Why young conservatives are the new radicals

Natural death might be non-partisan, but that hasn’t stopped it being politicised by liberals and socialists alike. One writer recently calculated that, assuming birth and death rates in Britain stay steady, Remainers will be the majority in 2022. Now, sitting around watching the clock and waiting for the right kind of pensioners to pop off the electoral register isn’t the most audacious of politics. But the newfound popularity of millennial socialism means ‘young people’ are as synonymous with nationalisation and redistributionism as ‘the miners’ were in the 1970s. So hold on to your iPads and Starbucks’ cups because we are on a one-way journey to a liberal future, and there is nothing you or anyone else can do or say about it.

There is just one problem. Young people are actually quite conservative. And not just because they are having less sex or consuming less alcohol or because they have a preference for hard work over hard drugs, but because they don’t like immigrants or gender equality nearly as much as liberals like to think they do.