>#The Tories face electoral disaster if they continue to ignore the plight of the young
>__My party has a moral duty to offer something back to a generation that gave up so much during lockdown. But it’s also a political necessity__
>RUTH DAVIDSON
>19 August 2022 • 9:30pm
>In the film Miss Congeniality, an undercover female FBI officer is sent to take part in the Miss United States beauty pageant. There’s a scene where all 50 contestants are asked what the most important thing is that society needs. Shocked silence descends when our protagonist is the only contestant not to immediately answer “world peace”.
>There are certain immutable rules in politics, as well as on the pageant runway. And, just as every beauty queen who seeks to take the crown has to profess to want a more peaceful planet, so every serious politician and leadership contender must build their platform on telling voters that casting their ballot for candidate X offers their children and grandchildren greater opportunities than they themselves experienced.
>It is the most natural thing in the world to want to provide a better life for your child. And for generations, that was the case. Following the Second World War, the arc of the nation was for people to become richer, healthier, more educated and longer living. More likely to own a home. Less likely to suffer an industrial accident. More likely for children to survive infancy. And children, teens and young adults could realistically dream of a better life than their parents. But somewhere along the line, that arc crumbled.
>Young people now may be more likely to go to university or travel abroad than their parents, but they are less likely to have the same job security and much less likely to have both the savings and income to own their own home.
But if the past three years have taught us anything, it is that even the immutable rules of politics can be subverted.
>How else would you categorise a months-long leadership election in which neither candidate for prime minister has made any meaningful attempt to sketch out how life will improve for young adults? Where both campaigns have tried to talk tough on protecting the green belt or scrapping national house building targets in favour of local Nimbyism, rather than address the staggering decline in home ownership among the under-35s?
>No wonder, buried in the data tables of this week’s YouGov poll, Labour’s overall nine point lead over the Conservatives grows to 49 points in the 18-24 age group. Fewer than 10 per cent of such voters say they would cast their ballot for the Tories. Even as you rise up the age range to 25 to 49-year-old voters – traditionally the prime age range for settling down, having a family, owning a home and, potentially, changing the motivations of your vote – Conservative support rose to just 16 per cent (compared with Labour on 51 per cent).
>The Conservative Party desperately needs to make an offer to younger Britons; to show that it understands the opportunities they have missed, the hardships they face and to include them in the national political narrative.
>During lockdown, the young made enormous sacrifices, without requesting thanks, in order to help keep older and more vulnerable people safe. These sacrifices affected their education, qualifications, employment, training, development and relationships – all in a bid to control a virus that posed a negligible risk to their health.
>While school pupils lost teaching hours and had exams scrapped, university students were locked down on campus and significant numbers of apprentices were furloughed, made redundant or had their training suspended.
>According to the Resolution Foundation, Covid measures disproportionately hit the young workforce, with workers aged 16-24 far more likely than their middle-aged counterparts to have lost working hours, experienced lower pay, been put on furlough or lost their jobs. In fact, young workers accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total fall in payrolled employment that occurred in the first year of Covid measures.
>But even before the pandemic hit, children and young adults were facing a rougher time with less support. The charity UK Youth reports that the average local authority cut to spending on youth services in the three years to 2021 was 40 per cent.
>The cost of accessing higher education has increased, with the House of Commons Library now forecasting students in England starting university this year will graduate with an average of £45,800 of debt. The graduate premium is shrinking, too, with around one in five students likely to be worse off over the course of their lifetime than if they had given university a miss.
They’ll just screw the country up as much as possible for the next couple years, they know Labour has got it in the bag. But by fucking it up more and more, Labour has more trouble fixing it and they can easily come back swinging with “SEE LABOUR DIDN’T DO ANYTHING”. Boom. Another 12 years.
I’ll never trust the Tories ever, I’m 29 and I didn’t remember what it was like from 1993-1997 but I know what it’s like now and honestly they are absolutely awful.
They have fucked this country to the max and when they first took power I was quite young and right leaning and now I’m full fuck the Tories and socialist.
Nah young people do things I don’t like and support things I’m against so we need to make them suffer as much as possible.
I’m late 30s. Despite everything, I’ve done okay and managed to make myself relatively financially secure.
