Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.
It’s September 2012. London’s third Olympics have just ended in a triumphant summer for Britain with surprisingly high falls in unemployment and inflation, Britain looks set to grow for the first time post-crash, and the 143rd most popular song in the country is Nick Clegg Says I’m Sorry (The Autotune Remix). Students love the song and teachers, including my own, play it in class.
That was the moment Clegg’s Liberal Democrats died. Sure, their collapse in the polls had begun fairly immediately after entering the Coalition. But post-Sorry any chance of recovery was dead. The party had not merely moved away from its base, nor was it merely dishonest. It was a joke.
Every time a Liberal Democrat is interviewed today they get the same question. It handicapped Jo Swinson in 2019, and in this year’s Question Time Election Special with Ed Davey, tuition fees were brought up the best part of 10 times in 30 minutes. It was a credibility destroyer and continues though its potency has faded. Speak to some LibDem members and they’ll joke that they’ll still be getting heckled about tuition fees at the heat death of the universe.
The credibility destruction Labour unleashed on the Liberal Democrats in the wake of the Coalition and spearheaded by tuition fees is the template for what the next Conservative leader needs to do to Keir Starmer’s Labour.
The good news is – there’s more than enough material for it. The even better news – more emerges daily.
Take tuition fees – in 2020 Starmer pledged to abolish them and Angela Rayner promised Labour wouldn’t backtrack on its tuition fee pledges. Now? Starmer has not merely ditched his commitment but seems set to hike fees to £10,500. Graduates will remember – and they must be made to.
There’s no Newtonian law specifying that young people must vote for the left – outside of the UK they’re certainly not. The Conservative Party of Canada managed it and so can the Conservatives here.
Be bold and offer an alternative – on tuition fees something like a 50 per cent debt-free degree apprenticeship target making ‘corporations not kids’ pay for education would be a good place to start. Integrating existing student loans within the marginal tax regime so that nobody pays a 60 per cent defacto income tax would be a good place to go from there; making universities bear some of the financial risk that students and the government face from bad degrees could work too.
You can do much the same thing on crime and immigration. Starmer promised Labour was the party of law and order and that he’d emulate Margaret Thatcher’s approach to criminal justice, yet here we are with arsonists being freed early and ex-prisoners popping champagne.
There’s this idea I hear occasionally, sometimes on here, that young people have views approximating to a ‘Defund the Police’ Guardian columnist. But I can count on one hand the number of people my age that hasn’t had their phone snatched on a night that, largely thanks to Labour-controlled councils and their licensing laws, ends four hours too early, and none of those people want less policing.
A micro-targeted attack line of more phone thieves thanks to Starmer can work – if only Tory politicians had an interest in making it (and an interest in doing something to fix it when in office).
On immigration frankly, it’s much the same. Young people are barely considered in our public discourse on migration and yet young people are the ones most impacted by it. Take the recent changes to the skilled worker salary threshold – raised from £26,200 to £38,700 – what has that done in concrete terms? Well according to the Financial Times it helped push graduate scheme pay up and meant more places for British graduates on some of the country’s most prestigious grad schemes.
Good – you have done something for young people, however unintentional. Now campaign on it. Even better, it’s a change Yvette Cooper is working to undo. Mentioning the major and sustained observed impact migration has on housing affordability, with one Swiss study finding a 1 per cent rise in the population thanks to migration represents an 8 per cent hike in rents, would be a good place to start too.
The point of this article then is this: young people don’t like Starmer anymore than the rest of the population, and I’m yet to see any reason to believe that’ll change given the policy agenda being pursued, yet so long as the Conservative attempt at appealing to young people consists of national service presented as punishment battalions, they’ll never win them over.
Maybe winning young people isn’t necessary. Maybe merely taking them out of the Labour column and pushing them towards abstention or voting Green would be sufficient but Merkel-esque asymmetrische demobilisierung (asymmetric demobilisation) requires not turning off voters so much that they turn-out.
The good news is that Starmer has already destroyed his credibility with his Clegg-style trail of broken promises. His unparalleled hypocrisy emerging from his neverending sugar-daddy scandal has helped too, but the task now is making voters remember it. It should be easy enough – but it will require the next Conservative leader to be at least willing to engage with people under 63.
