Who would be a young Conservative?
Eat your own seed corn at your peril
Aspiration is a word forgotten by the Conservative Party. It’s certainly not a word that’s forgotten by me. In only one generation, my family went from being born in council housing and needing to muck out the pigs before heading out to school, to providing a comfortable suburban upbringing that paved the way to my own graduate career in financial services. What better example of “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” conservatism could there be than this?
I first joined the party around 2011, 18-years-old and full of belief in the values that I think have delivered so much for my family, and the country at large. The right of individuals to choose how to spend their own money. The power of liberalised markets to deliver improvements in living standards. The importance of our national institutions. Empowering individuals to live their life on their terms. My belief in these values has not changed.
What has changed is the Conservative Party. While its leadership candidates would happily agree with these aspirational principles, to be a young Conservative today feels like being a Judas goat, leading its own generation towards destitution. It’s not just me — my circle of young party members didn’t have a positive word to say when we found out the choice was between the two continuity Johnson cabinet candidates.
I want to light a fire under the arse of the party. I want to grab it by the lapels and shout with the moral fury of a cri de cœur…
To continue reading this article on the Conservative Party and how it is eating the very seed corn from which it needs to grow its next generation of voters, please visit UnHerd, here: https://unherd.com/2022/08/who-would-be-a-young-tory/
The modern Conservative party is not something Edmund Burke or Disraeli would recognise. Repetitive purges of any talent with a coherent ideology (e.g. Rory Stuart) has left the party with two of the same copy of an outdated allele.
The Conservatives have formed a symbiotic fantasy with their base. In this fantasy the most pertinent issues are "woke", immigration, trans-athletes, net zero, brexit. The last time I spoke to a pensioner they ranted for an hour and a half about the quality of the "Polish" workmanship on their indoor blinds.
Anyone participating in the real economy, and not the index-linked+3% fantasy world, understands what the real issues are; nearly intuitively.
You need to take a look at the SDP. Don’t ‘spend’ your vote, ‘invest’ it in the future.