Janet Daley:

The younger generation, well-versed in contract switching, are too smart to want Corbyn’s monopolies

This being my last column before the election I will reiterate the prediction I made all those weeks ago (or maybe it was months ago – I’ve lost track of time), and state baldly that the Conservatives will win with a comfortable majority. That expectation was, back then, a political assessment of public opinion. Now it is a moral imperative. The idea that large numbers of British voters could contemplate the possibility of an anti-Semitic prime minister is simply insupportable.

I certainly saw nothing in Friday’s debate that causes me to change my forecast of the outcome. So let’s assume, for the preservation of our sanity, that the cataclysm is safely avoided and that the result is a foregone conclusion. What happens next? After the earthquake in political realignment in which, as everybody keeps saying, the electoral Red Wall is breached and vast numbers of people discover that you can vote Tory and still feel good about yourself – what then?

The fashionable account of this phenomenon is that all those traditional Labour voters who will betray their hereditary party loyalty on this occasion see themselves as Not Really Tory. They will simply “lend” their vote to the Conservatives because they are desperate to get Brexit over with (even if they did not vote for it), or because they detest Jeremy Corbyn (one opinion researcher I spoke to last week said that it was impossible to overestimate the “loathing and contempt” with which he is held in many working class constituencies), or because they actually quite like Boris Johnson (for the same reasons that so many liberal Londoners did when he was mayor).

These people are said to be making a purely pragmatic and temporary choice and not any sort of lifechanging commitment to Conservative philosophy. What must be concluded from this according to the received wisdom is that in order to hold these tentative new followers, the Tory party in government will have to become much more like Labour in its moderate Blair-Brown incarnation. That is, it will have to commit itself to higher public spending, big state solutions and to consign the idea of lower tax and more competitive private services to history.

The first really big thing that is wrong with this argument is the assumption that the voters we are discussing are sheep-like stooges who never actually change their minds about anything and are incapable of reassessing their own condition and life chances. This proposition was definitively disproved during the Eighties when a huge number of working class people decided that the Thatcherite package of aspiration, home ownership and self-improvement was actually a more attractive proposition than Labour’s invitation: stay where you are and we’ll look after you. With scarcely a backward glance, the same sort of people we are discussing now abandoned the paternalism and limitations in which the traditional class-bound Labour identity had locked them and embraced a quite different view of life’s possibilities. It is quite conceivable that we have reached a similar turning point with this election.

But this will only be so if the Conservatives seize the opportunity to make the country a fresh offer: to make use of Brexit as a genuine chance to open the national discourse and lead a new generation into a truly exhilarating debate about its future. This will take courage and imagination – which points to the other big thing that is wrong with the defeatist idea that the Conservatives must move to the Left in order to keep those ex-Labour recruits. It is cowardice of an unforgivable order.

There is a chance here – a once in a lifetime chance – of addressing the people in a momentous way, of setting out the real choice available to them. And when you think of it there could not be a more opportune moment to have this argument: to put the case for free market economics and the self-determination it permits. In fact, it is possible to turn the axioms of the present consensus on their head. It is generally agreed that the real division in British political life is not now between classes (see above) but between generations. It is the young who incline toward Left-wing state-control solutions and enthuse about nationalised services. Does no one notice the absurdity of this?

A generation accustomed to trading in their mobile phones for better ones every two years, renegotiating their broadband deals when they are dissatisfied with the service they receive, having an absurdly huge array of goods and services available online, buying their holidays and their insurance on price comparison websites – are going to accept state monopoly services in which a single provider will tell them what they can have and when they are going to get it? Seriously?

If ever there was a cohort of people who should not need lessons in the value of competition and markets, this is it. The expectation of free choice and the personal empowerment that it provides is so deeply embedded in their everyday lives that it has become invisible. All you have to do is tell them: make them look at the reality of state monopolies. Even the revered NHS – that great monument to nationalised public services – faces the problem of people who no longer want to be regarded as unquestioning supplicants.

There is a terrible, gutless retreat at the heart of this failure to defend the dream of economic freedom.

It is refusing to confront the great slander which the Left has managed to perpetrate – that the desire for private prosperity is nothing more than greed. So say it loud and proud: prosperity means self-determination, dignity, independence, the ability to make choices that will open new life experiences, and the freedom to leave behind the limitations of your background.

There is a whole new youthful population who would profess not to believe this perhaps because they cannot remember a time when the opportunities that they take for granted did not exist – but whose own lives attest to it. All you have to do is tell them.

‘The real division in British political life is not between classes, but between generations’