More money, less Thatcher: What young voters want from the Tories

the Telegraph is the Tory party just a retirement home for boomer voters and if not how is Kimmy Bagenock going to win back the feckless youth we're here in Birmingham for Conservative Party Conference to find out why welcome to this special edition of the Daily Tea with me Camilla Tominey me Tim Stanley and me Poppy Coburn you did find two people that listened to the Daily Tea there I did I think it's the only thing holding this country together it is the audience for the Daily Tea no no no no no for anyone under 40 this whole conversation is so beyond their memory it's so strange for Britain to be relitigating Thatcherism whether you love her or loathe her for heaven's sake you need to move on I think when Kimmy is being strongest is when she's offering really tangible policies that are actually going to put money back in your pocket before we get into a discussion about the nuts and bolts of the youth of today and whether young Conservative is an oxymoron I need to tell you that our YouTube membership is thriving we've got 50 members and counting if you want extra special content 50,000 50 million 50,000 500 million dollars 50,000 50,000 yes and we've got lots of members we need more members so do sign up if you want some extra special content you just don't know what might happen behind closed doors between me and Tim little conversations we have at our desks are we serving that doesn't go up online does it no in fact if you heard the conversations we had at our desks nothing would get published so we are here to talk about young Conservatives of which there are many and thank you for joining us clearly it isn't an oxymoron now can I just say something is the only person on the panel that was born right-wing I'm just going to make literally came out of there with a twin set of pearls on while you two were flirting with socialism thank you that is the right response I'm having come from Liverpool uh where socialists schmaltz appeared to be the order of the day Poppy Coburn you've been on a journey not a Robert Jenrick journey but a journey nonetheless no I mean at least you can say if you had grown up in Liverpool you'd have an excuse if you're a socialist I grew up in Essex and I still turned out left-wing until I was having to pay taxes at the age of 21. funnily enough I really changed my mind not sure what it was really but yes I was very left-wing I've written about it before there are photos out there you won't be able to find them I have taken them down from the internet Archive you really cannot find them anymore but yeah it was very left-wing I actually voted my first election for Jeremy Corbyn I know don't ever mention so I am the only young person in this room who wasn't a young conservative unless any of you guys have something to tell me at the end please don't make me feel too alone so I voted for Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 and then at the last election I did vote for a right-wing party but it wasn't for the conservatives so I have been on a journey politically so I've necessarily ended up but I think it's one that might speak to some people who were left-wing when they were younger and now have since changed and updated their politics because what I really want to ask the audience today why have you stuck with the Conservative Party there are now three parties on the right there's been major splits going on the last couple of years we have had conservative governments for 14 years in a row we've got a worse one now under Labour but I'm not really sure that's a positive reason for the vote we'd like to find out and I think when we get to the Q&A section why have you stayed loyal or maybe why have you been won over so that's my confession before we get to your lefty beginnings Tim before you saw the light can we also point out Poppy you were like Adele Vince mad extinction wasn't a million that would be much nicer if I was a millionaire activist I'd probably still be left wing um no I was I was a serious activist I was the opposite of a young conservative I was going to win you're really making me hated in this room Camilla I'm a little bit concerned about this is this why the wine is here you're going that's exactly but also you you see the light and we're going to send a struggle session this is very communist China now I've got the zealotry of a convert because you're probably right wing and you make all of the arguments for us on the newspaper but also on the airwaves and all the rest of it and frankly it's refreshing to see thank you very much Poppy Cobra I might be more right than you too why did Poppy vote reform rather than Tory I didn't say reform right oh oh oh blimey no it was reform um but it could have been another one you know I wanted to keep the suspense up um well I think the interesting thing because I went through that transitional period where I was moving away from left-wing politics because I actually had to start paying taxes and started to read my books and thought about life um I still had a conservative government and at the time the conservative party was not offering what I think a lot of people in the country felt that they were not offering the things that they'd promised you know I'd watched immigration hit record highs get nearly a million a year I had watched my financial prospects be ruined um the prospect of owning a home was further away than I could have possibly have imagined I didn't really feel that the conservative party had been conserving anything but I think what's interesting the last year is that has changed again so a lot of people who felt they had to move away from the conservatives are now slowly being