Court the young vote or die, Matt Hancock tells conservatives

A damning assessment of the Conservative Party’s electoral prospects has sobered the mood of the beer-drinking crowd at a central London pub.

As spectators throng the venue, a former Conservative cabinet minister delivers a striking warning.

“We have to embody the positive, socially liberal values ​​that people under 50 overwhelmingly support,” says Matt Hancock, the former health secretary turned reality TV personality.

“Because if we don’t do that, the Conservative Party will die.”

He addresses an audience of politicians at a packed event organized by Bright Blue, a think tank for liberal conservatism.

Talk topic: How can Tories attract young people?

It’s an existential question for Tories, who have long struggled to appeal to younger voters. For the party’s deputies, the data on voting intentions highlight their low support among the younger generations.

A YouGov survey found that just 21% of 18-24 year olds said they voted Conservative in the last general election in 2019, compared with 67% in the over-70 category.

In recent pollsmade in local elections this month, only 8% of the 18-24 age group said they would vote Conservative.

“For people ages 29 to 49, that number was 10%,” Mr. Hancock told the event.

That 10% figure, Hancock says, “is catastrophic for the electability of the Conservative Party, not just now, but for a decade.”

“We need to have credible policies that address issues that concern young people,” he says.

As a TikTok enthusiast With 184,000 followers on the platform, Mr. Hancock claims to have an antenna for what young people are looking for in politics.

Curbing climate change, providing more affordable housing and technological innovation are what young people care about, not a “divisive culture war,” Hancock says.

But does his analysis really reflect the hopes and fears of the younger generations?

At the event, we spoke to five people under the age of 30, and tellingly, they all say that housing is their biggest concern.

Eve Redmond, a 23-year-old tenant who recently moved to London, says: “I don’t think I’ll break through to the property ladder in the next 10 to 15 years.

“I think housing is a particularly important political issue for young people under 30, millennials like me.”

Joe Lynch, the 18-year-old chairman of Romford Young Conservatives, agrees.

“We need more affordable housing,” he says. “If we can do that as a party, more young people can come to us.”

He says the increasing Americanization of British politics has damaged the Conservative brand.

Some young people, he says, “think we’re all Make American Great Again lunatics, but that’s not the case at all.”

The perception among young people of being “the nasty party” worries 20-year-old Nathan Stone.

He says the war on the awakening, a term that has come to symbolize conservative resistance to social change, has been “carried to extremes” of late.

He says that some of the ideas expressed at this week’s National Conservatism Conference, an event organized by a right-wing American think tank, “are not really going to appeal to young people.”

In his remarks, Hancock slams the “Corbynist conservatives” in his party, who “preach the same kind of cancel culture and virtue, noting that they say they hate the left.”

“Looking at what’s going on in other conferences, sometimes it feels like ‘I’m a conservative, get me out of here,'” he says.

With Mr Hancock retiring as MP at the next election, he’ll be out of there soon. And yet he still believes that the liberal wing of his party has the answers to today’s political questions.

They will need answers if they are to close the generation gaps exposed in the recent general election. In the 2017 and 2019 elections, as well as the 2016 EU referendum, age became the most prominent dividing line in British politics.

A report by the Onward think tank, from 2019, said that 83% of Conservative voters were over the age of 45, while 4% were under the age of 24.

In the last election, the tipping point, the age at which people are more likely to vote Conservative than Labour, was 39, according to YouGov.

But a recent data analysis suggests that the younger generations are changing one of the most complicated assumptions in politics.

In research this yearTwo political scientists from King’s College London have shown that millennials and Gen Z are not getting more conservative as they age.

In the analysis of conservative support by age, the research showed a 40% gap between the oldest and the youngest in 2020, compared to 10% in the early 1990s.

An important factor is how events, such as the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, have shaped the life chances of a generation.

Bobby Duffy, a professor of public policy at King’s, says recent Conservative government decisions have failed to support young people, while the increasing focus on culture war issues has polarized generations.

“This generational divide looks like terrible news for future conservative support, as clearly the older generations are dying out and being replaced by these younger generations,” says the professor.

Still, there are reasons to view the Preservers’ extinction predictions through a skeptical lens.

“Conservatives face a real challenge, but it may have as much to do with the current offering of this version of conservatism as with the underlying principles and values,” says Professor Duffy. “Decline is not inevitable for conservatives, but to avoid it, they need to change.”

The Conservative Party declined to comment.

Michael Gove, the Leveling Up secretary, told the BBC it was important “not to think of the country in terms of young or old” and insisted that the Tories had “great young talent” who attracted voters from all over the world. the ages.

As the Tories wait to test that proposal in a general election, their party is being pulled in different political directions after 13 years in power.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hancock, apparently jokingly, turns to his pink tie for inspiration.

“Occasionally I wear a tie,” he says. “Today was the first time I’d put on a suit in two weeks, because now I’m a normal person. I’m not a Conservative MP. It’s like being normal, like the people we represent. That’s what we want.” I need to do.”