Today, I was kindly introduced to a thought piece about how the Tories could win back the vote of people under 40. Or, in the  hilariously telling vernacular of Conservative intelligentsia: the young.

It’s an interesting piece, not least because it does rightly identify several of the more egregious failings of Tory politics from the perspective of us wee babbers who haven’t even hit retirement age yet. But also because, after a little picking around the edges, it’s a case-study in blind faith and brand loyalty.

The headline is, essentially, the Tories can win back young voters if they can just do two things:

1. Stop being Tories.
2. Convince other sizeable Tory-voting demographics to accept what will be wildly unpopular reforms.

This highlights perfectly the kind of paradoxical thinking that the party seem blind do. That is, if you try to promise everything to everyone, you will end up lying to at least some of them and pissing them right off. It’s not particularly new or unexpected thinking, although I do find it odd that they think it is; it’s just another rebrand of the same old schtick. For example: Compassionate Conservatism.

Back then, it was reconciling bastards with the victims of bastards. Since then, the battle lines have changed so that we now have two alliances of opportunity.

In the blue corner, it’s old people, rich people, people who own multiple properties, the more unpleasant section of the penis-owning part of the population, and people who want other people to work for them as little as possible. These are, whether you like it or not, pretty much Tory core voters. They have no problem with the existence – enablement, even – of dessicated sacks of moral effluent like Christopher Chope. They’ve got quite a lot already and would like to turn it into even more. Some of which their children will be able to prise from their cold dead hands, should they in fact get around to dying while there’s anything worth left prising from them or anyone left above sea level to prise it.

In the, well… in all the other corners, we have young people, poor people, people who don’t own any property, the more modern section of the penis-owning part of the population, the majority of the vagina-owning part of the population who aren’t suffering socio-economic Stockholm Syndrome, and people who want to work for someone else in a way which allows them both dignity and financial sustainability. These are the people the Tories need to win the vote from and, while it might seem like young people are only one of these groups, it’s actually a demographic with a disproportionate amount of overlap with the others.

Anyway, that’s enough of the high-level stuff. What about the nuts and bolts? Let’s get down in the weeds and look at the ingenious plans for making up down. Or, indeed, making right left.

Idea 1: Guaranteed Home Ownership

In some shocking news that nobody had ever highlighted as perhaps being a problem and which therefore could not have possibly been foreseen, an unregulated housing market hasn’t worked out all that fairly. The banks, landlords and construction firms have done fucking fabulously, so on the surface of things it has been a raging success. However, it turns out that if one winds down the window of one’s limo when out cruising the boroughs, it hasn’t been quite so well-received by the proles.

Labour – typically – want to solve it by putting in place rent controls and taxing ultra-rich landlords who make money for doing nothing more than morbidly wallowing in tubs of liquefied cash. This is obviously raging socialism of the worst kind and therefore something no Tory would ever want anything to do with. Nevermind the fact that notorious Communist enclaves such as New York have rent controls, nor the fact that rental-generated economic activity isn’t good GDP in any sense, merely the shuffling of bank notes from one pile to the other without the creation of any value in the process.

Thankfully, there’s an entirely non-pinko way of solving the issue. What is being proposed is some good old neo-liberal not-for-profit cooperatives. These groups of working people will gather together their collective buying-power to purchase land, which they will then take out to tender to enthusiastic construction companies who’ll totally bid each other down to build affordable homes at far below current market rates and in such a way as will completely undermine their other business ventures by dropping the average cost of home ownership by a very substantial margin. This is neither socialism, regulation, nor obviously and profoundly fucking stupid if you stop to think about it for more than 3 seconds and have the slightest understanding of how an economy works.

So, idea one summary: taking an idea that is socialism when anyone else does it, making it shitter, and spending a few years wondering why the construction companies just don’t bid on those tenders.

Idea 2: Become the party of women “again”

There are two things of note here. One should have been covered sufficiently by my cunning use of scare-quotes in the section header. The other is that they have so little in the way of ideas here that it also covers homelessness and the belief that free speech = being able to say whatever you want and not find yourself unwelcome in certain places for doing so.

As a sort of bonus 3rd point, coming straight off the back of talking about how to win back those sub-40s whippersnappers, they talk about “millennial snowflakes”. Perhaps I could write to them about becoming the party of self-awareness “again”? It seems like it’d be a perfect fit for this innovative manifesto of whatever the brain equivalent of bacterial vaginosis is.

Idea 3: Don’t make the young pay for the old

This seems to have a couple of key points. First is that young people shouldn’t expect the state to stump up the money that old people have been paying it for decades in the form of National Insurance and Income Tax if they want to inherit some of the money those old people had left over after paying for those things. Before moving on to the other points, I’d just like to simplify this for clarity: we should make it clear to young people that they don’t have to pay for old people by making them pay for old people out of money they haven’t even received yet.