pulled back in but this is not the room to tell you this because by virtue of being here you are conservatives so apologies well some people may have been on their own Chinese Tim you're at Cambridge you had to be a lefty right no well um yeah I I'm of the view like in Ab Fab that you only go to university to shut it down and I I think being young aren't you just supposed to be left-wing I mean isn't it is an inherent part of being young I think you're odd absolutely not I have but having been right-wing just a heartless old Harrigan Harrington even at the age of 13. yeah well I I loved Margaret Thatcher really yes okay I um I am sort of felt like I grew up with two iconic women of the 20th century Margaret Thatcher and Princess Diana and my parents liked both of these women in equal measure right and um I mean I had a very privileged upbringing so maybe go to private school and the rest of it I remember when Thatcher was deposed and I had two very left-wing teachers walking down the corridor behind me kind of reveling in it and I was at an all-girls school and I said I don't know why you're celebrating the fall of a woman at the hands of a man and um they look startled but yeah I don't know why I was just right resolutely right-wing always and never even flirted with the other side even when it leads University following in Keir Starmer's footsteps and studying law there right well I I went to a grim bourgeois Protestant in grammar school that was so right-wing that in the 1997 election I was the labor candidate in the mock election and got one vote by by contrast it was so unpleasantly right-wing uh that the there was a split among the fascists and both the National Front and the BNP were on the ballot which I'm amazed the school allowed so to me growing up I just thought at the tail end of the major government it just felt like a straight jacket that I wanted to throw off hang on I think I'm starting to find a pattern here because you grew up in Liverpool you went to a very right-wing school I went to a very bright grammar school yes same here yeah yeah you Kip won our school elections well we just want to break conventions don't we but then when I moved is it all psychological when I moved to Brighton in my 20s when I was then surrounded by these people well that moved me back towards the right and hang on is tonight going to turn you to the left you're surrounded in a room of conservatives are we going to walk out postcode for me it's all about postcode the Green Party conference this week which was which was in Brighton which is a town where everyone is insane and for fans of the film Videodrome it's like the way in which in that film people's imaginations metastasize into real life the Green Party is a metastasized Brighton and it has it has trickled over it has spawned a politics that is simply balmy but it's very proper among the young and I didn't know not only was it a very youthful conference it was also a very white conference and I attended a session which I had to go to which was about checking your privilege because I like to check in on my privilege it's still there it's still there and it's very strong but this session was hosted by a black gentleman who began by saying that very often as a person of color you find yourself in situations that don't reflect you he was talking to an audience that was 99% white and his whole talk was about how people of color are discriminated against and not listened to and the white people in the audience kept interrupting him to tell him the ways in which black people are not listened to and ignored and eventually after a young man with half purple and half green hair like two-face in batman had said excuse me I can think of one other way in which black people are discriminated against uh the the presenter said you know sometimes I just think it's important to sit and listen it was all a reminder of the wonderful madness of right you did find two people that listened to the daily tea there i did i think it's the only thing holding this country together is the audience for the daily tea that's right so let's look then at some of kemi badenock's key pledges before we open the floor to questions um and we've had quite a few just today alone so she's announced this um end to the 100 000 pound cliff edge for parents who lose their right to 30 hours free child care a week because they're deemed to earn too much money we've also got 50 000 prison places to be paid for by slashing the foreign aid budget which everyone remembers was david cameron's little baby speaking of which the man who wanted to hug a hoodie has now been replaced by a woman who i don't know what she wants to do with hoodies but i think it's called tough love so that's changed as well we've got stamp duty which is brilliant if anyone actually is able to get on the housing ladder but many people in this room probably haven't i'm not talking about the boomers by the way we know you're living in a leafy home county's town in a detached home they're not going to you in just a moment sir and um she also wants to scrap inheritance tax which i suppose does benefit the children of boomers it does but the stamp duty change won't affect them right because you don't pay stamp duty on a first purchase i seem to recall when i made my first purchase and the stamp duty change and her reforms to uh the benefit system mean that if you're in your late 50s and you're made unemployed because you've been paying into the system you get universal credit at full whack but if you're young and you're unemployed and you're unemployed uh you get 70 of it you get a subsistence wage which comes in a card which you can't use to buy booze and fags which i think is very