However, I will never forgive the Tories for what they have done, and the hurdles they have continually put in my generation’s way.
I would on paper be the exact type of voter that should be increasingly attracted to the Tories, but not in a million years.
I think they may have really fucked themselves long term.
I’m a financially secure homeowner in my late 30s.
In another generation, I’d be their ideal target voter.
I will never forgive them for Brexit. In voting and to the extent I even actively fundraise for the main opposition in my constituency.
I’ll never vote tory regardless
I’m 35. I’ll never vote for the Tories. I’m a higher rate tax payer. I went to private school. Noone I know will vote for them. They’re fucked when the boomers start dying.
Anyone got a link to a non paywall version of the article?
At this point the plight of the nation. Bunch of cunts
They cannot rely on older people and the middle class forever. The middle class are being squeezed too and they will not like their assets going down in value. The elderly are dying off and many are having to sell their homes to pay for a very basic standard of care. The Tories might have twenty years at best before they become politically irrelevant, as the young people they ignored for so long become the older voters they used to target.
In my view the Tories face electoral disaster whatever they do because of what they have done over the last 12 years
I’m from a large family whose patriarchs now in their 80s were all a little conservative, but none of their wider family tree are doing other than voting against, mainly labour but whatever it takes.
I don’t see this as a one off because of the pinnacle of direness they have achieved, this is forever voting patterns
When have they ever done anything for the young yet they have been in power for 12 yrs?
I mean I see them losing but at what point will things be too late. It’s not as if we’re getting a much better alternative.
But I suppose anything is better than nothing.
The Tories ARE the plight of the young
Here is my in depth analysis :
Tories are TOAST!
Here is my in depth analysis :
Tories are TOAST!
We all hate the tories in this house. My kids are both voting age.
One used to be conservative and he’s gone full tilt Lib Dem.
Sshhh. Let’s keep them in the dark.
The funny thing is that the Tories we currently have in charge don’t seem to recognise what their posion as a brand is right now.
It’s not that younger people aren’t voting for them or don’t seem to believe what they say “because they’re prejudiced against us!/biased!/brainwashed!” or any variant of those.
It’s literally because their policies have at best made life fractionally worse for (Brexit, travel, delays and loss of choice in shops), and at worst *actively made life much more difficult for* (student loan threshold and cost increase, lack of pay rises, increased bills, inflation, austerity, cutting services and support, health delays, how they handled covid restrictions, any number of policies that have punished *only* the young or attacked things they believe in) the vast majority of the total population under a certain age – catching within that net those who would have been the next generation of their natural voters.
Why? It seems like arbitrarily they just decided to sacrifice some of their own, maybe thinking that they would keep them anyway. The trouble is, they haven’t done so quietly – they’ve done it crowing from the newspapers and from Question Time and the likes, actively going out of their way to oppose anything that younger people value or believe in, once again, *even small c conservative younger people*. Well, the chickens will come home to roost, frankly. For whatever reason they’ve chosen to actively set themselves up as an enemy to younger people, and have stayed so as those people start to age up. It honestly seems crazy for a party that are normally so good at playing the game of politics.
I think they face electoral disaster whatever they do. People just get sick of a party and want a change, it’s a symptom of the 2 party system.
No, I honestly believe those who are wealthy, those who are the ‘haves’ compared to the ‘have nots’ will choose to protect their own lifestyle over helping the wider world.
It’s a cycle of self preservation through corruption and lies.
I don’t believe it can be broken. This is it.
Considering how much the Johnson government has completely screwed over us yeah not really surprising is it
The young need to get out and vote then – nothing will change if the young don’t vote, sitting at home moaning about it will change nothing!!
41 year old divorced small business owner with a mortgage and child at uni. In another world I’m an absolute target Tory voter but I will never vote for them and never forgive them for pushing through with austerity in the 2010s that basically forced me to leave my profession and start doing something else because there was no money in what I was doing. Policies that hurt people I knew and cared about and ignoring serious economic issues to focus on culture war crap that should have been over and done with 10 years ago.
It’s not the fault of BLM or trans people that energy prices are about to go through the roof and Winston Churchill’s statue can’t fix it. If Truss thinks she can ride in and throw a last minute deal down in an attempt to save the day and think people will forget the stress they’ve been under the last few months she’s got another thing coming. People are tired of politicians playing games.
