- 1 John Curtice, “General election 2019: Do people still vote according to class?”, BBC, 26 November 2 (...)
- 2 Bobby Duffy et al., “Divided Britain: polarization and fragmentation trends in the UK. The Policy I (...)
- 3 Curtice, “General election 2019: Do people still vote according to class”, op. cit.
- 4 Tim Bale, The Conservative Party, From Thatcher to Cameron, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010; Tim Hepp (...)
- 5 Tim Heppell, The Tories, From Winston Churchill to David Cameron, London: Bloomsbury, 2014.
- 6 Democratic Audit, “Youthquake 2017: how the rise of young cosmopolitans in Britain could transform (...)
- 7 Gideon Skinner et al., “How Britain voted in the 2019 election”, Ipsos, 20 December 2019, https://w (...)
1For a very long time, social class was considered as one of the main drivers behind the way British people cast their votes. British historian Peter Pulzer even claimed that “class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail”.1 This trend seems to have nonetheless changed. Today, age has somewhat replaced social class as a leading factor in voting behaviour, in a highly fragmented British political landscape.2 In a recent BBC article, published just weeks before the 2019 general election, political scientist and polling expert John Curtice argued that “there has always been a tendency for the Conservatives to be favoured in greater numbers by older rather than younger voters, with the opposite being true for Labour”.3 He also pointed to the fact that this generational gap had widened after Brexit and that it represented today “the most striking difference” between voters. It should be noted however that this age-based polarization is not new. As a matter of fact, the Conservative Party has never really been popular with young people.4 Worse, despite David Cameron’s best efforts to turn this situation around from 2005,5 the Tories have continually scored very low among younger voters, culminating in the “largest gap in support for Labour and the Conservatives amongst 18–24-year olds for over 40 years”6 in 2017, and an eight-point loss two years later among voters aged 18-24.7
- 8 Judy Atkins and Alan Finlayson, “Show – don’t tell: Political rhetoric is increasingly anecdotal bu (...)
- 9 Anna de Fina, “Narrative Analysis”, in The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics
2This paper aims to cast some light on this aspect of British politics by providing an overview of the way young people are perceived – and depicted – by Conservative leaders. To do so, we propose to study the narratives that Tory leaders usually associate with young people. Over the past 40 years or so, narratives have become ubiquitous in political rhetoric8 because they are “seen as representing a non-argumentative, more common-sense and therefore more grass-roots inspired mode of conveying political views”.9 Narrative will thus help us understand the way “the youth” were discursively framed by leading Conservative politicians.
3We posit that the overall narrative about young people in the rhetoric of the Conservative Party was instrumental in the construction of the very negative image associated with the former, which in turn, fuelled resentment at the latter. To verify this hypothesis, this article sets out to study the way recent Conservative leaders (2005-2022) have used storytelling in their keynote conference speeches. The rationale behind this objective and the theoretical framework, explained in the first part, will clarify the analysis carried out in the second part.
- 10 When used with no capital letter, “conservatism” refers to a tendency to resist change and preserve (...)
- 11 Dean Blackburn, “Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and British Conservatism’s Politics of Negatio (...)
- 12 Hickson, 2020, op. cit.
- 13 Agnès Alexandre-Collier and Emmanuelle Avril, Les Partis Politiques en Grande-Bretagne, Paris : Arm (...)
- 14 Hickson, 2020, op. cit., 6.
- 15 Alexandre-Collier and Avril, 2013, op. cit., 29.
- 16 Monica Charlot, Le Parti conservateur, Paris : Ophrys-Ploton, 2003.
- 17 Edmund Neill, “Ian Gilmour and One Nation Conservatism”, Revue Française de Civilisation Britanniqu (...)
- 18 Pete Dorey, “The Legacy of Thatcherism - Public Sector Reform”, Observatoire de la société britanni (...)
- 19 Philip Norton and Arthur Aughey, Conservatives and Conservatism, London: Temple Smith, 1981.
- 20 Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism, Basingstoke: Mac (...)
- 21 Catherine Marshall, “Introduction. ‘One Nation Conservatism from Disraeli to Johnson’”, Revue Franç (...)
- 22 Heppell, 2014, op. cit., 132.
4In the United Kingdom, Conservatism, which is not to be confused with conservatism,10 is associated with the Conservative Party and is a flexible, yet complex, ideology.11 It is nonetheless possible to pin down a few core “Conservative” values that encompass all the different strands of Conservatism12, such as tradition, authority, social order and nationhood.13 At the heart of the Conservative doctrine lies a rather pessimistic view of human nature and consequently, the role of the party is to “make the best of an imperfect world”.14 British Conservatism is usually, and simplistically,15 divided between a paternalistic and organic vision of society of Disraelian inspiration (“One-Nation”), which is sometimes dubbed as “Progressive Toryism”16 or “Compassionate Conservatism” as it aims to uphold social policy and ease class tension,17 and so-called “Thatcherism”, whose ambition was to “dismantle the post-1945 political settlement in Britain”18 and which is sometimes referred to as “combative Conservatism”.19 Thanks to an aggressive rhetoric and a radical attitude, Thatcherism aims to promote what Gamble calls “the free economy and the strong state”.20 Blackburn argues that Thatcherism is a philosophy of negation that rests on a dyadic conception of Conservatism in which the values of inequality, free market and tradition should be sustained. At the heart of Thatcher’s ideology is the notion of “popular capitalism” which encourages the creation of a “property-owning democracy”.21 In terms of rhetoric, political image and ethos building, Thatcherism is usually associated with determination, courage and the ability to earn the respect of foreign leaders. As such, Thatcher was the embodiment of the “warrior” leader, as opposed to the “healer” figure of pro-consensus, post-1945 leaders. Rhetorically, Thatcher’s legacy provided the Conservative Party with a powerful myth of conviction leadership and a particularly appealing narrative: when things seem to go wrong, just like during the Winter of Discontent, a dominant figure will take thing into her/ his own hands to turn the table and propose something (apparently) new. Confrontation is therefore key because, as Heppell argues, “Thatcherism required ‘others’ and fears around others to sustain its claim to political argument hegemony”.22
- 23 Sarah Pickard, “A Conservative future? Youth and the Conservative Party », Observatoire de la socié (...)
