Conservatives are in deep trouble.
The British Conservatives were wiped out in the latest local elections, and face a similar fate in at the coming General Election. In the US the entire conservative movement is a hostage to the fortunes of Donald Trump, slumped in a court room hearing his most sordid actions read out in public.
The biggest problem facing the Tories however isn’t electoral, it’s demographic. In the past the Conservatives could rely on older voters, who although they were a minority of the electorate voted reliably for the Tories giving them regular Parliamentary majorities. As people got older they became more Conservative.
I always thought that explanation was too simplistic, it makes voting Tory seem like a disease of old age like erectile disfunction and creaking joints.
Instead I think that the relationship is with accumulated wealth. The more wealth you accumulate the more likely you are to vote Conservative. Generally speaking as people get older they accumulate more wealth, and so they become more likely to vote Tory. This is particularly true of unearned wealth, for example where people have got lucky through rising house prices. The fortunes of the Conservative party neatly match the ups and downs of the housing market, and successive Conservative Governments made sure that the house price bubble was sustained as long as possible.
The huge problem British Conservatives have is that the policies that kept house owners wealthy made it harder for young people to get on the housing ladder. This in turn made it harder and harder for them to accumulate wealth, and the high burden of student loans only made things worse. A whole generation have been unable to accumulate wealth the way the older generation did.
Even those who did manage to get on the housing ladder were hammered after the disaster that Liz Truss wrought upon the UK economy pushed mortgage interest rates sky high.
As a consequence the demographics of the Tory vote has changed. It used to be that the age at which people became more likely to vote Tory was in the mid 40s. Now it is over 70.
An incoming labour Government that can bring down interest rates and build more houses has a chance to win the Trust of a generation of voters who may never vote Tory now matter how old they get
The Conservative Party’s voter base is dying out.
But this is where the Tory party’s salvation lies. We are at the start of the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the UK. The same is true of lots of other countries, such as the US.
The boomer generation and those who came immediately afterwards accumulated more wealth than any previous generation, and as they die that wealth is redistributed by inheritance. Lots of this was unearned wealth from people who got lucky in the housing market.
The process can be seen most readily among the super rich.
There are a 1000 billionaires in the world over 70 with a combined fortune of £5tn. That’s trillions not billions. Their children will inherit enormous sums of money.
In the UK there are no billionaires under the age of 30 who created their own wealth – they all inherited their money. There is only one self made billionaire in the UK under 40, Ben Francis who set up the company Gymshark
The same story is true at more modest levels. The huge accumulated wealth of the boomer generation is starting to flow down to my generation and from us to our kids. The accumulated wealth that was held by a small number of older home owners is going to be distributed among a much wider group.
A huge amount of unearned, inherited wealth is flowing through countries like the UK. Not equally or evenly by any means, but a generation who were unable to accumulate wealth are all of a sudden finding themselves with large inheritances. Over time a whole lot more potential Conservative voters are being created.
This creates a new potential pool of new Tory voters to reinvigorate the parties fortunes. The party of unearned wealth has a new generation to offer protection. Too.
This of course assumes that the Tory party wants to appeal to a new generation of voters rather than talk amongst themselves about Brexit and small boats and Rwanda. British Conservatives embraced Brexit, and American Conservatives embraced Trump because they had run out of ideas, and had no idea how to run a country.. Which is pretty obvious from the last 8 years of British politics, and the ongoing car crash of Trumpism. The failure of Brexit will poison the Conservative party for generations to come unless someone can persuade them to face reality. Trump might poison US Conservatism for even longer.
I suspect it might take more than one election defeat to wake them from their fever dreams. But a new generation of Conservative voters is out there if the politicians can turn their gaze outward and see them.