Jack Barwell: Why we lost and what we need to do differently. Part Two – Lessons from abroad

Jack Barwell was a Conservative campaign manager in East Devon at the 2024 election.

FrederickThis is part 2 of a short series you can read part 1 here

In 2019 the Conservative party won 13.9 million votes and the average age someone was more likely to vote Conservative than labour was 39.

In 2024 this changed to 6.8 million votes and the average age being 63.

This confirms that the core vote shrunk massively and younger voters abandoned the party, causing long-term damage without a change of message.

We need common sense polices rooted in the average voter.

We need to win back voters from all different political parties that we lost this time.

We need to tackle the difficult questions and tell the truth, and we need to appeal to younger voters who will be the future of any conservative coalition.

We must also be serious about the real issues facing our country and here we can learn lessons from our sister parties across the western world. Whether it be the German Christian union taking a strong position against illegal immigration under Friedrich Merz, the Canadian conservatives with a pragmatic low tax, law and order and pro house building policy under Pierre Poilievre or the Australian Liberal Party committing to rapid expansion of their nuclear energy programme.

Conservatives that come out on the side of hard work, low tax and tackling cost of living are showing up incumbent left wing governments and if polling is right, are on the course for, or securing electoral successes. The early signs of this labour government have been that there is no love for Starmer or his broken tax promises, conservatives in this country really could be on the path to electoral success next time round if we take the pragmatic decisions to stand on the side of working people and tell the truth about the issues that really matter.

But most of all we have to start building an electoral base for future elections, not rely on a coalition that is already fragmented after the last election, and which won’t have enough people in 10-15 years’ time to give us a hope in hell.

That can only start by winning working age and younger voters who have abandoned the Conservative party in recent elections, and while many people can be confused about the interests of young people by just watching them protesting in the streets about Donald Trump, feminism and home insulation, younger voters are more nuanced than they are given credit for and they’re also more politically engaged than any previous generation at that age.

In fact, I believe the Conservative party could win younger voters by doing just three simple things policy wise.

By ending the economic unfairness of high student debt as they leave university and a poor economic outlook for those that don’t attend university. This means continuing to invest more in apprenticeships, mandating quotas for the number of apprenticeship graduates different job markets should have to take on when they are bringing people in in their early 20s.

It also means reducing tuition fees for courses like Medicine where the graduates go onto to work in the NHS for 10 years. That way we help reduce the need for immigration, increase employment and help make university more affordable – all in one go.

It means building enough houses for all of our country to live in so that young people can have a start in life and can raise their own family. People on the right of the Conservative party often point out the dangers of the declining birth rates in Britain or the high levels of immigration putting strain on the housing market.

They’re right about both of these things. We do need to increase our birth rate and decrease our immigration rate, but we can’t do that unless we build enough houses to deal with the backlog and supply demands to people already living in this country.

But this doesn’t have to be a nanny state policy, we can financially incentivise councils to build enough to meet their demands if they want extra investment from government, as Poilievre is proposing within the Canadian conservative platform, and we can do it, unlike Labour, without playing politics and increasing targets in the cities as well.

Finally we can achieve net zero to save our planet while we still can but we can do it in a financially stable way that doesn’t lump costs on to ordinary people as the previous government was suggesting. Young people care about the climate but young people specifically from poor backgrounds also care about having enough money to buy their groceries and heat their homes today, never mind in 2050.

These policies would allow the conservatives to build an electoral coalition to truly keep conservatism as the face of Britain for the rest of this century because without it our coalition will crumble, and socialism will reign supreme and ordinary voters in this country never have voted for that.

To anyone who doubts this approach, Poilievre is the leading experiment of the young voter theory on the right so why not take a (maple) leaf out of the books of conservatives who are popular and change the electoral map while we still can.