I can’t see my daughter ever voting for them because I don’t see her having any chance of getting any assets until she’s nearly my age and that’s just tragic.
“Lizzy hears ya… Lizzie don’t care”
“The Tories face electoral disaster if they continue to ignore the plight of the young”
What do you mean if?
Yeah. I’m 06 so next GE will be voting, we all need to find the party of lesser evils and vote the cunts out. Oh wait, they will probably pass a bill making it impossible to vote bc i dont own a house. Spaffheads the lot of them
I’ll be honest, I don’t think they care.
I really, 100% would not be surprised if by the next election they had essentially become so blaise about being corrupt, that they just declare they win and that’s that.
Realistically, if they did that, what can people do? Protest? They’ll have you arrested and your passport taken away, or go to jail. Write a strongly worded letter to your MP? They won’t give a fuck.
Bleak distopian future on the way. Don’t forget, these fuckers are in power until basically 2025.
I will never vote for the tories, they dont want people like me to exist and they completely fucked the country and still continue to fuck the country and ignore the plight of everyone in here. In fact everyone should not vote for them they are against humanity.
“ignore the plight of the young”
They’re not ignoring it, they’re the source of the problem.
Iam 34 from EU and becouse of brexit i was forsed to spend 3k for british pasport.Now iam gonna use this pasport to vote out people who forced me to take one
There was a time when the policy might have been eradicate poverty, now it’s eradicate the poor.
I remember Thatcher and fighting the poll tax. Utter cunts the lot of them.
Ruth Davidson is held up as some kind of ‘Not quite as evil super genius’ but the stuff she says is super fucking obvious!
Yep! I was always left leaning I’m 26 yet I did have an open mind, if the conservatives seemed good then I would actually vote for them and I was always told when I was a teen and a child by adults that I would become more right leaning and I would support the conservatives when I was older so I was like waiting for that moment and it never happened.
They’ve turned me of conservatives for good and i do think the only way to help our country is to have another party in charge. Conservatives yo me just seem selfish and greedy.
I did vote stupidly in the last election because I didn’t vote strategically to try and get the conservatives out, I won’t make that mistake again.
Yeh no. I can’t support a political party that’s effectively going to allow thousands of people to starve or freeze to death this winter.
I’m a mid-30s homeowner with a stable public sector job so in theory I shouldn’t give a fuck about those starving poor people, but some of the news coming out lately like libraries to be ‘heat banks’ in the winter – what the actual fuck? Who the fuck in their right mind is voting for these monsters?
Our real enemy politically is apathy – there’s been a trend of young people just not voting at all because none of the political parties offer anything of value and they make it very hard for students/etc to get votes in. The real risk here is that at the next general election we see a continued trend of the youngsters not voting and then the bastard Tories get in again.
I have a sense youngsters unable to afford a home – despite working hard, in a good job, is going to sting
Good. Please Tories, continue to ignore the plight of the young. And the old. And everyone (apart from yourselves, of course!). We need to rid ourselves of you for good.
Truss is the easiest to manipulate so those in control want her in power, the tories will slash and burn the UK over the next 2 years before they lose power.
Labour will win and struggle to stabilise the shitshow the tories created, the rightwing media will blame labour for the state of the country and stupid people will vote Tory in the following GE, it’s all going to plan.
Never trust a tory.
I’m a full blown socialist and it was actually the Conservative Party that shaped my political worldview. In fact, they’ve radicalised me. I’d rather eat broken glass than ever fucking vote Tory.
God, I hope. They absolutely have it coming. I just don’t think it’s healthy for a party in a democracy to exist for centuries while being so consistently close to power as the Tory/Conservative & Unionist continuum has. It’s not in any way healthy to still face the same electoral options we did before there was universal suffrage.
Britain desperately needs to separate its love of tradition and continuity from politics. Keeping the monarchy around as the figurehead of a healthy democracy is one thing, but this general politically traditionalist mindset has prevented closer examination of so many institutional problems in the UK for so many years.
They’ve been screwing us over for a straight decade, do you seriously think they’ll stop now. Fuck the Tories and every cunt that works for them.