5As we have seen in the introduction, political scientists and pollsters alike have often highlighted the fact that the Conservatives tend to be more popular with older voters. The Tory Party has nonetheless tried to broaden its appeal among younger voters by creating many different youth organisations, dating back to the early twentieth century. After the Second World War, the “Young Conservatives” group (YC) was quite popular and claimed more than 150,000 members23. However, as Sarah Pickard notices in a 2007 article:
During the Thatcher premiership YC became ever more linked to the largely pejorative concepts of ‘Tory Boy’, ‘Hooray Henrys’ and ‘Tory toffs’. These negative stereotypes of self-centred upper middle-class youth on a completely different wavelength to a majority of contemporary British youngsters were very damaging to the image of YC. Thus, the new and young (37) party leader William Hague disbanded the outdated and much-criticized organisation in 1998.24
6Hague then launched “Conservative Futures” (CF) for party members under 30. If it did manage to attract a few thousand members, its youth credibility was not obvious. As Pickard notes: “for a youth-based organisation, the main CF website […] seems remarkably un-young and un-trendy both in its appearance and content”. After a series of controversies, it was even disbanded in 2016. Other organisations aimed at young right-wing people were created, such as the Young Britons’ Foundation or Wave Network, but they also disappeared.
7In terms of policies, and despite the official Conservative narrative, the party’s efforts to reach out to the young have always been “few, ill-adapted and superficial”, which leads Pickard to conclude that “the young have been largely ignored by the Conservative party in recent years”. The Tory Party simply “does not believe in a specific youth-orientated policy”. As they tend to reject the party, young people are clearly not a priority in the Conservative agenda. Or maybe, it is the other way around. Pickard argues that the “Tory Boy” image and the obvious lack of youth-orientated policies are the two main obstacles preventing the Conservatives from connecting with young people.
- 25 Heppell, 2014, op. cit., 137.
8Under David Cameron, things seemed unlikely to change, at first, as he was himself, through his education and personal background, a symbol of the “Tory Boys” that many young people resent so much. Besides, some of his early decisions, such as the will to keep the tuition-fees if elected, were not particularly popular with younger voters. However, we might assume that his rebranding of the Conservative Party as an inclusive organisation that cared about gay rights and the environment, away from toxic issues such as Europe or immigration, might have resonated with some part of younger voters. As a young leader, Cameron was meant to embody the new direction taken by his party.25 As he tried to rejuvenate the image of his party, Cameron’s years as party leader will constitute the starting point of our study.
- 26 Christian Salmon, Storytelling, la machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits, Par (...)
- 27 Sébastien Durand, Le storytelling. Le guide pratique pour raconter efficacement votre marque, Paris (...)
- 28 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. [‘Discours du récit’, Figures III, 1972], (...)
- 29 Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: CUP, 2008, 21.
- 30 Martin Reisigl, ‘“Narrative! I can’t hear that anymore’. A linguistic critique of an overstretched (...)
- 31 Yiannis Gabriel, “Narratives and Stories in Organizational Life”. In De Fina and Georgakopoulou (Ed (...)
- 32 Caren Schnur Neile, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Storytelling and Politics”, Storytelling, S (...)
9To carry out our analysis, we will focus on the concept of storytelling. At its most basic, storytelling is “the art of telling stories”26 with the aim of “capturing the attention or gaining the support of an audience”.27 Stories create an image that is positive for the company, brand, or politician at the heart of the narrative. In the field of narratology, stories are usually differentiated from narratives.28 Abbott provides an interesting explanation and argues that “a story is the series of events at issue, while narrative is the story ‘mediated’ through how the teller presents it”.29 As “the communicative products of the process of storytelling”,30 narratives are ubiquitous in politics31 and can be understood as “the use of an amusing, or otherwise emotion-generating anecdote to make a point, break the ice, or in some other way support an effective public utterance”.32
- 33 Jonathan Charteris-Black, Analysing Political Speeches, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 207.
- 34 Olivier Clodong and Georges Chétochine, Le storytelling en action, Paris: Eyrolles, 2010, 33.
- 35 Francesca Polleta, It Was Like a Fever, Chicago: CUP, 2006, Preface.
10Political narratives play a key role in the complex relation between politicians and citizens. Indeed, as far as persuasion is concerned,33 narratives create and sustain positive emotions which contribute to the elaboration of a vision of the world likely to appeal to a majority of voters.34 In the preface to her much-acclaimed book, Francesca Polleta quotes two of Bill Clinton’s main spin doctors: pollster Stanley Greenberg who claims that “a narrative is the key to everything” and James Carville, who declared that “I think we could elect somebody from the Hollywood Hills if they had a narrative to tell people about what the country is and where they see it.”35
- 36 Raphaële Galmisch, « Le Storytelling: cercle de la narration au service de l’ethos du leader », Rev (...)
11Storytelling is also very important to the process of ethos building.36 Politicians often relate stories about themselves, or about people they have met, using the general history of their country and collective memories as inspirational backdrops. Mass rallies and national broadcasts are key events as politicians can address a great number of people who, in turn, can identify with the stories related and therefore have a positive image of the speaker. In the United Kingdom, party conferences represent such moments when politicians can reach a very large audience.
- 37 Alan Wager, “Party Conferences”, UK in a Changing Europe, 22 September 2022, https://ukandeu.ac.uk/ (...)
- 38 Florence Faucher-King, Changing Parties: An Anthropology of British Political Conferences, London: (...)
