There will be no more Conservatives if we fail to build
4 min read
I’m 32 years old and I’ve been married nearly eight years. And sadly, sometimes it feels true that everybody under 40 who voted Conservative at the last election probably attended my wedding.
A joke, but too much of a nugget of truth in there – every young Conservative recognises how thin our support now is, not just among under 25s or under 35s, but now anyone under 60, and plenty of older ones are waking up to it too.
Sir Winston Churchill once said: “If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a Conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.”
But it is not advancing in age itself that creates Conservatives, but rather the personal growth of passing through the gateposts of a life well lived. You buy a house, start a family, save money into your ISA, your pension pot begins to accrue compound interest, you get promoted at work and pay more tax.
We are wasting a huge amount of potential and the consequence is no more Conservatives or capitalists
As you go through these gateposts, you build capital – financially and socially, building a broader stake in our society – and you discover the facts of life are, indeed, Conservative. But for too many young people in this country, they are not making these steps – we are wasting a huge amount of potential and the consequence is no more Conservatives or capitalists.
The reason? Housing – or rather, a lack of housing.
Current estimates say that compared to other major European nations, we have a backlog shortage of a whopping 4.3m homes. Further, the government target of an average of 300,000 new homes built per year is being continually missed, running closer to 130,000 per year, and this gap opens up more starkly each and every year. That’s before even considering that the unplanned mass migration into this country way outstrips the assumption underpinning the 300,000 per year target.
We are in a mess, and whereas in 1997 the ratio of average earnings to average house price was in the region of three times more, it now closer to nine times. Millions of young people are now paying an immense share of their income after tax in rent; home ownership feels further and further away. This is having disastrous effects in almost every policy area. It is gumming up our economy, stifling family formation and represents a huge intergenerational injustice.
I come from a very working-class background in Greater Manchester and my very first memories are of my parents returning from night school on alternate evenings as they sought to get the qualifications they needed to start their small business. That small business gave me and my brother opportunities my parents couldn’t have dreamt of growing up. They showed me from an early age that anyone who works hard and values education can improve the lives of themselves and their families. That is the root of my conservatism, but how true is it today to say that the industry which you apply is more important than the wealth of your parents when it comes to getting on in this country?
For our politics, our economy and our families – we need to find a Conservative way to get building again. We shouldn’t be covering our countryside with soulless, windowless, car-orientated sprawl. But we absolutely should be significantly increasing the density of housing in our most productive cities (Paris is twice the density of London!).
We should be encouraging a regenerative gentle densification in our suburbs, and we should be building beautiful new places, using Scrutonian principles, utilising organisations like the King’s Foundation.
If we do not, Labour will impose it on us, and young people will not become Conservatives – and our party will continue to drive down an electoral demographic cul-de-sac.
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