43 comments
>#The Tories face electoral disaster if they continue to ignore the plight of the young
>__My party has a moral duty to offer something back to a generation that gave up so much during lockdown. But it’s also a political necessity__
>RUTH DAVIDSON
>19 August 2022 • 9:30pm
>In the film Miss Congeniality, an undercover female FBI officer is sent to take part in the Miss United States beauty pageant. There’s a scene where all 50 contestants are asked what the most important thing is that society needs. Shocked silence descends when our protagonist is the only contestant not to immediately answer “world peace”.
>There are certain immutable rules in politics, as well as on the pageant runway. And, just as every beauty queen who seeks to take the crown has to profess to want a more peaceful planet, so every serious politician and leadership contender must build their platform on telling voters that casting their ballot for candidate X offers their children and grandchildren greater opportunities than they themselves experienced.
>It is the most natural thing in the world to want to provide a better life for your child. And for generations, that was the case. Following the Second World War, the arc of the nation was for people to become richer, healthier, more educated and longer living. More likely to own a home. Less likely to suffer an industrial accident. More likely for children to survive infancy. And children, teens and young adults could realistically dream of a better life than their parents. But somewhere along the line, that arc crumbled.
>Young people now may be more likely to go to university or travel abroad than their parents, but they are less likely to have the same job security and much less likely to have both the savings and income to own their own home.
But if the past three years have taught us anything, it is that even the immutable rules of politics can be subverted.
>How else would you categorise a months-long leadership election in which neither candidate for prime minister has made any meaningful attempt to sketch out how life will improve for young adults? Where both campaigns have tried to talk tough on protecting the green belt or scrapping national house building targets in favour of local Nimbyism, rather than address the staggering decline in home ownership among the under-35s?
>No wonder, buried in the data tables of this week’s YouGov poll, Labour’s overall nine point lead over the Conservatives grows to 49 points in the 18-24 age group. Fewer than 10 per cent of such voters say they would cast their ballot for the Tories. Even as you rise up the age range to 25 to 49-year-old voters – traditionally the prime age range for settling down, having a family, owning a home and, potentially, changing the motivations of your vote – Conservative support rose to just 16 per cent (compared with Labour on 51 per cent).
>The Conservative Party desperately needs to make an offer to younger Britons; to show that it understands the opportunities they have missed, the hardships they face and to include them in the national political narrative.
>During lockdown, the young made enormous sacrifices, without requesting thanks, in order to help keep older and more vulnerable people safe. These sacrifices affected their education, qualifications, employment, training, development and relationships – all in a bid to control a virus that posed a negligible risk to their health.
>While school pupils lost teaching hours and had exams scrapped, university students were locked down on campus and significant numbers of apprentices were furloughed, made redundant or had their training suspended.
>According to the Resolution Foundation, Covid measures disproportionately hit the young workforce, with workers aged 16-24 far more likely than their middle-aged counterparts to have lost working hours, experienced lower pay, been put on furlough or lost their jobs. In fact, young workers accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total fall in payrolled employment that occurred in the first year of Covid measures.
>But even before the pandemic hit, children and young adults were facing a rougher time with less support. The charity UK Youth reports that the average local authority cut to spending on youth services in the three years to 2021 was 40 per cent.
>The cost of accessing higher education has increased, with the House of Commons Library now forecasting students in England starting university this year will graduate with an average of £45,800 of debt. The graduate premium is shrinking, too, with around one in five students likely to be worse off over the course of their lifetime than if they had given university a miss.
They’ll just screw the country up as much as possible for the next couple years, they know Labour has got it in the bag. But by fucking it up more and more, Labour has more trouble fixing it and they can easily come back swinging with “SEE LABOUR DIDN’T DO ANYTHING”. Boom. Another 12 years.
I’ll never trust the Tories ever, I’m 29 and I didn’t remember what it was like from 1993-1997 but I know what it’s like now and honestly they are absolutely awful.
They have fucked this country to the max and when they first took power I was quite young and right leaning and now I’m full fuck the Tories and socialist.
Nah young people do things I don’t like and support things I’m against so we need to make them suffer as much as possible.
I’m late 30s. Despite everything, I’ve done okay and managed to make myself relatively financially secure.