- 39 Robert Leach et al., British Politics, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 104-105.
- 40 Ketaki Zodgekar and Tim Durrant, “Party Conferences”, Institute for Government, 26 August 2020, htt (...)
- 41 Wager, 2022, op. cit.
12Conservative Party conferences are held annually, in Autumn, usually in Birmingham or Manchester. If public interest in those meetings is sometimes questioned, Dr Alan Wagner argues that “they remain one of the few chances for each party […] to set out their strategic direction and receive significant coverage for policy pronouncements”.37 As they represent important PR events,38 they are extremely well-prepared, carefully stage-managed and highly influential platforms for the leaders of the party,39 which makes them very relevant as far as the study of storytelling is concerned. Party conferences attract a lot of media attention. This is why keynote speeches by the leadership, and in particular by the leader of the party, which usually takes place on the final day of the conference, are of tremendous significance,40 as they “crystallise the relative strengths and weaknesses of party leaders”.41
- 42 Leach et al., 2011, op. cit., 104.
13As Conservative Party conferences have no constitutional power, there is no vote on policy and no fiery debates. Instead, they are relatively docile and they represent an opportunity for the party faithful to meet their leaders in a friendly atmosphere. More importantly, they allow “leading politicians to display some effective platform oratory and secure abundant valuable free publicity for the party”42 and for themselves.
14Keynote speeches enable leaders to express the “official” narrative of the party on any given topic to a dual audience. Indeed, the keynote address is destined directly for party leadership and membership in the conference hall, where the leader has to display unifying leadership, and it is indirectly addressed to potential voters outside the conference hall, as the edited highlights of the speech are usually aired on the evening news and on smartphone notifications. This dual target calls for clear-cut messages and powerful sound-bites that are readily taken on and used by party faithful and spokespersons and easily digested by TV viewers/ smartphone users. As a consequence, conference keynote speeches constitute representative – albeit limited – source material for the study of how the Conservative Party has depicted young people over the last twenty years. Our approach is voluntarily top-down, as keynote speeches express the official vision of the party to the largest audience possible. A more specific analysis, focusing on speeches delivered to local youth associations might produce slightly different results, but would not, arguably, be as representative of the party’s general agenda.
15Our corpus of interest is composed of 18 keynote conference speeches by Tory leaders, from 2005 to 2022 (11 by David Cameron, 3 by Theresa May, 3 by Boris Johnson and 1 by Liz Truss; 106,289 words in total). Our approach will be twofold, as we will focus on both grammar and semantics. Thanks to corpus manager and text analysis software Sketch Engine, we will extract every occurrence of the terms “young” and “young people”. The “Word Sketch” tool will highlight the word’s “collocates and other words in its surroundings”,43 which will represent a useful “summary of the word’s grammatical and collocational behaviour”.44 This text mining process will shed light on the way those terms were grammatically constructed by Tory leaders.
- 45 De Fina, 2017, op. cit.
16It will also help us understand the types of narratives used to talk about “young” people. Due to the important media coverage they generate, keynote speeches enable leaders to “control the narrative” and to create what narratologists call “master narratives” or “grand narratives”, that is, the “public dominant discourses about particular social issues”.45 Political leaders are therefore able to frame the way certain issues are understood, as Seargeant argues:
- 46 Philip Seargeant, The Art of Political Storytelling, London: Bloomsbury, 2020, 141.
Through careful management of language, those in power can influence the way our brains interpret important political issues and thus influence the way we perceive reality […] the associations that build up around a concept, that become the ‘natural’ way of thinking about that idea, are often structured by an underlying story.46
- 47 Norman Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis. Routledge, 2010, 3.
- 48 Charteris-Black, 2014, op. cit., 83.
- 49 Teun Van Dijk, “Critical discourse analysis”, In: Schiffrin et al. (eds) The Handbook of Discourse (...)
- 50 Charteris-Black, 2014, op. cit., 83
17Because of these framing, cognitive and strategic dimensions, we argue that a critical approach to political storytelling is particularly relevant – even necessary – in order to decipher the political levers at stake in the overall depiction of the youth by Tory leaders. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) aims to reveal the manipulative use of language by people in position of power47 and to show how “difference in power and knowledge are created by inequalities in access to linguistic resources”.48 Van Dijk explains that CDA is “a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context”.49 CDA linguists are mainly interested in two interrelated concepts, context and persuasion, and believe that language is essential “in determining social power relationships”.50
- 51 Shaul Shenhav, “Political Narratives and Political Reality”, International Political Science Review(...)
- 52 Anna de Fina and Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Analyzing Narrative, Cambridge: CUP, 2012.
- 53 Mariana Souto-Manning, “Critical narrative analysis: the interplay of critical discourse and narrat (...)
18The role of narratives in understanding those power relations has already been well-documented.51 CDA is indeed considered as an integral part of narrative analysis52 – what Souto-Manning calls “Critical Narrative Analysis” (CNA). She explains that combining CDA with narrative analysis creates a mutually beneficial partnership because CNA “allows us to learn how people create their selves in constant social interactions” by proposing that “when individuals make sense of their experiences through narratives, they bring together the micro (personal) and the macro (social or institutional) situations in place”.53
- 54 Galmisch, 2015, op. cit.
19Charteris-Black (2014) argues that CDA must follow a three-stage methodological process. The first stage consists in analysing and explaining the overall context, or “speech circumstances”. The second stage involves both the identification of narrative units and their eventual classification according to their meaning, and function within the text. To this end, the theoretical framework of our research seeks inspiration from a typology devised by Galmisch.54 She argues that there are three main types of narratives in political storytelling: personal, citizens’ and collective. In personal, or autobiographical stories, the speaker evokes episodes from his or her own life. In citizens’ narratives, it is the stories of other people which are related. Collective stories are about national history and they usually appeal to the shared imagination and common memories of a people. This three-part typology provides a mechanism of categorization that conceptualizes the boundary work that narratives perform and simplifies the identification of narrative elements by framing their distinctive features.
