Young British voters haven’t just turned away from the Conservative Party; their minds have turned away from conservatism

Last week YouGov published opinion polling that found the Tories trailing Labour very badly on all key policy issues among those aged between 18 and 24.

UnHerd today publishes polling from ComRes that suggests the weakness facing Britain’s Conservative Party – among the same age group – run even more deeply with the newest generation of voters holding attitudes on the balance between freedom versus equality; national power; Christianity; and the causes of crime which suggest the Left’s grip on values-generating institutions including schools, universities and the entertainment industry is strong. Very strong.

I’ve written about this research for The Guardian and concluded in this way:

“Tories determined to remain optimistic could hold on to Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that the facts of life are conservative. By that she meant that there were limits to how much a government could raise taxes without damaging the economy, for instance. David Willetts, the two-brained former Tory minister, once joked that a conservative was a libertarian with children. And certainly, as young people get older and their own kids experiment with drugs or are the victims of muggers – they, themselves, get “mugged by reality” and become more conservative in their attitudes to law and order and social structure.

That gravitational downwards pull on liberalism will take time, however. In the meantime the schools, universities and ideas-generating powers in social media are continuing to shape young minds in liberal, progressive ways. Until it faces up to the cultural onslaught on everything it holds dear, conservatism is in more trouble than it realises.”

There’s much more to come from the ComRes poll over coming days and I’ll be publishing them in daily bursts. Please follow us on Twitter or sign up to our email alerts if you don’t want to miss them.

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Tim Montgomerie was most recently a columnist and comment editor for The Times of London. Before that journalistic turn he was steeped in centre right politics, founding the Conservative Christian Fellowship, then the Centre for Social Justice and, just over ten years ago, ConservativeHome.com.

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