However, I will never forgive the Tories for what they have done, and the hurdles they have continually put in my generation’s way.
I would on paper be the exact type of voter that should be increasingly attracted to the Tories, but not in a million years.
I think they may have really fucked themselves long term.
I’m a financially secure homeowner in my late 30s.
In another generation, I’d be their ideal target voter.
I will never forgive them for Brexit. In voting and to the extent I even actively fundraise for the main opposition in my constituency.
I’ll never vote tory regardless
I’m 35. I’ll never vote for the Tories. I’m a higher rate tax payer. I went to private school. Noone I know will vote for them. They’re fucked when the boomers start dying.
Anyone got a link to a non paywall version of the article?
At this point the plight of the nation. Bunch of cunts
They cannot rely on older people and the middle class forever. The middle class are being squeezed too and they will not like their assets going down in value. The elderly are dying off and many are having to sell their homes to pay for a very basic standard of care. The Tories might have twenty years at best before they become politically irrelevant, as the young people they ignored for so long become the older voters they used to target.
In my view the Tories face electoral disaster whatever they do because of what they have done over the last 12 years
I’m from a large family whose patriarchs now in their 80s were all a little conservative, but none of their wider family tree are doing other than voting against, mainly labour but whatever it takes.
I don’t see this as a one off because of the pinnacle of direness they have achieved, this is forever voting patterns
When have they ever done anything for the young yet they have been in power for 12 yrs?
I mean I see them losing but at what point will things be too late. It’s not as if we’re getting a much better alternative.
But I suppose anything is better than nothing.
The Tories ARE the plight of the young
Here is my in depth analysis :
Tories are TOAST!
Here is my in depth analysis :
Tories are TOAST!
We all hate the tories in this house. My kids are both voting age.
One used to be conservative and he’s gone full tilt Lib Dem.
Sshhh. Let’s keep them in the dark.
The funny thing is that the Tories we currently have in charge don’t seem to recognise what their posion as a brand is right now.
It’s not that younger people aren’t voting for them or don’t seem to believe what they say “because they’re prejudiced against us!/biased!/brainwashed!” or any variant of those.
It’s literally because their policies have at best made life fractionally worse for (Brexit, travel, delays and loss of choice in shops), and at worst *actively made life much more difficult for* (student loan threshold and cost increase, lack of pay rises, increased bills, inflation, austerity, cutting services and support, health delays, how they handled covid restrictions, any number of policies that have punished *only* the young or attacked things they believe in) the vast majority of the total population under a certain age – catching within that net those who would have been the next generation of their natural voters.
Why? It seems like arbitrarily they just decided to sacrifice some of their own, maybe thinking that they would keep them anyway. The trouble is, they haven’t done so quietly – they’ve done it crowing from the newspapers and from Question Time and the likes, actively going out of their way to oppose anything that younger people value or believe in, once again, *even small c conservative younger people*. Well, the chickens will come home to roost, frankly. For whatever reason they’ve chosen to actively set themselves up as an enemy to younger people, and have stayed so as those people start to age up. It honestly seems crazy for a party that are normally so good at playing the game of politics.
I think they face electoral disaster whatever they do. People just get sick of a party and want a change, it’s a symptom of the 2 party system.
No, I honestly believe those who are wealthy, those who are the ‘haves’ compared to the ‘have nots’ will choose to protect their own lifestyle over helping the wider world.
It’s a cycle of self preservation through corruption and lies.
I don’t believe it can be broken. This is it.
Considering how much the Johnson government has completely screwed over us yeah not really surprising is it
The young need to get out and vote then – nothing will change if the young don’t vote, sitting at home moaning about it will change nothing!!
41 year old divorced small business owner with a mortgage and child at uni. In another world I’m an absolute target Tory voter but I will never vote for them and never forgive them for pushing through with austerity in the 2010s that basically forced me to leave my profession and start doing something else because there was no money in what I was doing. Policies that hurt people I knew and cared about and ignoring serious economic issues to focus on culture war crap that should have been over and done with 10 years ago.
It’s not the fault of BLM or trans people that energy prices are about to go through the roof and Winston Churchill’s statue can’t fix it. If Truss thinks she can ride in and throw a last minute deal down in an attempt to save the day and think people will forget the stress they’ve been under the last few months she’s got another thing coming. People are tired of politicians playing games.
