Ross Hutton: How to stop the imminent extinction of the conservative species | Conservative Home

Open any newspaper, on any given day, and you will be greeted with an article that discusses the prospect of the extinction of The Conservative Party. We are, they argue, a dinosaur wandering the earth in its final days – about to be blown away by one almighty Farage-sized meteorite.

I find there is such an intense focus on asking if The Conservative Party can survive the next five years that very few people then appear to be asking if we will be able to survive the next fifty. The question should not necessarily be about the imminent extinction of The Conservative Party, but the imminent extinction of the conservative species.

The extinction of the dinosaurs happened approximately sixty-six million years ago, which was about the same time the average 2024 Conservative voter was born. 43 per cent of over-70s voted Tory last year, marching into the polling booths with promises of a quadruple-locked pension for themselves and a few years of national service for their grandkids. The last words spoken from our Conservative administration was to pledge conservation of the gerontocracy. It is, perhaps, little wonder as to why only eight per cent of voters aged under-30 decided their cross should go in our box.

The received wisdom is that people will lean left when they are younger and grow more conservative with age, so on the face of it, this voting behaviour is just to be expected. They speak about young people not voting Conservative in the same manner they would speak about the weather – “you can complain about it raining, but there’s nothing you can do about it”. This is especially pronounced with it comes to the issue of votes for sixteen and seventeen-year-olds, with some Conservatives accusing Labour of rigging the game when it comes to expanding the franchise.

But by asking young people to vote Conservative without giving them anything to actually conserve, we are rigging the game against ourselves. This is the extinction threat we should be most worried about. We cannot allow ourselves to save The Conservative Party from extinction in the short-term, only to see us lose it in the long-term because we haven’t given young people a stake in society.

It does not need to be this way. I believe those that say this generation are uniquely predetermined to be permanently left leaning have little sense of the current mood and where it might go in the future. Something is happening in the minds of young people, both in Britain and abroad. There is a growing restlessness, not unlike that seen in the 1960s.

Much has been made of this generational comparison. Contemporary campus sit-ins by students have been likened to the 1964 Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Crucially, however, many of the students involved in that display of radical politics would go on to elect, and subsequently re-elect with a landslide, both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan within the space of two decades.

It was more than just another quintessential example of that aged shift from left to right. Young people in the 60s were a generation whose enemies were defined by David Halberstam in his masterpiece The Best and the Brightest as being “bigness, technology and government itself”. Then, like now, “bigness” – both in technocratic thinking and in government – is the damaging orthodoxy of the day. Conservatives and young people have a common enemy and therefore a common cause in the war against bigness. Showing young people that we recognise that fact could be an electoral game-changer.

At every level, young people have been blighted by bigness. Bigness in taxation has meant graduates have experienced an effective marginal tax rate of 51 per cent, funding ever more generous welfare that they know they’ll never see. In Scotland, the situation is even worse. Are you a graduate earning over £43,663 and wanting to start a family? Good luck with that. You’ll be paying the 42 per cent higher rate and the 8 per cent main rate of NI at the same time. Add a student loan repayment into the mix and you are looking at an effective marginal tax rate of almost 60 per cent.

Bigness in house prices has effectively priced out millions from the conservative dream of home ownership. First time buyers are paying 191 per cent on average more than their parents, with the earnings-to-house-price ratio more than doubling to 8:1. This has resulted in only a fifth of middle income 25- to 34-year-olds owning their own home. Arguably most worrying for the UK should be the bigness of the opportunities abroad, as young people determine they’d be both better served and better off by taking their talents elsewhere.

Labour have already shown that they have no intention of challenging this. In fact, they seem to be revelling in making it worse. Reform have shown that they don’t get it either with their pledges to increase the size of government and the welfare state. It is mere bland statism dressed up as exciting populism. Bigness is bigness, regardless of how you sell it.

This is a generation crying out for a party to take on the state, to take on government and to take on technocratic bigness. If that requires us to be blunt about what taxation can and cannot afford, then blunt we must be. Currently we spend 5 per cent of GDP (£138bn) annually on pension expenditure because of the triple-lock. Without changing course, the OBR has stated that by the early 2070s that will rise to 7.7 per cent. Nobody seriously thinks this is sustainable and it breeds resentment among young people who know their taxes are being used to fund a level of state pension that they will never receive themselves.

The end result of this must be a new conservative promise to the next generation. A promise that we will lower your taxes; we will ensure homes you can afford are built; and that we will support your efforts to start a family. This point has been pushed by groups such as Next Gen Tories (of which I am a proud member) and MPs such as the ever-prescient Neil O’Brien. In Holyrood, Russell Findlay has been prosecuting the case that technocratic big government has resulted in the decline that is now synonymous with our nationalist government.

The focus must be on not just creating a new generation of Conservative voters but on creating a new generation of conservatives. Cutting taxes, cutting regulation and cutting bigness is the route to doing that. Rejecting extinction and embracing evolution into a party that reaffirms its place as the only home for the young, hardworking and ambitious is the only long-term route to survival. We owe it to the next generation, and to the country, to become that party once again.