The politics of home ownership: why Conservatives need something to conserve

It is likely that today’s European election will strengthen the evidence that the great demographic divide over how we vote is no longer about class but about age. It used to be that Labour would win a majority of the working class vote while the Conservatives would do better among the middle class. That gap has narrowed significantly. But at the last general election, the marked contrast was in the big Conservative lead among pensioners, while Labour zoomed ahead among the young.

In terms of Brexit, the contrast in the typical ages of Leavers and Remainers is even sharper. So exasperated have some Remainers become with their older compatriots that there have been instances of discourtesy towards the elderly, including eager anticipation of the rate at which they will die off. This is pretty tasteless. It also shows some double standards, given that young Remainers often belong to the very cohort that is usually so keen to urge the police to act against “hate crime” whenever a comment is expressed that others regard as offensive. But the generational divide will doubtless appear again this week. We are likely to see, for instance, a contrast between the voting behaviour of different age groups for the Brexit Party and, say, the Greens or Liberal Democrats.

What is the explanation? Is it a divide between the phenomena that David Goodhart has called the “Somewheres” and the “Anywheres”, or what Theresa May once called the “citizens of nowhere”? Are the young to be dismissed as “rootless cosmopolitans”, to borrow Stalin’s anti-Semitic phrase to denounce Jewish intellectuals in Russia? Or are the old merely a burden on the taxpayer, as some advocates of “intergenerational justice” maintain?

Roger Scruton wrote a book over ten years ago called News from Somewhere: On Settling. It concerned his (largely successful) efforts to be accepted into rural Wiltshire. More recently came David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere, which suggested that the EU referendum result was partly a reaction by those who felt national identity was threatened by immigration.

My conclusion is that the young do tend to be in the Anywheres camp, but this is not inevitable. They don’t want to be rootless. All the evidence suggests that their aspirations are thoroughly old fashioned. They generally want to settle down, get married and have children, to work hard and be rewarded for it with a good standard of living. They also want to own their own homes.

What is pretty heroic, given the extraordinary rise in house prices in recent decades, is how many people have retained the expectation of their dreams being fulfilled. The most reason English Housing Survey found that 58 per cent of private renters expect to buy at some point in the future. For social renters, it is just 25 per cent. Many more of all groups would like to buy if they could afford it. The British Social Attitudes survey puts the figure for that at 86 per cent.

Home ownership changes the political mindset. Resentment is replaced by a sense of accomplishment. With something to conserve, people become more conservative. There is the pride and independence of something to pass on to the next generation.

It’s A Wonderful Life, starring James Cooper, is a favourite Christmas movie. But it’s really a film about home ownership. That is the mission of its small town hero, George Bailey: “Satisfying a fundamental urge, for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace.” He indignantly declares: “This rabble you’re talking about. . . they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”

So Conservatives should not give up on the young. Nor should they regard cancelling Brexit or controlling immigration more tightly as panaceas for wooing the alienated youth vote. What is needed is to build. We need to build enough homes for house prices to fall, at least in real terms. We need to see attractive housing in the places people want to live in. Then over time more of the young will become homeowners. More of them will be Somewheres. And more of them will become Conservatives.