- 55 Martha S. Feldman et al., “Making Sense of Stories: A Rhetorical Approach to Narrative Analysis”. J (...)
20The final stage of our methodology analyses the interaction between the overall political context, the image of the speaker and the choice of storytelling elements. Feldman et al. propose a three-level approach. The first level consists in identifying the storyline. The objective here is to determine the type of narrative archetypes being used to convey political ideologies and worldviews. The second level of analysis consists in establishing the opposition(s) in the story because, according to Feldman et al. “looking for oppositions allows the researcher to uncover the meaning of a key element of the discourse by analysing what the narrator implies the element is not”.55 The third and final level of analysis consists in determining the argument at the heart of the story. In other words, the objective is to “reproduce the story in the form of syllogisms, logical arguments that help the storyteller express the ideas in the story”, in order to explicit the storyteller’s arguments. Very often, one part of the logical reasoning is left for the hearer to imply, which reinforces the persuasive effect of truncated syllogisms, or enthymemes.
Table 1. Occurrences of the adjective “young” in narrative elements in the corpus
|
Difficult lives |
Paternalistic solution |
Dreamer / Tory dream |
Crime |
Total |
| David Cameron |
|
|
|
|
|
| Personal stories |
|
1 |
1 |
|
2 |
| Citizens’ stories |
16 |
8 |
5 |
3 |
32 |
| Collective stories |
|
|
|
|
|
| Total |
16 |
9 |
6 |
3 |
34 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Theresa May |
|
|
|
|
|
| Personal stories |
|
|
|
|
|
| Citizens’ stories |
7 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
13 |
| Collective stories |
|
|
|
|
|
| Total |
7 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
13 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Boris Johnson |
|
|
|
|
|
| Personal stories |
|
|
|
|
|
| Citizens’ stories |
5 |
4 |
|
3 |
12 |
| Collective stories |
|
|
|
|
|
| Total |
5 |
4 |
|
3 |
12 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Liz Truss |
|
|
|
|
|
| Personal stories |
1 |
|
|
|
1 |
| Citizens’ stories |
|
|
|
|
|
| Collective stories |
|
|
|
|
|
| Total |
1 |
|
|
|
1 |
| Total (overall) |
29 |
15 |
8 |
8 |
60 |
21Table 1 records the occurrences of the adjective “young” associated with human-related nouns (“people”, “girl”, “boy”, “woman”, “couple”, etc.) and classifies them according to the types of narratives in which they appear and the main topics they evoke. There were 91 occurrences of the adjective “young” in total, but we decided to focus only on occurrences of “young” in what might be described as narratives, which brings the total down to 60.
22Several initial remarks can be made. First, most Tory leaders seem to favour citizens’ stories to talk about young people. This entails that they never really talk about their own youth, which means that they do not tend to identify with young people and that they talk about them at arm’s length. Young people are usually used as real-life examples to prove a point rather than being placed at the centre of the leaders’ narratives. Second, there is a clear distinction between Liz Truss and the other three Prime Ministers, as she only talks about her own youth once and never evokes young people in her conference speech. It seems then that in 2022 young people were further down the political agenda of the Conservative Party. The third element of interest is the mainly negative image associated with young people. Indeed, what Tory leaders stress first and foremost is how difficult life can be for young people and the inherent link between the young and crime.
- 56 Sketch Engine official website. op. cit.
- 57 The thesaurus in Sketch Engine is an automatically generated list of synonyms or words belonging to (...)
23Sketch Engine seems to confirm the low priority given to young people in the corpus. The “Keywords” tool is quite significant for that matter. It aims to “compare corpora and identify what is unique or typical, […] the selected corpus is compared to a reference corpus to identify these key data”.56 The term “young” does not appear in the first 500 entries of “single-word” keywords and the expression “young people” ranks 230th in the “multiword terms” keywords section. The Thesaurus tool57 provides further proof of the Conservatives’ negative bias towards young people, as “poor” and “hard” are among the most frequent terms associated with “young”. Our qualitative analysis of the corpus will now put these initial remarks to the test, as the study of storytelling occurrences will shed light on the conception of “young people” in the eyes of Tory leaders.
- 58 Richard Hayton, “Fixing Broken Britain”, in Tim Heppell and David Seawright, Cameron and the Conser (...)
- 59 Agnès Alexandre-Collier, “David Cameron à la tête du parti conservateur : la jeunesse est-elle un g (...)
- 60 John Oxley, “The Youth of Today: Has Generation Cameron deserted the Tories?”, PoliticsHome, 2 Octo (...)
- 61 Abby Tomlinson, “What does David Cameron have against young people?”, New Statesman, 14 October 201 (...)
24One of Cameron’s primary objectives, when he entered 10 Downing Street in 2010, was to “mend our broken society”. This early focus on social problems, initiated in the opposition years, was part of a wider strategy to decontaminate the Conservative brand so as to broaden the appeal of a party that had suffered from decades of internal tension and fratricidal conflicts. However, the modernisation project was mainly a make-over process and the first Cameron government mainly drew inspiration from the Thatcherite ideological legacy.58 Still, Cameron’s detoxification, along with a sharp – and strategic – focus on his relatively young age,59 managed to secure a significant part of the youth vote in 2010, which was dramatically reduced at the following general election and which eventually almost disappeared after the Brexit referendum. Oxley60 explains that this drastic loss of confidence from the youth comes, first and foremost, from the government’s failure to secure easy access to home-ownership and to properly deal with childcare costs, but also from the increasingly aggressive rhetoric of the Tories and, we argue, from the overall depiction of young people by Cameron. So much so that some commentators even claim that Cameron was against young people.61
25In Cameron’s keynote speeches, the youth are most of the time evoked in the “poverty” or “broken family” sections and almost exclusively in citizen’s stories. They fall victims to a system that does not work for them and that they do not understand, as he said as soon as 2005: “when I meet young people, they tell me how sick they are of the whole political system – the shouting, finger-pointing, backbiting and point-scoring in the House of Commons. That’s all got to go”. They are excluded from a political system that they do not recognize and which, in turn, ignores them. Here are a few representative examples:
It’s a change that will help us get taxes down. I believe in low taxes – and today, working people are crying out for relief. Like the young couple I met in York three weeks ago, who both work seven days a week and still struggle to make enough to pay the mortgage (2008).
