think it’s a sham.” And why wouldn’t they?
Imagine, if you will, two children born to neighbouring families in the early 1990s.
These families are identical in all respects save for one: Family A exercises their Right to Buy while Family B does not. Family A sells and moves a few times, riding the wave of increasing house prices throughout the 1990s and 2000s until they end up in a large house that their salaries could never have bought them. When Child A grows up, her parents can release equity in their home to give her a deposit for a flat.
Did Family A work harder than Family B? Did they upskill? Did they invent something new? Of course not. They simply moved house in the 1990s and 2000s – and that alone has guaranteed their prosperity and a home for their child.
Now, young people everywhere have internalised this as the most important lesson from their parent’s generation: nothing matters as much as being in the right place at the right time.
There can be few better examples of this than the elevation of Charlotte Owens to the House of Lords.
I do not doubt that she is a bright and talented young person, but the simple fact is that she was given a lifelong seat in the British legislature because she was pals with the boss.
She is, in many ways, the poster child for her entire generation: someone who has succeeded because she was in the right place at the right time.
We saw this in the obsession with cryptocurrency that ran through the country a few years ago, and the money that ordinary young people gambled, won and lost on purely speculative assets in the hope of securing a deposit for a flat.
While crypto fever swept the world, this fascination with “get rich quick” schemes is a symptom of a deeply broken economic model that is almost unique to the United Kingdom.
Today, just 39 per cent of under-30s in this country believe that hard work will bring rewards – far below the 60 per cent recorded among under-30s in the US and, most strikingly of all, below 60 per cent of over-70s in the UK.
This gulf between the old and young should set alarm bells ringing.
We are witnessing the death of aspiration among an entire generation – and it is all thanks to the Conservative Party’s dogged and self-reinforcing unwillingness to do anything to improve the lives of people who are not their voters. (Remember Rishi Sunak’s boast that he had diverted funding from deprived urban areas to wealthy rural villages?)
From austerity to Brexit, young people today have grown up with a Conservative government which has obsessively prosecuted policies that are obviously harmful to their future prosperity and wellbeing.
Indeed, what young people see today, as they stand in the ashes of an economy and society the Conservative Party has laid waste to, is a government obsessed with genitals and immigrants.
It is abundantly clear to young people that their government, having lost the economic argument was lost long ago, have turned their focus on the culture war. It is the last remaining terrain the Conservative Party thinks it can win on.
I have no doubt there will be some highly enthusiastic feedback about immigrants and transgender people in the comment section, but it is a simple fact borne out of the polling: young people across the country see the Conservative Party’s foray into the culture war as a transparent – and weird – attempt to distract from their legacy of economic and political failures.
It is not for nothing that the share of 18-34s in Britain who say they “strongly dislike” the Conservative Party has doubled in the last ten years.
The Conservatives have spent years saying no. “There is no such thing as society”. “There is no alternative” to regulation and austerity. No to Europe. No to migration. No to home ownership. No to prosperity. No to hope.
After all that, is it any wonder that young people are now saying the same to them?
The share of 18-34s in Britain who ‘strongly dislike’ the Conservative Party has doubled in ten years