unkind to anyone who's unemployed so my point is is but my question is is everything in the old um without any sort of interest in the material incentive for the young well there is a reason for that you know 50 of the conservative voting base are pensioners now you could zoom out and look at people who are actually voting in this country one in four voters are pensioners there's a very good reason why politicians will talk about cutting pip and don't really like to talk about the biggest welfare spending in the country which is pensions because they need the votes of those people so there is a pragmatic reason why they shy away from it but something you said there about the fact that there's a very good reason why politicians will talk about stamp duty made me think what do we actually mean by young because in politics young has a slightly different meaning than i think anywhere else in the world and no one else can get away with saying a 45 year old is young and yet in conservative circles that would be considered a young voter and yeah seriously under 50s are the conservative youth vote which is very flattering i think if you are on that threshold yeah i mean there's something under 50s are young aren't they tim yeah yeah everyone on the panel yes we are very yes we are thank you very much thank you very much it's the material issues but also there are certain cultural issues and someone so being at the green conference i know they're not reflective of all youth but it does seem to me that gaza is this generation's iraq or vietnam and has defined the way a lot of young people see their country and foreign policy and the other issue regrettably is brexit and someone was saying to me at the greens and i was having this argument about what is a youth-friendly platform he said you just won't be taken seriously among the young unless you're willing to reverse brexit because of issues of free movement and i think that's a very good point i think that's a very good point and i think that's a very good point and i think that's a very good point and i think that's a very good point and i think that's a very good point and i think that's a very good point and this audience may contradict that but it does seem to me that there's a cultural barrier to to the right winning over the young not just a material incentive should also be pointed out of course that the conservatives along with reform have committed to keeping the triple lock yeah yeah and in fact this morning i was uh doing an incident where it was richard tice was competing with penny malden about who could defend the triple lock hardest which was quite interesting uh to sit there and go okay well this is politics now in this country that's great um but i suppose there's another aspect to this material discussion of what is good for young people because there is that broad base of who's young and who isn't if you're an older millennial you are going to be inheriting seeing that is going to be the biggest cash transfer so you are going to want some changes to happen on inheritance tax if you're a younger person your material circumstances are completely different if you're post 2008 entering the workforce your priorities are different i think on what you said tim as well and the cultural differences if i speak to my friends and i tell them i work for a newspaper they're like that's so cool i didn't realize they still have those like it's like illuminated manuscripts yeah yeah but a lot of it is because it's doing being done through video and i think what left-wing parties are very good at is making really good video content that doesn't make your toes curl with embarrassment i'm not going to name any names robert jenrich tackling people in the street and shoplifters and all of this stuff i think it plays well to an older audience but to a younger one you're just trying a little bit too hard yeah robert jenrich trying too hard this is it you A question here from the floor let's ask it now because it's um directly um aimed at whether kemi badenock has got what it takes to attract the youth of today do you feel that kemi with her direct no-nonsense approach attracts support from younger people now there is something very interesting about kemi badenock actually we heard andy burnham talk about how he was apparently brought up in a cardboard box in the middle of the night and he was like oh my god i'm going to go to the middle of the street um but curiously ended up socially mobilizing all the way to cambridge funny enough under a tory government but goodness me margaret thatcher's evil um actually comparatively kemi badenock's got the much more compelling story because when she grew up in nigeria under a socialist government she was doing her homework by candlelight she was going and fetching water in rusty buckets she claimed and yet she's edged away from that narrative and i wrote a column at the weekend saying actually in this world of instagram too much information maybe vibes do matter and maybe she needs to lean into her personal story a bit more maybe she needs to lean into her ethnicity a bit more but she doesn't want to do that because she wants people to be colorblind about her leadership what do you think well i think she should for moral reasons because i think we've got a battle against the far right that needs to be won in this country and the conservative party has a unique opportunity to uh not redefine but reclaim uh the center right from the lunatics uh and there's a very positive story to be told when we're having so many conversations about ethnicity what is english what isn't english about being led by a british nigerian leader who understands what's flawed about this country but also loves