Miriam Cates: You can’t expect the young to vote Conservative, if they’ve never been given a Conservative vision

Miriam Cates is the former MP for Penistone and Stocksbridge.

It is a well-known fact in Conservative circles that the Tory vote is dying out.

The only age group in which the Conservative Party polled more than a quarter of the vote in 2024 was the over-70s. Even in 2019, one of the Conservatives’ most successful general elections, the Party won the popular vote only among the over 60s. Just 8 per cent of under-30s voted Conservative last July. Traditionally, it was expected that people would become more likely to lean conservative as they grew older, but the ‘conversion age’—where someone becomes more likely to vote Conservative than Labour—is now 63.

Unless the Conservative Party finds a way to appeal to young voters, it faces electoral extinction.

In the 1983 election, Thatcher won 42 per cent of the youth vote. So why are young adults in 2025 so averse to voting Conservative? The conventional wisdom states that Britain’s housing crisis is to blame. ‘Why support capitalism if you have no chance of owning capital?’ as the policy wonks like to ask.

But if conservatism is about having a material stake in the future, it’s not just housing costs that dissuade young people from voting Tory. Below-replacement birth rates over the last 50 years have shifted the burden of an ageing population onto the young. The ratio of working-age people to pensioners has dropped from 4:1 in the 1970s to 3:1 today, and we are heading toward an unprecedented old-age dependency ratio of 50 per cent—two working-age people per pensioner.

This means each year, younger adults shoulder a greater and greater tax burden to support pensions, healthcare, and social care for the elderly. Yet, instead of redressing the balance, the last Conservative government facilitated a wealth transfer from young to old.

The unaffordable pensions triple lock was sacralised, while the young were penalised by fiscal drag, the removal of universal child benefits, the two-child benefit limit, competition from immigrants, a failure to build enough homes and rising student loan costs. During the pandemic, almost all government spending and borrowing protected the old, while the young lost out on education, job opportunities, and social interaction. Now, they must work even harder to pay off the debt.

But Gen Z disillusionment goes beyond economics. If we want to know why young people aren’t voting Conservatives, we must ask: what is it that they might want to conserve?

For 50 years, the unchallenged advance of liberalism has changed Britain almost beyond recognition. Economic liberalism—embraced by the Conservative Party—led to globalisation and deindustrialisation, eroding Britain’s working-class job market and exacerbating the debt crisis young people must now fund. Meanwhile, social liberalism—whether championed or merely overseen by Conservatives—has profoundly reshaped society.

Since the sexual revolution, Conservatives have barely challenged the wholesale undermining of marriage and the family, culminating in Boris Johnson’s 2020 No-Fault Divorce law; an Act that the public neither asked nor voted for.

The Conservative Party, in deed if not in word, has failed to take a stand against the liberal lie that family structure doesn’t matter. As a result, 2.5 million British children are growing up without a father figure. In the early 1970s, just 8 per cent of children lived in single parent households. In 2025, nearly half have experienced family breakdown by the time they reach their teens. The cost for our children has been significant; children whose parents separate are statistically more likely to have poorer social, health and economic outcomes.

A destabilising social revolution has played out in just two generations.

Over the last 15 years, the revolution has accelerated. The key factor now shaping British childhood is the internet. The online world offers great benefits to adults—who can work from home, and order everything they could ever need from Amazon—but for children it is a lawless, antisocial space where centuries-old social guardrails have disappeared. In the real world, we have established moral and legal expectations that impose social, economic, and even criminal consequences on those who lie, steal, exploit, and abuse. No such boundaries exist online, where predators, pornographers, paedophiles, and psychopaths thrive.

Adults may be able to navigate this environment safely, but children cannot. Yet, in the pursuit of free markets and the liberal idea that children are just ‘mini-adults,’ the last Conservative government oversaw the unrestricted adoption of revolutionary new technologies —never designed for or tested on children—that have fundamentally undermined childhood and young adulthood. For centuries, civilised society has understood that we must tightly control access to our children, so that during their most vulnerable years they can be raised with healthy moral and social norms rather than being misled or exploited. Yet since 2010 we have discarded this age-old wisdom with catastrophic consequences.

The negative effects of online pornography alone are shocking. The average age of first exposure to violent pornography is just 12. Nearly a half of child sexual abuse is now committed by other children. Children routinely watch videos of real rapes and degrading sexual abuse. The National Crime Agency recently revealed British boys are blackmailing children into sexually abusing their siblings online. A quarter of teenagers have been sent unwanted explicit images, a third of young women have been strangled during sex (compared to just three per cent of over-55s). Nearly half of boys believe girls expect violence in sexual encounters. Even primary school teachers report serious sexual abuse among their pupils.

