Charles Martin is an award-winning business student with political experience. He is reading Law at the University of Exeter.
The Conservative Party has been through a volatile period, with the general election result the worst in recent history – so how does the party possibly recover from such a dire situation? The youth vote will be crucial – and winning it back demands a serious rethink on the part of the Party.
According to YouGov, the voting intentions of those between the ages of 18-24 are largely in Labour’s favour. As someone who falls into this age bracket, I am not at all surprised; it is evident to anyone who is in higher education that the left is the norm for this cohort.
Labour’s strength with younger voters is not a new phenomenon. It was evident at the 2015, 2017, and 2019 elections too; even when the Tories went on to form a government, it was largely older voters they had to thank.
The danger now is that Labour consolidates its support with these voters as they get older, whilst continuing to win over successive cohorts of young people to whom the Conservative Party appears to have little to offer. Our most recent manifesto had big pledges on everything from pensions to farming and defence, but no clear pitch to the under-35s.
Contrast this with Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who have each at different elections put a bold offer to younger people – normally around tuition fees – front and centre of their case to the electorate, and reaped the rewards.
I believe the most recent election is a great case study as to what has gone wrong in the relationship between the Conservatives and the youth vote. Let’s start with one of the earliest policies which the party announced: mandatory national service.
Looking at the policy in detail shows that there is a lot of value in the proposed scheme, with cohesion as a society at the heart of it.
The issue is that it was a headache to communicate in a few snappy lines, which is usually the best way to go in election campaigns; when the announcement was made it made it look like the party was bringing back some form of conscription, when this was very much not the case.
Nonetheless, young people did not receive this policy well and took it as the Conservatives, yet again, declaring war on the next generation.
There have been obvious attempts by the party to appeal to the youth vote, including an abrupt entrance onto TikTok in the middle of the campaign. But this content seemed massively out of place; embracing new media is all well and good, but clearly not sufficient to bridge the profound disconnect between the Conservative Party and the people who use it.
Reform UK has the most followers of any political party on TikTok, followed by the Tories; the problem is clearly not centre-right or right-wing politics per se. But finding an audience is only the first step – converting that audience into your voters is much harder.
We need to future-proof the Conservative Party with a proper strategy for winning over younger voters; if not, there is a real danger that our electoral position will only degrade further as our existing voters die off. The imminent overhaul of the party brand is a good opportunity to get this process going.
The best way to go about this is staying true to our conservative values on both economic and social policy – but making a much greater effort to ensure, and communicate, that young people benefit from our programme. I think a return to the “compassionate conservatism” of the 2010s would offer an ideal policy platform, but every faction should assess its proposals through the lens of winning over the younger generations of voters we need to survive.
Finally, we also need to work on cultivating a more accessible image; fairly or not, Labour often seems much more down-to-earth and ‘normal’ than the Conservatives – which probably helps to explain why the Party faces such an uphill struggle on social media. Addressing this is just as important as overhauling our policy offer.
This work cannot begin soon enough. Like it or not, the party which commands the loyalty of the youth vote has an electoral down-payment on the future, especially in a country such as the UK where the political definition of ‘youth vote’ is creeping higher and higher. Without an effective strategy, in years to come the Conservative Party may well go the way of its current electorate.
