Over the coming weeks, CapX will be running a number of perspectives on the future of the Conservative Party. If you have an idea you would like to contribute, get in touch at [email protected].
As Kemi Badenoch takes charge of the Conservative Party, she isn’t exactly short of worrying statistics about the struggle she faces to return the Tories to power. But the fact that at the last election the median age of a Conservative voter rose to 63, compared to 46 for Labour (and just 56 for Reform!) should worry anyone with an interest in seeing a revival of the centre-right. Four times as many voters in their 40s voted Labour compared to the Conservatives, and three times as many voters in their 50s. Only voters in their 60s and above split in the blue team’s favour.
By contrast, the leader of Canada’s Conservatives Pierre Poilievre is currently leading in the polls among voters aged 18-34, and Donald Trump’s landslide victory saw him gain a bigger share of voters aged under 30 than any Republican running for the presidency since 2008.
One cause of the greying of conservative voters in the UK is that the Conservatives themselves became monomaniacally obsessed with this demographic, if only because older citizens are known to be more reliable at turning up at the polling booths. The introduction of the pension triple lock, which Rishi Sunak promised in the election to make a quadruple lock, was a deeply irresponsible policy, one which leads to pensions growing inexorably as a share of government spending, regardless of whether the country as a whole can afford it. The continuing refusal to build anything anywhere which might impinge upon the views of property-owning boomers is to inflict misery on younger house-hunters. The constant feeding of the NHS money-pit with general taxation is also a colossal transfer of wealth from the young to the old, at the expense of every other public service that we depend upon as a nation, from defence to criminal justice.
Finally, though, this Conservative strategy has run out of road. You cannot win an election with only the grey vote, useful though it may be. As such, the percentage of the over-60s that vote for the party may be a classic example of Goodhart’s Law.
Named after the economist Charles Goodhart, the law simply states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. This phenomenon crops up in many real-world situations. For example, being aware of how many people wait for more than four hours in an A&E department might be a good indicator of how well it is performing. However, by turning that measure into a target, you start to incentivise staff to stop prioritising on clinical need in favour of waiting time, hiding the true underlying performance of the unit, and probably actually making it worse. Not only is the measure made unreliable, but as a target it might be actually detrimental to performance.
The Conservative Party has always attracted older voters for a multitude of reasons. Chief among them is that people do become more (small-c) conservative with age, because they probably have something to conserve, financial or familial. Another reason may be that by the time they have observed more than a handful of electoral cycles, a person might have grown sceptical of the ability of politicians to rebuild society, the promise that perpetually emanates from the Left and is rarely fulfilled. The Conservatives should be the ‘natural party of government’ for older people. If they are not, something must have gone awry. The proportion of over-60s that vote Conservative is thus an excellent measure of whether the current incarnation of the party appears essentially sane and basically competent.
But the mistake that the Conservative Party has made (apart from failing to appear sane and competent) is turning that measure into a target. Actively trying to increase the vote share in that demographic is detrimental to the government of the country as a whole. Yes, there are poor pensioners; but there are also poor people of working age. Yes, some pensioners struggle to heat their homes in winter; but so do single parents with three small children. The problem seeking to be remedied here is poverty, not age.
Restricting development may be good for the propertied pensioner, but it is bad for the property-less family. To govern is to choose, and to choose the elderly consistently is to consciously not choose the working-age population, those who pay the taxes on which the whole edifice of public spending rests and who raise the children through which society continues. It is a bad target because it leads to bad policy.
So, what is to be done? Simple – choose a target that coincides with good governance. The fundamental ethos of conservatives should be the preservation of the society for the future. That means favouring people of working age, helping them bring up families, own property, start businesses and participate in non-government institutions. In some cases, that will mean making policy against the direct interests of the over-60s. But, of course, those people have children and grandchildren too, and may well care about their struggles more than their own. On top of which, economic growth benefits everyone.
What flagship policies, then, could Badenoch put forward to show voters that the Conservatives have changed? One obvious one is to finally merge employees’ National Insurance with income tax, a policy constantly avoided because it would mean raising the amount of tax that wealthier retired people pay. Another would be the full restoration of child benefit to those paying higher rate tax. Taxing declared family units (nuclear or not) would also be much fairer than taxing individuals but assessing families for welfare.
A more radical policy would be to observe that the current university funding system isn’t working for anyone, but is particularly harsh on young graduates who face a marginal tax rate nine percentage points higher than a non-graduate, rising to fifteen points higher if they have the temerity to have taken out a loan to get a postgraduate degree. Such a person is faced with a 47% tax rate if they earn over £25,000 a year, rising to 57% if they earn £50,000. And this at an age that we expect people to buy a house and have children? We are also actively disincentivising people from gaining new skills mid-career. If our society was truly interested in investing in its future, then education for working-age people would be free and healthcare for retired people would be paid for: in cash, by insurance, from assets upon death, or by ending inflation-busting pension increases.
In this age of NHS-worship, the latter is probably an impossible policy to sell. However, student loan repayments currently just bring in £3.5 billion per year, out of a total tax take of £1,100bn. Ceasing repayments while the system is redesigned would be a promising start, easing the burden on young families. At the most extreme, the current £236bn student loan debt could just be wiped out, added to the national debt and gradually repaid out of general taxation. Alternatively, the burden could be switched to the employers of graduates in an effort to tackle the inflation in qualification requirements via an employers’ NI surcharge.
None of these policy decisions would be easy, but at least they would be targeted at bolstering the future productive capacity and sustainability of our society. In short, governing in the interests of 30-55 year olds would lead to a more prosperous country. And a government that created a more prosperous country through conservative means would hopefully attract the approval of the over-60s. By all means, keep an eye on that figure… but for pity’s sake, stop chasing it.
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