Now I’ve got in trouble for talking about Twitter before, but let me put it like this. I want a country where young people aren’t endlessly thinking: ‘what can I say in 140 characters?’ but ‘what does my character say about me?’ (2014)
Do you know that in our country today, even if they have exactly the same qualifications, people with white-sounding names are nearly twice as likely to get call backs for jobs than people with ethnic-sounding names? This is a true story. One young black girl had to change her name to Elizabeth before she got any calls to interviews. That, in 21st century Britain, is disgraceful (2015).
26The overall storyline is one of despair, made even worse for young people coming from minority background. Young people fall victim to a world which excludes them and in which they do not (try to) belong, as expressed in the derogatory remark about the way they use Twitter (2014). The oppositions are between young people and the reality of life, but also between deserving young people, who try to work hard, and the others. The logical argument that Cameron implicitly constructs in his narratives about young people could be summarized as:
- Life is tough and unforgiving (major)
- Young people do not necessarily understand social conventions (minor)
- Young people will have to work twice as hard to make it (conclusion)
27Cameron’s narratives about the youth are inherently linked to the notion of meritocracy, even if he recognises the initial, and structural, difficulties that young people have to face. Cameron’s Conservative Party proposed a few solutions, as we will see below, in particular access to home ownership, which was meant to be a priority when in opposition (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008), but which became less pregnant once in government. This might account for a feeling of “betrayal”62 experienced by young people, made worse by the decision to leave the European Union.
- 63 Theresa May, “First speech as PM on the doorsteps of 10 Downing Street”, 13 July 2016.
- 64 Raphaële Espiet-Kilty, “Was Theresa May a One Nation Conservative?”, Revue Française de Civilisatio (...)
28In her very first speech as Prime Minister, Theresa May argued that she wanted to walk in the footsteps of Cameron’s “One-nation Government”.63 From the very beginning of her mandate, she made it clear that she saw Brexit as “the revenge of the left behind” and that she aimed at creating “a country that works for everyone”.64 Rhetorically, May follows up Cameron’s two-level division between young people and the general community and among young people themselves, according to their skin colour. In her first conference speech (2016), May vows to fight injustice and to “set our party and our country on the path towards the new centre ground of British politics” in order to “build on the values of fairness and opportunity” to create a society “where everyone plays by the same rules and where every single person – regardless of their background, or that of their parents – is given the chance to be all they want to be”. She recognizes the inherent inequalities of the British society, and stresses the difficulties encountered by many young people from minority background, but tries to show the positive contribution of the Conservative Party:
Yet within our society today, we see division and unfairness all around. Between a more prosperous older generation and a struggling younger generation. Between the wealth of London and the rest of the country. But perhaps most of all, between the rich, the successful and the powerful – and their fellow citizens. Now don’t get me wrong. We applaud success. We want people to get on. But we also value something else: the spirit of citizenship […] That spirit that means recognising the social contract that says you train up local young people before you take on cheap labour from overseas (2016).
Like Alexander Paul, a young man who came to this conference three years ago to tell his story. The story of a young black boy growing up in modern Britain who without causing any trouble – without doing anything wrong – found himself being stopped and searched by people in authority time and time and time again. Alexander spoke so eloquently about his experience and how he came to mistrust those in positions of power as a result. So, inspired by his example, we took action. We shook up the system, and the number of black people being stopped and searched has fallen by over two thirds (2017).
- 65 Judy Atkins and John Gaffney, “Narrative, persona and performance: The case of Theresa May 2016–201 (...)
29In line with her healer persona,65 May offers a more optimistic vision of the youth, even if she does not deny the many difficulties ahead for them. The overall narrative, as we can see in the two representative examples above, is that life is tough for young people but society has a role to play in order to make things better. The implicit oppositions are therefore between inclusion and exclusion, fairness and inequality, and, perhaps more significantly, between unity and division. The main syllogism that can be drawn is the following:
- A healthy society is one that works for everyone (major)
- Life is especially tough for young people (minor)
- It is everyone’s duty to make sure young people can make it (conclusion).
- 66 In the 2017 manifesto, the party scrapped the 2015 pledge to press for a total ban on ivory sales a (...)
30Despite this somewhat hopeful vision, May’s controversial stances on environmental issues66 and her focus on party politics against a backdrop of Brexit tension, damaged her image among young people, who effectively flocked en masse to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
- 67 YouGov. 2022. “How well is Boris Johnson doing as Prime Minister?” https://yougov.co.uk/topics/poli (...)
- 68 British Election Study. “Age and voting behaviour at the 2019 General Election”. https://www.britis (...)
- 69 Philip McCann and Raquel Ortega-Argilés, “UK ‘geography of discontent’: narratives, Brexit and inte (...)
- 70 Jon Ord and Bernard Davies, “Young people, youth work & the ‘levelling up’ policy agenda”. Local Ec (...)
- 71 Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto 2019, Get Brexit Done Unleash Britain’s Potential, 2019, (...)
