Ben Knight is a 26-year-old former civil servant turned Parliamentary Researcher, who embarked on a three-year career in adult social care at the beginning of the pandemic. He has since worked in sales.
There’s something different about “Gen Z.” They may exist in a world of “rizz,” “aura” and “skibidi toilets” which is as alien to those of us born prior to the turn of the millennium as the summer of love was to the baby boomers.
But the generation of young people born between roughly 1999 and 2012, who are just beginning to come of age, are a demographic which – contrary to received wisdom – may yet hold great promise for conservative parties.
It doesn’t come natural to most functionaries in politics to scour the highlights of TikTok or Snapchat; but if they did, they would find something altogether quite interesting.
Gen Z are committed to “the grind” – the idea of get-up-and-go, of self-improvement, of hard work, of “securing the bag” (which means, in a nutshell, making money.)
They are far less likely to drink, smoke, or take drugs than any of their predecessors. They are far more likely to join a gym. They are also, increasingly, starting their own businesses and pursuing new vocations, whether as “side-hustles” or as their main source of income.
In my local area, heads were turned when two groups of young men finishing their GCSEs independently established their own car cleaning and valeting services. “The Bubble Boys” scored rave reviews, and have continued to run the business as they pursued further studies.
I’ve lost count of the number of health, beauty, and wellbeing pages established by slightly younger contemporaries of mine on social media sites – a young woman I once knew as a barmaid has now purchased her own salon premises on the high street.
Then, of course, the legacy of “democratised” service-delivery platforms have given many young people access to a rapid revenue-raiser: spare evenings on a bicycle delivering food via UberEats, or selling tasteful (or less-tasteful) holiday snaps on OnlyFans.
This new generation are self-motivated, driven and determined. Often they have aspirations far beyond the achievements of their parents. We know already that rightly or wrongly, more young people than ever before are going to university, And whilst most conservatives would argue that those universities are now oversubscribed and undervalued, it is an undeniable testament to an overwhelming inclination towards self-improvement that hasn’t always been readily obvious in the mindsets of the young.
When I worked in a sales role in the leisure industry, my new sign-ups were overwhelmingly people aged 16-21, pursuing the kind of sculpted body and honed mind that I could only dream of (despite getting the gym for free.)
This whole attitude is important, because it’s a predilection towards taking responsibility, pursuing opportunity, and aspiring to do more that is intrinsically aligned with post-Thatcher conservative values. But in respect specifically of political views, there is promise too
Across Europe, young people have been turning to the right and centre-right. The recent success of the AfD has been popularly put down to a “Youthquake” in East Germany. In Canada, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party is making waves with young people who aspire towards home ownership.
In Britain, the unprecedentedly rapid descent into unpopularity of a new government is disenfranchising young people in their droves with a Labour movement that they had been told for almost two decades was their champion-in-waiting. As the youth vote begins to realise that Sir Keir offers little of the change they hoped for, those voters will be looking for an alternative vision.
And during the election campaign we saw Nigel Farage and Reform UK effectively mobilise the young: his TikTok account became the most popular of any British politician, and his videos achieved viral meme quality on more than one occasion.
The next generation of British voters, many of whom will vote for the first time in 2029, are more conservative than many of them would care to admit. Their timelines are filled with the stories of strivers and self-made success stories; their icons, like Molly-Mae Hague or even Kim Kardashian, are openly meritocratic in their views, and just as openly critical of those who don’t want to work hard.
Even its villains reflect this broad outlook: Andrew Tate has offered an outlet, albeit unhealthy, for young men frustrated by a society which teaches them that they must suppress almost all of their natural tendencies.
The left has less of a hold on our young than at any time in recent history, and young voters are crying out for leadership which speaks in their language and to their aspirations. This ambitious, hard-nosed and hard-working generation does not, on the whole, deserve half of the flack it sometimes get. It is, or should be, open to a revitalised, refreshed Conservative Party.
The mission for the centre-right of British politics must now be to orient itself around a vision for the future which reflects the oft-misinterpreted values of young people, and which responds to the inevitable criticism that a lacklustre Labour government will incur over five years in office.
The big questions around the future of work, the housing crisis, the integration of infrastructure and the issues affecting the environment will need to be met with bold answers.
A new Conservative leader will need to be able to communicate with the “aura” (charisma) and “grindset” (commitment to working hard) that they will find inspiring, and an innovative approach to some of the issues of intergenerational inequality and perceived unfairness, which challenges the roadmap for working people of ever-higher tax contributions and ever-lower returns, will need to be fleshed out.
Fundamental ideological debates, which pit the fantastical utopianism of socialism against the real results of a free market system in quashing global poverty and creating wealth, will need to be won anew.
The kids are alright, you know. And if we are prepared to take them seriously, we might just find that they start to take the Conservative Party very seriously indeed.