it what's flawed about where she came from but also what she loves about it and as the country changes which it is and people can bemoan that but it's happened and it ain't going back i think she's a generational transitional figure that cuts through culturally and i don't think we can be more than that and i think that's the thing that's really important and the pride i personally feel and people laugh at this i don't give a damn but they laugh i feel proud about the fact that the country is being led by a generation of uh of people who of a change in in ethnicity i'm very happy to see that being reflected it doesn't bother me at all and i'm happy about it so i'm keen for her to do that but i wouldn't dismiss andy burnham quite so easily as some people do because he does speak to a desire that many people have to be able to have for a politics of identity and belonging and many people are not just poorer now they're sadder they're more lonely they feel something is going ironically his appeal is a little more temperamentally conservative than hers is um and there are many of us who when we heard his story about losing his father that's something we can identify with yes and i think you'd be very silly to dismiss that kind of appeal and just say ah who cares about it no that actually strikes a chord with people there is a bit of a difficulty with both of these politicians though because you could say that andy burnham with his big conference speech it was all about the 1970s you know a britain before thatcher kemmy badenock has made a big deal of she loves margaret thatcher she loves the dynamism that was brought to this country in the 1980s that's a really really long time ago yes you know i i can speak to my dad who was someone whose life was transformed by thatcher you know he left school at 16 and managed to get a job in the city because of her you know and a great it brought prosperity to our country you know and i think it's a really important thing for us to be able to you know to our country and it brought prosperity to my family so it's quite personal but for people now who don't really have a connection to that world outside of their family members well how are you going to resonate they brought her clothes here last year like the traveling relics of a saint didn't mind it was i'm sorry it was creepy and weird it was creepy and weird well nobody asked you to wear them i mean that's the exclusive bonus content by the way that would give margaret thatcher a sense of modernity if men were to start wearing them no no no no for anyone under 40 this whole conversation is so beyond their memory it's so strange for britain to be relitigating thatcherism whether you love her or loathe her for heaven's sake you need to move on it's unhealthy to still be debating i know what happened in the 1980s but some of her appeal perhaps was this kind of motherly figure i mean it is interesting that the only significant party leader is a woman with three children she happens to be black i think that's less relevant to her age and just the way she's positioned herself like is she down with the kids enough because we were having a joke before we came on air you know what have the tories given the young a suggestion that they do more maths and national service yeah and i'm wondering actually whether the comparison with thatcher is relevant now simply because we have some very clear ideological water between kemmy badenock and andy burnham now it was slightly more of a comparison between the two of them i think Muddy, wasn't it, by Keir Starmer. Is he right? he left who is he he's ken loach one minute he's blair the next we absolutely now know that this battle for ideas is about people who do want to go back to the 1980s or capitalists versus people who want to go back to the 1970s and socialists and therefore that could really invigorate the young the question is is she making clear enough arguments but conservatism in the face of a social media dominated by figures like gary stevenson it is also just a feeling of you have to be able to offer some vision that things are going to get better and i think there's there's a very compelling vision that's being offered by left-wing figures on social media as you mentioned who will at least diagnose in quite like catastrophizing terms how badly this country has gone wrong and people will feel they're actually being honest about that they'll it will speak to how they feel about their own lives and their own finances to be completely frank you : i i don't think it's enough to just point to a period in time where people weren't alive and say let's go back to that we weren't there for that we want to actually have a roadmap to get there ourselves and i think when kemi is being strongest is when she's offering really tangible policies that are actually going to say put money back in your pocket and i think for a lot of young people no one has done that seriously sometimes we overthink it politicians have not actually created policies specifically designed to ease the economic situation of young people in this country for so long and i think it's a very important issue and i think it's a very important issue and i think it's a very important issue and i think it's a very important issue and i think it's a very important issue so long that we've kind of forgotten that that's something you can do like sometimes it is actually worth standing up and saying yeah we are going to make it for you to start a family we are going to make it easier for you to buy a home we are going to make you keep your wages we're not just going to take it all we're not going to laugh at you for going down the university route when we encouraged you to do it