31Boris Johnson never scored very high in terms of popularity among young people.67 As the Brexit champion, Johnson’s appeal was greater among older voters.68 However, young people were meant to be an integral part of the ambitious, yet unclear,69 “Levelling Up” program of the Johnson government, which laid emphasis on youth work70 and whose ambition, through massive investment, was “to unite and level up, spreading opportunity across the whole of the United Kingdom”.71 Newman highlights the comprehensive approach of the program, but also some potential spin:
- 72 Jack Newman, “The Ambiguous Ideology of Levelling up”, The Political Quarterly, 92, 2021: 312-320.
It speaks to social democrats about tackling deprivation; it speaks to social liberals about equality of opportunity; it speaks to economic liberals about supporting the free market; and it speaks to conservatives about reuniting the nation.72
32Despite the positive outlook of the Levelling Up slogan, the image of the youth depicted by Johnson is once again quite negative. Ironically, Boris Johnson picks up on the stop and search controversy but adopts a radically different attitude, in line with a more critical approach to young people. He marks a clear break with May’s – and to a certain extent Cameron’s – compassionate Conservatism and tries to embody a tough stance:
Yes, we will be tough on crime, we will make sure that the police have the legal powers and the political backing to use stop and search, because it may be controversial but believe me that when a young man is going equipped with a bladed weapon there is nothing kinder or more loving or more life-saving you can do than ask him to turn out his pockets (2019).
33He nonetheless tones down his message during the pandemic, as he recognizes the difficulties encountered by many young people. There is indeed a real evolution between his authoritative – almost bossy – attitude of 2019 and some form of relative compassion in 2020:
When Covid struck there were millions of people, often young people, who found themselves locked down in rented accommodation, without private space, without a garden, forced to use ironing boards for desks and bedrooms for offices (2020).
- 73 Harold D. Clarke et al, Brexit, Why Britain Voted to Leave The European Union, Cambridge: CUP, 2017 (...)
- 74 Alma-Pierre Bonnet, “War Propaganda or Political Opportunism? How British Prime Ministers Have Used (...)
34We might argue, of course, that the context was instrumental in this change of heart. In 2019, Johnson was trying to rally the Brexit vote in order to have a working majority at the December general election. He needed to appeal to Brexit voters, who are usually older and whiter than the overall UK population.73 Attacking young people and showing no real compassion towards minority members might have been a strategy to score points among pro-Brexit voters. Johnson needed to be seen as a tough leader, almost a war leader,74 who could stand up to EU negotiators and lead the UK towards what he described as a brighter future, outside the European organisation. The situation was obviously different in 2020, at the heart of the pandemic, and we might assume that keeping such an aggressive stance when millions of (young) people were suffering, was not politically viable. This relatively positive image of young people enabled Johnson to sketch out a vision for post-Covid Britain:
I want to raise your eyes, and I want you to imagine that you are arriving in Britain in 2030, when I hope that much of the programme I have outlined will be delivered, and you arrive in your zero-carbon jet made in the UK and you flash your Brexit blue passport or your digital ID, you get an EV digital taxi. And as you travel around you see a country that has been and is being transformed for the better – where young people in their 20s and 30s have the joy of home ownership, and where they can bring up their children in the neighbourhoods where they grew up themselves, in the confidence that the schools are excellent and that crime is down. And instead of being dragged on big commutes to the city, they can start a business in their home town, a place that has not only superb transport connections and green buses, but gigabit broadband, and where the workforce is abundantly equipped not just with university degrees but with the technical skills that the new economy demands (2020).
35Storytelling allows Johnson to depict a dream-like vision of the post-Covid world. It should be noted that this hypothetical narrative is the only example in the corpus of a purely optimistic – and unconditionally positive – vision of young people, and even here, “young people in their 20s and 30s” only play a minor – and passive – role in Johnson’s overall plan for the future, as the main focus of his narrative is the positive outcome of the Conservative programme outlined in the speech. The implicit opposition in Johnson’s narratives is between Conservative voters, usually an older cohort, and young people, who are depicted as background characters. As such, Johnson dwells on a paternalistic vision of the British society which could be discursively and logically structured as:
- Governance necessitates wisdom (major)
- Young people do not possess sufficient maturity (minor)
- Young people should therefore be mentored by older people (conclusion)
- 75 Toby Helm, “Young adults have dramatic loss of faith in UK democracy, survey reveals”, The Guardian(...)
36However, Johnson’s chaotic resignation, at the heart of the Partygate scandal, further alienated young voters.75 This lack of confidence was reinforced by his successor.
- 76 Graeme Demianyk, “Liz Truss Thinks Young People Are ‘Natural Conservatives’ Because Of Their ‘Side (...)
- 77 Kevin Hickson and Ben Williams, “Boris Johnson and Beyond: The Revival of One Nation Conservatism?” (...)
37Shortly before becoming Tory leader, Liz Truss explained that she considered young people as “natural Conservatives” because of “the entrepreneurial spirit of under-30s”,76 which is in line with her neoliberal conception of society of Thatcherite inspiration.77 Young people are nonetheless almost absent in her conference speech. Her focus is on growth and she only ever mentions “children” to talk about her vision for the country: “I want to live in a country where hard work is rewarded. Where women can walk home safely at night. And where our children have a better future. To deliver this, we need to get Britain moving” (2022). The only occurrence of the adjective “young” is to highlight the difference in treatment between young girls and young boys:
I know how it feels to have your potential dismissed by those who think they know better. I remember as a young girl being presented on a plane with a “Junior Air Hostess” badge. Meanwhile, my brothers were given “Junior Pilot” badges. It wasn’t the only time in my life that I have been treated differently for being female or for not fitting in (2022).