I can’t see my daughter ever voting for them because I don’t see her having any chance of getting any assets until she’s nearly my age and that’s just tragic.
“Lizzy hears ya… Lizzie don’t care”
“The Tories face electoral disaster if they continue to ignore the plight of the young”
What do you mean if?
Yeah. I’m 06 so next GE will be voting, we all need to find the party of lesser evils and vote the cunts out. Oh wait, they will probably pass a bill making it impossible to vote bc i dont own a house. Spaffheads the lot of them
I’ll be honest, I don’t think they care.
I really, 100% would not be surprised if by the next election they had essentially become so blaise about being corrupt, that they just declare they win and that’s that.
Realistically, if they did that, what can people do? Protest? They’ll have you arrested and your passport taken away, or go to jail. Write a strongly worded letter to your MP? They won’t give a fuck.
Bleak distopian future on the way. Don’t forget, these fuckers are in power until basically 2025.
I will never vote for the tories, they dont want people like me to exist and they completely fucked the country and still continue to fuck the country and ignore the plight of everyone in here. In fact everyone should not vote for them they are against humanity.
“ignore the plight of the young”
They’re not ignoring it, they’re the source of the problem.
Iam 34 from EU and becouse of brexit i was forsed to spend 3k for british pasport.Now iam gonna use this pasport to vote out people who forced me to take one
There was a time when the policy might have been eradicate poverty, now it’s eradicate the poor.
I remember Thatcher and fighting the poll tax. Utter cunts the lot of them.
Ruth Davidson is held up as some kind of ‘Not quite as evil super genius’ but the stuff she says is super fucking obvious!
Yep! I was always left leaning I’m 26 yet I did have an open mind, if the conservatives seemed good then I would actually vote for them and I was always told when I was a teen and a child by adults that I would become more right leaning and I would support the conservatives when I was older so I was like waiting for that moment and it never happened.
They’ve turned me of conservatives for good and i do think the only way to help our country is to have another party in charge. Conservatives yo me just seem selfish and greedy.
I did vote stupidly in the last election because I didn’t vote strategically to try and get the conservatives out, I won’t make that mistake again.
Yeh no. I can’t support a political party that’s effectively going to allow thousands of people to starve or freeze to death this winter.
I’m a mid-30s homeowner with a stable public sector job so in theory I shouldn’t give a fuck about those starving poor people, but some of the news coming out lately like libraries to be ‘heat banks’ in the winter – what the actual fuck? Who the fuck in their right mind is voting for these monsters?
Our real enemy politically is apathy – there’s been a trend of young people just not voting at all because none of the political parties offer anything of value and they make it very hard for students/etc to get votes in. The real risk here is that at the next general election we see a continued trend of the youngsters not voting and then the bastard Tories get in again.
I have a sense youngsters unable to afford a home – despite working hard, in a good job, is going to sting
Good. Please Tories, continue to ignore the plight of the young. And the old. And everyone (apart from yourselves, of course!). We need to rid ourselves of you for good.
Truss is the easiest to manipulate so those in control want her in power, the tories will slash and burn the UK over the next 2 years before they lose power.
Labour will win and struggle to stabilise the shitshow the tories created, the rightwing media will blame labour for the state of the country and stupid people will vote Tory in the following GE, it’s all going to plan.
Never trust a tory.
I’m a full blown socialist and it was actually the Conservative Party that shaped my political worldview. In fact, they’ve radicalised me. I’d rather eat broken glass than ever fucking vote Tory.
God, I hope. They absolutely have it coming. I just don’t think it’s healthy for a party in a democracy to exist for centuries while being so consistently close to power as the Tory/Conservative & Unionist continuum has. It’s not in any way healthy to still face the same electoral options we did before there was universal suffrage.
Britain desperately needs to separate its love of tradition and continuity from politics. Keeping the monarchy around as the figurehead of a healthy democracy is one thing, but this general politically traditionalist mindset has prevented closer examination of so many institutional problems in the UK for so many years.
They’ve been screwing us over for a straight decade, do you seriously think they’ll stop now. Fuck the Tories and every cunt that works for them.