Tories must make the case for conservatism
Given the present political uncertainties, it is not too early for the Tories to motivate themselves and try to connect with a public they left largely undisturbed during the recent, catastrophic campaign. This is particularly true of the young. A YouGov poll last week showed Labour outperformed the Tories in every age group under 49. And the Centre for Policy Studies outlined the open goal the Tories missed with younger voters.
It correctly branded Labour’s populist “free” tuition fees plan “elitist”, as non-graduates would subsidise graduates, who earn on average £9,500 a year more. Overall, Labour’s spending plans would have added £150 billion to UK debt over five years, the burden of which would have fallen disproportionately on the young – as, already, has the cost of Labour’s last economic disaster in 2008.
The CPS also argued that Tory measures such as the Modern Slavery Bill and reforms to stop and search should have been promoted to young people, on the grounds that they are more concerned about such issues than their elders. However, the Tories should have broadcast to the whole electorate how such measures enriched humanity and upheld the idea of justice: it is called the moral case for conservatism.
But then taxing and spending are part of that moral case too. No one said to the young, their heads turned by the prospect of their successors being relieved of tuition fees, that they should question how that money would be found. No one said that instead of bearing student debt they would have to bear greater national debt in the decades ahead. No one explained the opportunity cost of this so-called free-ride.
That cost was probably higher taxes, disincentivising the workforce and, if levied corporately, driving some businesses into jurisdictions such as Ireland, or Singapore. No one said this would impede wealth creation, on which the funding of public services relies. No one raised the possibility that those requiring society’s compassion – the infirm and impoverished elderly, deprived children, the chronically ill and severely disabled – might suffer a diminution in state assistance so the most privileged section of our youth could have a free ride.
Such young people are neither stupid nor callous: but like all with less experience of life they require to be informed. Labour was very good at informing them; the Tories made no attempt to offer their own version of economic reality. Ignored by the Tory campaign, many young people did not have to be committed Leftists to support Mr Corbyn, whose illiberal, economically catastrophic Marxist ideas would have caused the stock market and the currency to collapse, wealth creators to flee, debt to become unsustainable and public services to implode.
As a teenager I was attracted to conservatism principally by two arguments: that it understood, and sought to promote, the link between capitalism and liberty; and that it sought also to diminish the role of the state and encourage the growth and responsibility of the individual. In those days Mrs Thatcher, armed by Ralph Harris and Arthur Seldon at the Institute of Economic Affairs, was inspirationally repairing Britain after the horrors of the Seventies. Young voters will not recall when it took six months to have a telephone line put in, when the car industry was committing suicide by a semi-permanent wave of strikes, when inflation was 26.9 per cent, and when Britain was run with the permission of men such as Joe Gormley of the National Union of Mineworkers and the Soviet-funded Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers Union, whose names did not appear on ballot papers at general elections.
It was in the hope of escaping such an anti-democratic, corrupt, incompetent and above all wasteful state that my generation, who voted for the first time in 1979, put Mrs Thatcher into power. In the autumn of 1976, as I embarked on my A-level economics course, we followed daily the humiliations of the Labour government whose chancellor, Denis Healey, had to divert from the airport to the Labour conference to explain to an angry brotherhood why the money was running out. The International Monetary Fund assumed control of the British economy, and the public sector collapsed in an orgy of strikes in the months before Mrs Thatcher won office. It was an object lesson in the limits of Keynesianism.
That is where Corbynism takes you. Young people are not his dupes. If they were, tens of thousands – and not a handful of Trotskyists – would have manifested for the ludicrous “Day of Rage” last Wednesday. Our young people are intelligent and reasonable: but they, like the rest of us, expect to be engaged with, and not ignored or patronised. They are waiting to have the case for conservatism – especially the moral case – made to them.
That is what the Tories should be doing without delay: not waiting for another, ill-prepared election campaign. Labour does not have a monopoly on compassion, sense or moral rectitude: quite the opposite. Tory policies do not just benefit “the rich”. They are fair to everyone, not least in the way in which the encouragement of wealth creation results in the tax revenues that ensure no one in society is left destitute or helpless.
And there is an obvious person to take charge of this policy of connecting with younger voters – not just by deploying essential digital technology, but by deploying reason and persuasiveness. Ruth Davidson, whose huge success in Scotland was not least through her appeal to younger voters, hopes to become first minister of Scotland: but that aspiration would be furthered by her leading a UK-wide Conservative campaign to tell younger voters why voting Tory is the genuine way to make Britain fairer, happier and more successful. The Tories must get off their knees: she is the woman to pull them up.
Conservative policies do not just benefit ‘the rich’. They are fair to everyone