Social media has had equally disturbing effects. Suicide, self-harm, depression, ADHD up; school grades, happiness, concentration skills and social interaction down.

But mainstream conservatives fail to grasp the full extent of this crisis.

Many on the right dismiss concerns about smartphones and social media as a ‘moral panic’ or an excuse to censor the internet. But this is hypocritical. When it comes to immigration, and scandals like the Pakistani grooming gangs, right-wingers readily acknowledge the failures of multiculturalism and the negative impact of certain cultural norms. Yet they turn a blind eye to the effects of children being immersed in an online anti-culture and claim it is a ‘parenting issue.’ When 97% of children own smartphones, an even those who don’t are being damaged by the culture they create, it is no longer a private matter, Even the most hardened libertarians can’t claim that 97% of parents are bad parents.

Yet again, liberalism—masquerading as conservatism—prioritises individual adult freedoms over the boundaries that enable the safe and successful raising of children.

Many in the Boomer generation benefited from the liberal shift. They grew up in stable families and cohesive communities and then, as adults, reaped the rewards of asset price inflation, cheap immigrant labour, online shopping and greater individual freedoms. But while Boomers won the liberal lottery, Gen Z is liberalism’s collateral damage. Fatherless, indebted, unmoored from a shared national identity, and brutalised by the internet, many young people cannot even imagine the stability and rootedness Britain once offered.

Unsurprisingly, the normal U-shaped happiness curve—where happiness peaks in youth and old age—has collapsed. Young people are now more miserable than the middle-aged, with a 40 percent increase in those not in education, training, or employment just since the pandemic. Liberalism unravelled centuries of cultural and social stability in just fifty years. Gen Z may well ask what exactly conservatism has achieved.

As a result, the Conservative Party cannot assume that the emerging generation will be attracted to the same policy offer as Boomers. Polling shows stark generational divides on the changes that have occurred. Boomer women gained enormously from feminism, particularly in education and careers. But after 30 years of relentless ‘girl power’ messaging, the gender pay gap has been reversed among younger adults, and a poll by More in Common showed that just 42 per cent of young men believe feminism has had a positive impact on the world.

Boomers take liberal democracy for granted, yet more than half of young adults now favour authoritarian rule. And when it comes to the internet and social media, while establishment conservatives claim it would be deeply ‘un conservative’ (code for ‘not liberal’) to restrict children’s access to the internet, young people themselves disagree. Two-thirds of 16–25-year-olds now support a ban on social media for under-16s, and 77 per cent of young women believe pornography is undermining the relationships between the sexes.

If we think children growing up fatherless, consuming a toxic mix of pornography, violence, and self-harm, will magically emerge into adulthood and get good jobs, marry, buy houses, have children and vote Conservative, we are deluding ourselves. Conservatives cannot simply continue promoting liberalism and expect young people—whose lives have been upended— to come around to the idea.

But we must not give up on Gen Z. Culture has changed, but human nature has not. Young people still seek stability, belonging, status, prosperity, and family. If we want future voters to support conservatism, we must rescue childhood and young adulthood from liberalism. Banning social media for under-16s and cracking down on pornography are the most conservative policies imaginable—a crucial first step in rolling back the damage liberalism has inflicted on the young. Kemi Badenoch’s recent statement that under-16s should not own smartphones, and her PMQs challenge to the Prime Minister for voting down a school phone ban, were significant steps forward.

But protecting children from online horrors is not enough. We must also prove we are serious about redressing generational economic inequalities. Conservatives must be radical in their offer to young people—lower taxes, subsidised housing, generous family allowances. And we must be bold enough to champion a conservative vision of society. We cannot continue pretending that family structure does not matter when family breakdown has had such tragic consequences.

Many established Tories will fear that such uncompromising conservatism would be rejected by the young. But I’m not so sure. We must remember that this is a generation that has never experienced conservatism, or heard a conservative vision of society articulated in public. Gen-Z men especially seem to be yearning for a more traditional idea of society.

Liberalism was an attractive idea, and its pioneer generation reaped the rewards. But socially, economically, and culturally, it has been a disaster for the young.

The Conservative Party must wake up to this reality—or risk permanent political irrelevance.