This is genius. It is also not at all like the creeping socialism of taxing people to pay for welfare and public services out of money before they receive it.

Anyway, second is the idea that young people should be expected to give up the kind of personal freedom to fly the nest and live their own lives. Now, many decent people would look after an aging relative if they were able; that is great and I am in no way knocking it. But as a means of showing that Tories don’t see old people as a burden for young people to shoulder literally until the old people drop dead, insisting that they do exactly that if they want to see any meaningful inheritance is a funny one. Not Haha Funny; the other sort.

If only there were some sort of system whereby those old people could have paid vast sums of money into the state, so that later in life there was some sort of provision for taking care of them without expecting subsequent generations to foot the bill. Like homes where people could be cared for. A system where people’s wellness was… fared for? I don’t know. Just spitballing.

Idea 4: Rescue our towns

Finally, we get to an authentically Conservative policy other than “show young people we like them by rebranding the way we fuck them”: bloody-mindedly fight progress. Bursaries for people who want to start a local high street business! Incentives for people who do-up knackered old shop fronts!

How about we instead accept that the small-town high street is dead? There is no viable reverting to a pre-ecommerce world, nor would it be desirable to do so even if there were. But there are ways we could give young entrepreneurs a helping hand in starting up modern digital businesses, with a global reach and therefore potential to bring more value into the economy rather than just recirculating it and calling it growth.

We could also return some character and community to towns by regulating large corporates such as Tesco and Asda, leaving competitive space for local shops. They’ll still be up against online shopping, but at least they won’t be taking it from both ends while they try and make a fist of it. I can’t work out whether that is poor phrasing or inspired metaphor.

More importantly, preventing the big breweries from buying up all the spots for pubs, forcing generic market research line-of-best-fit family gastropubs onto every corner would be pretty good. We might see a return of pubs with character and community, rather than identi-kit seating areas around which you can sullenly sip dull beer.

Idea 5: Bring down the barriers

Be less racist, do something about uncrossable class divisions, invest in public services and state education funding. I don’t think I need to go into why this won’t be popular with the existing Tory core vote, in light of the undue control over the party currently wielded by the ERG crowd.

Idea 6: Help students out of debt

By cutting the interest on loans. Now, colour me stupid, but I’m pretty sure that was the situation for a long time and those rates have consistently gone up under the Tories. In fact, they have not only gone up, but been aggressively defended under the auspices of austerity and since being sold on to private interests who pretty much by definition want to make as much money as possible out of them.

I can only interpret this as a call for greater public funding for education and re-nationalisation of the higher education funding sector. Great ideas, I fully support them. But as the author quite clearly states, it’s really only a halfway house of undoing past Tory policy in a move towards what’s already Labour policy.

Idea 7: Tackle the gig economy

Another openly Labour-inspired idea: stop companies taking the piss with zero-hours contracts that allow them to avoid all the obligations we as a society have spent decades fighting to put in place.

But it’s a very hand-wavy reference to a major problem, ignoring the fact that anti-competitive regulations alone won’t fix it and that there’s a really simple solution that will. That is banning zero hours contracts entirely and forcing all companies to provide all employees with the same rights. Even – and this is where the idea will struggle to gain traction with Tory donors – if it means those companies don’t make as much money, reducing their market cap and making them less desirable to private equity investors.

Idea 8: Save the cost of tuition fees

If less people go to university to better themselves and their opportunities in life, less people will have to pay back astronomical sums of money that previous generations somehow magically didn’t have to pay! Inspired.

The fact that there is even the slightest flicker of hope this will be seen as preferable to the quickly-identified objection of “how come the boomers could get it for free but we can’t even get it for cheap?” is the same kind of damning insight into the mentality behind all this as the implication the youth vote is anyone under the age of 40.

Which (thank god) brings us to the end of the piece. I’ve gone on far longer than I expected or hoped to, so I’m not going to waste too much on final thoughts. I think I’ve pretty much covered most of it already. The truth of the matter is we don’t just have a problem with young people, but a rising problem with middle-aged people as well. There’s some desperate flailing around to find ways to pay for the stuff that’s needed to address this, but they all seem to come back to “young people, only let’s not call it that”.

Cynically – but I suspect accurately – I think this is because the alternative is raising taxes, investing more in society from the ground up, and making corporations pay more back into the very same communities as they’re growing immensely fat and privileged off. Which I think should speak volumes about which of the two groups will be expected to take the hit when the inevitable “sorry, we promised everything to everyone again and it turns out that still isn’t possible” moment arrives. Hint: it won’t be the blue corner.