Read: The Tory Party is facing a demographic crisis and that’s why it needs to level-up for younger people

Bob Dylan wasn’t primarily known for being a political pundit but he was closer than he realised when he said ‘the times they are a changing’ and “you better start swimming, or you sink like a stone”. It’s great advice for any political party. Especially today’s Conservative Party.

Winning elections is about winning an argument about what the future should look like. As the Member of Parliament for Putney, I represented a constituency with the youngest demographic electorate in the country, other than next door Battersea. The average age of a voter was 38.

Representing that diverse, young community, I learnt you don’t get to tell them what you stand for as a politician, they decide. It’s based on what you do and how you act, not what you say. Authenticity is everything.

At the moment, the voting preference rates for voters aged 24 and under show a generation that doesn’t think this Conservative Government is on their side. An opinion poll by YouGov in December 2022 found just 6% of 18-24 year old voters would consider voting for the party. 

I can picture a long list of ‘lines to take’ prepared for Conservative MPs to tell young people why they should vote Conservative, but this electorate isn’t buying it. And culture wars and ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric - whatever that term actually means - might tell some voters that the Conservative Party is in tune with them but are a turn off for many others, especially younger voters. 

There was a reason why it was my Department of Education (DfE) that prioritised “levelling up” before others when we released our Social Mobility strategy in 2017, two years before the words “levelled up Britain”  first issued forth from Boris Johnson’s mouth. That reason was at the DfE we understood that levelling up opportunities is fundamentally about improving the prospects for younger people, and not just about improving them for places. 

The Conservative Party’s challenge is its political coalition around levelling up has focused on one voter group - red wall seats that don’t have enough opportunity on the ground, but missed out the other - younger people across the country, also wanting a Britain to get a lot fairer, a lot faster with a better education system to turbocharge progress. That political blind spot remains today.

It was the Momentum wing of the Labour Party that mobilised many disillusioned young people to vote back in 2017, tapping into a sense of alienation many felt from a political system that seemed to lack values, lack ambition and was too focused on other voters. 

There is talk that the Conservative Democratic Organisation is a new equivalent of Momentum in the Conservative Party, working as a grassroots organisation to change the party from the inside. But it seems unlikely that it will be a group that will mobilise many young people through target reforming student finance, affordable housing, an ambitious plan for education or a strong approach to protect the environment and tackle climate change. 

The Conservative approach to reaching out to young people continues to try to win them over by building homes and highlighting investment in vocational education and skills. Homes matter, but housing targets were successfully opposed from within the party itself. Meantime, first in family university students going to often excellent, but non-Russell Group universities closer to home to save money, are told that if they don’t get a graduate job their degrees are ‘low value’, even though the lack of a graduate job is more to do with a weak local economy than their own potential. The apprenticeship levy remains unreformed, with billions of it unspent and handed back to the Treasury. The post-covid £10bn Education Recovery plan of Sir Kevan Collins was rejected by ministers as too expensive. It would have been a significant investment but the long-term damage to the economy of the scarred education of a generation will cost Britain far, far more.

As things stand, the Conservative Party has already lost the argument for the future, if the voting intentions of younger voters are anything to go by. And the problem is getting worse, steadily moving up the age ranges. I remember a time when the party debated the challenge of ‘young voters’ under 30 not voting Conservative. As years went by, it became the under 35s, then the under 40s. An opinion poll last week showed just 21% of 35-44 year olds would currently vote Conservative.

It needs to up its game, not with rhetoric but with authentic action. Until the Conservative Party is sufficiently ambitious in delivering equality of opportunity, with an education and skills system reformed from early years onwards, to enable everyone to have a fair shot in life, it risks a long term disengagement from younger voters that could prove fatal for the party. Ministers will point to investment in skills and education, but it's clearly not substantial enough to win over the younger generation it’s there to help.

Dylan was right that the times are changing. The Conservative party is in the midst of an old-style political debate - with itself - over whether or not tax cuts are the right step to kickstart growth. But it risks missing the fact that success in the 21st century will be about developing talent and connecting it to opportunity. It is investment in our young people and their potential, and getting that approach right for the longer-term, that is Britain’s real growth strategy and the bedrock of any sustainable plan to level up Britain. It’s the right thing, the smart thing and it’s obvious to young people. When they feel it’s obvious to the Conservative Party too, then, and only then, might the polls start to turn around.

Featured in the Yorkshire Post 18th February 2023.