38What Truss is mainly concerned with here is not the fate of young people but rather the fact that she had to overcome difficulties to achieve her goals. Youth is seen, once again, as a difficult period in somebody’s life. It is a test that needs to be passed to reach adulthood. The storyline that could be elaborated from Truss’ example is that youth is a moment of confrontation with the “real world” that is tough and unforgiving, and consequently, the underlying message is that young people should work twice as hard to achieve anything. The oppositions are between resilience and fear to act, and between courage and moral weakness, in a move reminiscent of the Thatcher ethos. As such, the logical argument that could be applied to her conception of the youth echoes that of David Cameron:
- Life is tough and unforgiving for young people (major)
- Society imposed strict norms on people (minor)
- Young people will have to work twice as hard to make it (conclusion)
39Our analysis reveals a cyclic movement in the depiction of young people by Tory leaders, as Truss’ conception is similar to the one envisaged by Cameron, after the more positive approach devised by May and the highly paternalistic vision of the Johnson years.
40Young people are very often seen in a negative light by Conservative leaders. The general narrative is one of despair, with little hope for the future. The main idea is that young people suffer from the inherent inequalities within British society and they seem to be on the receiving end of everything that is wrong in Britain. Life is even worse for members of minorities. There is however one domain in which young people are seen in a positive light: when they enrolled in the army or join the police. Here are a few examples:
Earlier this month, up the Helmand River in Sangin I met a soldier in the Royal Irish Regiment, Ranger Blaine Miller. He’d just turned eighteen years old. He was the youngest soldier there. He’s not much more than a boy and he’s there in the forty-five degree heat, fighting a ferocious enemy on the other side of the world. I told him that what he was doing was exceptional. He told me he was just doing his job (Cameron, 2008).
This year marks a century since the end of the First World War. Just a few hundred yards from this conference centre stands a Hall of Memory, built to honour the sacrifice of men and women from this city in that terrible conflict. Inscribed within it are some familiar words:’AT THE GOING DOWN OF THE SUN, AND IN THE MORNING, WE WILL REMEMBER THEM.’
We do remember them. We remember the young men who left their homes to fight and die in the mud and horror of the trenches. We remember the sailors who shovelled coal into hellfire furnaces in the bowels of battleships. We remember the selflessness of a remarkable generation, whose legacy is the freedom we enjoy today. I think of Hubert Grant – my father’s cousin in whose honour he was named. Hubert fought and died at Passchendaele at the age of just 19 (May, 2018).
I have been prime minister for only seventy days but I have seen so many things that give cause for hope. Hospitals that are finally getting the investment to match the devotion of the staff. Schools where standards of reading are rising through the use of synthetic phonics. Police colleges where idealistic young men and women are enrolling in large numbers to fight crime across the country (Johnson, 2019).
41Young people seem to be only fully part of the national community when they join the army and defend their country. We might infer from this that one of the main problems for Conservative leaders, as far as young people are concerned, is their supposed lack of patriotism. The only way to close the generational gap is therefore by displaying traditional Conservative values, like love for the country. This, in turn, shows a biased and stereotyped vison of the young as self-centred and unpatriotic. As a consequence, the Conservative conception of British society is not inclusive because it requires political formatting, or the risk of being left on the fringes of the national community. It should be noted that the examples above are rare cases of personal storytelling in the corpus by Tory leaders, who seem to only ever connect with young people when they display those traditional values. This general approach highlights the overall negative image of young people in the words of Tory leaders.
42Very often, narratives are politically loaded. David Cameron, for example, relates a meeting with a young man in order to shed light on the problems of what he describes as “the broken society” and to propose solutions to fix it:
I met a young man the other day, he came to my office. He had recently been in prison and he was trying to go straight, he had got a job. He’s got a kid already and he’s got another on the way. He is being mentored by someone in my office and the only reason he doesn’t live with the mother of his children is because she would lose benefits if he did. We must be crazy in this country to be using the benefits system to drive people apart rather than bring them together. We’ve got a tax system that doesn’t recognise marriage and we’ve got a benefit system that actually recognises any form of co-habitation, any form of commitment and penalises it. So, what will we do to change that? (2007)
43Here again, the image of young people is extremely negative as even when they try to “go straight”, society works against them. As such, young people seem to be mere pawns in the Tories’ game. In Cameron’s speeches, they are mainly used to promote his “Big Society” agenda, which aimed at promoting the civil society and reducing the role of the State, and to attack Labour’s fiscal policy. In May’s addresses, they become symbols of the profound divisions affecting the post-Brexit British society (2016, above). Similarly, under Johnson, young people are always on the wrong side of history, as they are the ones who suffer the most from the problems within Britain:
And yet if you looked more carefully you could see – and indeed many of us said so at the time – that the UK economy had some chronic underlying problems: long-term failure to tackle the deficit in skills, inadequate transport infrastructure, not enough homes people could afford to buy, especially young people – and far too many people, across the whole country, who felt ignored and left out, that the government was not on their side; and so we cannot now define the mission of this country as merely to restore normality (2020).
44The overall conception of young people in the eyes of Conservative leaders seems to be one of submissive passivity, made worse by a clear lack of maturity which de facto places most of them outside the national community: like children, young people are on the margins of (Conservative) society. The Conservative message concerning young people is therefore clear: they cannot really cope on their own. Without the help of the Conservative Party, this situation seems to offer only two solutions for young people: a life of failure or a life of crime.
45Failure is indeed another common trait in most speeches: failure at school, failure to get a decent job and failure to own a home. Once again, if young people are very often associated with the notion of failure, most of the time, they are not directly responsible. David Cameron (2007) and Theresa May (2017) made it quite clear:
In this new world of freedom, nothing matters more in terms of opportunity and our economy and our future than education. But too many things are not right in education in Britain. Almost 50% of 11-year olds leaving school are not able to read, write or add up properly. Falling down the European leagues in terms of educational performance. 23,000 young people leaving school without any qualifications whatsoever. We are not doing enough to prepare young people for this world of freedom […] There are five million people in our country of working age who aren’t working. There are a million young people, more than a million who are neither in employment, nor in education, nor in training. And the number is actually higher than 10 years ago (2007).
