“I do think it is pretty obvious really.” After new research suggested millennials believe the Conservatives deserve to lose the next election, former Tory cabinet minister David Willetts says the answer lies with the economy. Polling for thinktank Onward, whose director, Sebastian Payne, hopes to become a Conservative MP, found that 62% of 25 to 40-year-olds believe the party deserves to lose the next election. Unlike their forebears, this generation do not seem to be shifting to the right as they age. Willetts says that is because they have been denied the stake in society that previous cohorts were able to achieve at the same age. “The process of spreading the property-owning democracy – the old Tory slogan of young people getting started on the housing ladder, getting a place of their own, getting a decent pension, having a stake in society. That progress is slower and more difficult and more precarious than it’s been at any point since the war,” he says.
Willetts is the author of a 2010 book called The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future and Why They Should Give it Back. If anything, since then, generational divisions have become even wider. Recent Resolution Foundation research showed that the long-running housing boom, aided by quantitative easing and rock-bottom interest rates, has meant baby boomers now own more than half of Britain’s wealth, against 8% for millennials. And while just 10% of family units headed by a baby boomer were living in the private rented sector at the age of 30, for millennials of the same age, it was 40%. As well as the failure to liberalise planning rules and ensure more housing is built, Willetts points to policies such as repeated cuts to working-age benefits, in contrast to the generous protection of state pensions, as examples of policies that have worsened the “pinch”.
“In my experience, by and large young people are not plotting Marxist revolution in Latin America; what they want is to own a place of their own and to have a decent job,” says Willetts. “They’re not so fundamentally radical that a sensible Conservative party couldn’t appeal to them. But the more difficult we make the process, the harder it is for them to get a stake in society, the less likely they are to become Tory.” Much of his analysis is echoed from a very different part of the political spectrum by James Meadway, director of the Progressive Economy Forum thinktank and a former adviser to Labour MP John McDonnell.
“Effectively government policy has been geared towards making sure that house prices stay up – this is what QE [quantitative easing] actually did – whilst at the same time, it has been difficult to actually get a mortgage,” he says. “That’s great if you own a house, and you’re trying to pay off your mortgage; but it’s been pretty terrible if you’re trying to buy a house. And then you’re forced into the private rental market which is hideously underregulated and generally terrible,” he said. And Meadway argues that the nature of today’s labour market has also contributed to millennials’ malaise. “If you think about the period from the mid-1990s through to 2008, for a lot of graduates you could come out of university and go straight into a reasonably secure job with some prospects of something that looked like a career. And since 2008 that’s just not happened: you’ve had this profusion of zero-hours contracts, insecure work, part-time work: and it’s particularly younger workers who have ended up in these things,” he said.
The Onward report sought to draw comfort from the fact that millennials preferred low to high taxes, and believed big business could provide opportunities – suggesting this meant they were “shy capitalists” ripe for a Conservative message. But Prof Will Jennings, an elections expert at Southampton University, argues that as well as their economic struggles, younger voters may also be alienated by other aspects of the government’s stance – on migration, for example. Rishi Sunak has made “Stop the Boats” one of his five major policy pledges in a bid to win over waverers in “red wall” seats perceived to be socially conservative, and the home secretary, Suella Braverman, has used hardline rhetoric, including describing the arrival of migrants as an “invasion”. Jennings argues that younger voters are not necessarily “fully signed up woke warriors and social justice activists,” but, “it’s the nature of the broad rhetoric which suggests to them that the government is not standing for their sort of values”. A Labour strategist goes further, arguing that picking fights with social liberals is a deliberate choice on the part of the government. “You can’t have Suella Braverman as home secretary and also say, we’re serious about the concerns of people aged 25 to 40 – because it is almost designed to anger them. That’s not a flaw, it’s the model,” they said. Perhaps nowhere has that been more true in recent years than on Brexit. Two-thirds of millennials voted for remain, compared with just a third of boomers; but they have found themselves hit just as hard, if not harder, by its economic impact – at a time when the Tories have been proudly flying the flag for leave. “You could actually argue that this is where the economic dimension and the cultural dimension blurs,” says Jennings. “There was a big generational gap in Brexit voting. That is now inflicting economic drag, and that’s being felt on a generation that already was facing a pretty tough economic deal.”