Youth is a time for rebellion, an idea that has become commodified since the 1960s but goes back many centuries. Young people are supposed to rage against the machine, while in contrast, juvenile conservatives are often treated with a mixture of disdain and amusement.
One of the most famous examples was the 16-year-old William Hague addressing the Tory conference, telling the elderly audience about how they’d all be dead in 30 years. Hague regretted that it cast him as a ‘bit of a freak’, and it probably hurt the career of a politician who might well have made a decent prime minister (could he have done worse?), because most people remember being that age and literally the last thing they’d be doing was addressing a Conservative Party conference. And that was in the days when large numbers of young people actually voted Conservative – now they are vanishingly rare.
Earlier this week I wrote about how social trends were going against the Conservative Party, but towards the end of my book on the subject I did quote J.R.R. Tolkien’s line that ‘I do not expect “history” to be anything but a “long defeat”— though it contains... glimpses of final victory’.
Where might that final victory come from? The Right will always exist, almost by definition, but conservatism is not a universal creed, unlike liberalism or socialism; it means the preservation of distinctive national or local customs and institutions, and in many cases these can die or be damaged almost beyond repair if custodians don’t carry the flame. When that happens, what comes after may be of an entirely different nature altogether - and that will almost certainly be true of Britain’s future conservatives.
For one thing, Christianity will play far less of a role, even if there might be latter-day Julians out there who wish to reverse the great transformation. Historically, although it is understated, English Conservatism has been linked to the Church of England, and Anglican churchgoers still vote for the Tory party in large numbers (and also for Brexit), even if the hierarchy might not be in communion with them on politics.
More broadly, the traditional link between conservatism and institutions has been largely broken: most now exist to serve centre-left goals, whether it’s ‘British values’, equity, diversity or universal human rights, and so young Right-wingers will naturally feel little interest in the traditional conservative duty to preserve institutions - and that, of course, includes the Tory Party.
Nigel Farage has returned to politics with a strange new energy, and an increasing number of polls show his Reform Party overtaking the Tories. The once absurd scenario of the populist Right replacing the mainstream now looks at the very least possible, just as has happened already in Italy in France (and with parties carrying far more baggage).
What should alarm the Tories most of all is the that fact that Reform may have twice as many young voters. Farage is surrounded by young activists, and is outperforming everyone on TikTok, appealing to young men in particular, just as the populist right has done across the continent. His account has almost 800,000 followers, more than double the combined total for the four other large parties in Britain, and one video has had almost eight million views.
Aaron Bastani observed how he met a group of 16-year-olds ‘desperate to talk about Farage,’ and in many cases I imagine their parents wouldn’t approve. (A lot of younger people are also aware of the man through his Cameo videos.)
In the New Statesman, Nicholas Harris suggested that ‘this is undoubtedly a grass-roots phenomenon’ for ‘how else would we end up with Farage speeches being remixed to songs by Mitski, one of Gen Z’s favourite muses of melancholia?
‘But the fact that a portion of the young vote is tending not Conservative but further right raises the spectre of the recent European election results. The 28-year-old Rassemblement National president Jordan Bardella, potentially the next French prime minister, has reached exceptional levels of popularity on TikTok (there’s been extravagant talk of “Bardella-mania” in parts of the French press). About a third of French 18-24-year-olds back his party.’ Next month Bardella may even become France’s first Zoomer prime minister no cap.
Across continental Europe, the young are moving to the right. In the Guardian, Albena Azmanova warned that we are ‘witnessing something new: the first signs of a populist insurrection of the young. In both European and national elections, voters under 30 have given their support to far-right parties… French students have not been chanting, as they did during the 2017 presidential election: “Neither Le Pen nor Macron, neither the Patriot nor the Boss: we deserve better than that.” This time, 32% of the French youth, irrespective of gender, supported National Rally.
‘This is in stark contrast to the 2019 EU elections when young voters overwhelmingly backed Green parties – true to our image of young people as cosmopolitan, culturally liberal and worried about the planet.’