For 30 or 40 years we simply haven’t built enough homes. As a result, prices have risen so much that the average home now costs almost 8 times average earnings. And that’s been a disaster for young people in particular (2017).
46Young people’s failure to have a good education, to get a job or to own a house is due to a British society that does not work for them. However, the very fact that the situation does not seem to have improved between 2007 and 2017 (and later, as what Johnson calls “the broken housing market” was still a big issue in 2021) shows that the Conservatives have not solved the problem. It is therefore a twofold problem that young people have to face: a society where they do not fit and a governing party that supposedly does not really try to help them.
47Young people are marginalized and they experience failure on a regular basis, and this results sometimes, in the words of Conservative leaders, in a life of crime. Crime is indeed inherently associated with young people, as either perpetrators or victims. Here are a few examples:
We need to confront – and I mean really confront – extremism. When I read what some young people born and brought up in this country are doing, it makes me feel sick to my stomach. Girls not much older than my eldest daughter, swapping loving family homes and straight-A futures for a life of servitude under ISIL, in a land of violence and oppression (Cameron, 2015).
And this city of Manchester knows it better than anyone. Because four months ago, this city came under attack from those who hate our country and despise our values [cf. Manchester Arena bombing]. And because of this hatred, they chose to take out their rage on the defenceless and vulnerable. The innocent and the young (May, 2017).
The first thing we must do in spreading opportunity is to insist on the equal safety of the public wherever you live to make your streets safer and that is why we are recruiting 20,000 new police officers and that is why we are committing now to rolling up the evil county lines drugs gangs that predate on young kids and send them to die in the streets to feed the cocaine habits of the bourgeoisie (Johnson, 2019).
- 78 On the official NCS website we can read the following description: “NCS is where young people can g (...)
48The Conservatives are not depicted as saviours, as they only provide partial solutions to the many problems facing the young. Those solutions are twofold: some form of national service or, more importantly, home ownership. There is actually a clear evolution in the answers Conservative leaders come up with for young people. Under Cameron and May, the Conservatives aimed to take an active – yet limited – role in young people’s lives through what came to be known as the “National Citizen Service” (NCS) scheme.78 Cameron evoked the scheme as early as 2007:
If you ask people of my parents’ generation about national service, they tell you often that it was something that brought people together. It didn’t matter whether you were from the north or the south or whether you were rich or poor. It was something we all did together, and it was about serving our community and serving our country and we learnt responsibility. Now I’m not about to suggest a return to national service. Sorry to disappoint you. But I do think this. I think the time has come for national citizens’ service where we say to 16-year olds, we’ve got a compelling programme that’s about the transition from youth to adulthood. That’s about your responsibilities in society. That’s about community service. That will challenge you.
- 79 Hélène Balazard, Robert Fisher and Matt Scott, “The ‘big society’ in the United Kingdom: privatisat (...)
- 80 Matt Honeycombe-Foster, “Theresa May hails ‘gold standard’ new T Levels – as top official warns ove (...)
- 81 Raphaële Espiet-Kilty, “Boris Johnson’s “Levelling Up Across the Whole of the UK”: One Nation or Bu (...)
49As part of the Big Society program,79 the NCS scheme was about “the transition from youth to adulthood” and the idea of taking responsibility, which implicitly underlines the immaturity of young people. May continued the programme of “Free Schools” and introduced the idea of T-Levels (technical-based qualifications in England, whose course content are to be drawn up alongside employers to make sure they are directly relevant to the workplace).80 Under Johnson, the “Levelling Up” program failed to arouse public enthusiasm,81 just like Cameron’s “Big Society” endeavour and in Truss’ only keynote, there was no more programme for the young.
50As a matter of fact, the only guiding principle throughout the corpus, to answer the needs of young people, is access to home-ownership. Home ownership seems indeed to be the Conservative dream. Cameron made it clear in 2007, and repeated his pledge to build more houses time and again; May doubled down in 2017 (see above) and under Johnson, the “dream of home ownership” was the only positive outcome for young people:
One of the aspirations people still have, and rightly so, is the aspiration to own a flat and a home of their own. And all of us, all of the Shadow Cabinet here they can tell the same story of young people who come to our surgeries, they show you their salary, they talk about local house prices and they just say: ‘I don’t see how I can achieve that dream.’ And George [Osborne] showed how we are going to cut stamp duty to show that we’re on their side, and we will help mend the housing ladder and get on their side. This is the party of aspiration and opportunity and George has shown us the way (2007).
And by making neighbourhoods safer, by putting in the gigabit broadband, by putting in the roads and the schools and the healthcare, we will enable more young people everywhere to share the dream of home ownership (2021).
51This dream seems to be available only to those who “deserve it”, as Cameron put it in 2012: “The doers. The risk takers. The young people who dream of their first pay-cheque, their first car, their first home – and are ready and willing to work hard to get those things”. This Conservative dream is therefore conditional and creates de facto a distinction between deserving young people and those who indulge in “the something for nothing culture” (Cameron, 2008). We might assume that this solution is politically-loaded, as home-owners are traditionally considered to be more likely to vote for conservative parties, which means that once again, the message delivered to the young is that they should conform to the Conservative vision of society if they ever want to be considered as worthy of attention.
52To go back to the initial research question, this paper has shown that the image associated with young people that has been elaborated by Tory leaders over the past 20 years is extremely negative. We assume that this accounts for the very low support for the party among younger voters, who do not feel represented. Cameron, May and Johnson made it crystal-clear that the young were not a priority in the political agenda of their party and Truss did not even talk about young people, which effectively excluded them from the national community. It seems that this pattern of exclusion is probably one of the most salient features of the representation of young people in the eyes of Tory leaders, which, in turn, might partly explain the overall rejection of the party by younger voters.