for your entire youth we're not going to penalize you for doing that we think that if you're ambitious if you work hard as conservatives you deserve to keep the money that you earn and i think that message is one that would really resonate you don't need to patronize people young people don't need guns they don't need to go white bottoms for britain they just need to be told that they're actually part of this country and they're foundational to its future yeah very good before we open it out to the floor a difficult question from tim patmore oxford east in brackets what would camilla tim and poppy do to reunite the right uh-oh tim no not me i've got to think of the answer what do we do to reunite okay all we're going to do to reunite the right well i've been thinking about the bbc's finances recently and and one one idea i did have for a new hit social media kind of centered show for them reality television show is you put rupert lowe nigel farage and kevi badenock in a room and it's escape room and you've got cameras everywhere and you've got to stay there for a month unless you make an electoral pact wow and you and you can do donations you can come and you can ask them questions you can get do challenges maybe you could do like a bush tucker trial thing get you can get rupert lowe to like write his favorite nationalities you know you can you can make a real big thing out but all the money would go to comic relief okay that's what i did i mean i think the country suffered enough it's a thought poppy can you be the bridge to the only way you can reunite the right is if javier malay invades the falklands yeah it's the only way it can be done i'm not sure i want to reunite the right do you want to reunite the right do you want reform do you want a pact with reform well there you go because that's what reuniting the right looks like can i just say reunite the right isn't just conservatives no no no this is this is the thing i mean i'm i think one thing that's happened in the last couple of years is we've seen where people really stand and what they really stand for and i don't want to be in any coalition that includes restore right so i i think we're moving okay two years ago that was a valid question because there were things that could be done negotiations that could happen uh and maybe some people needed to swallow their pride and say to nigel farage you should be in this party maybe even leading it but those choices were not made and we've reached a point now where some people have gone so far down the road that they've just plopped out the other side as a national socialist and i don't want to be in a room with them so yeah uh there was an extraordinary by-election result in blackpool where basically because restore polled at seven percent it cost reform the seat that it ought to have won because it was blackpool and of course the labor councillor ended up being elected and i don't know if anyone saw it on social media but it would it would epitomize the absolute lunacy of this situation that you then had restore celebrating that labor had won a reformed seat which basically makes anyone with a right-wing head wanted to explode yeah um but we've spoken to some good restore people who are sane and sensible and there are even some restore people we were told by a pollster who are doing it because they think reform is too right-wing but if you take the average restore voter this is a human being who has gone into the polling booth thinking nigel farage is too moderate yes the only thing i can say is i think it's a good thing that you're saying that reform is too right-wing and that's the only thing i can say is that i think it's a good thing that you're saying that reform is too right-wing and that's the only thing i can say is that i think it's a good thing and is there actually a distinction between reform and the conservatives okay we'll say that restore are further out than them and i think some people within the upper echelons of the party that's true maybe not for all the activists but do you believe there's actually a difference between reform and the conservatives because if you list off top-line policies it's quite a lot that's in common i'd be interested to find out why is is it a vibes thing is it personality is it personality is it is it ethics or is it actually a policy difference that you're seeing i mean there is something to be said for the idea that notwithstanding some of the supporters i mean it's curious isn't it the conservatives gave rupert lowe that seat of that select committee basically i managed to find out it's because they knew that he would vote with them and maybe there was something there was some devil in the detail of kind of keeping him on side because it was a two-fingered salute to farage who knows but i think everybody in this room is deluding themselves if they think that these right-wing parties don't broadly agree on a great deal i'm as uncomfortable as tim is about ethno-nationalism no thanks very much and had stand-up rows with rupert lowe about it but this idea that actually if you do the electoral maths and in a lot of seats in fact swathes of the midlands and the north the right-wing vote would poll over 50 maybe even 55 but that labor could hold on to those seats it's ridiculous isn't it we will be speaking to jacob reese mogg tomorrow for the daily tea once a young conservative back in the 1800s um and he will be with us in hall nine at the icc at 1 p.m so if anyone fancies that an hour with jrm actually chatting about that extraordinary tucker carlson interview which i do urge you all to watch goodness me um but thank you very much for being here this evening enjoy the rest of conference and that's a wrap you