Inside the young Tories’ plot for a Conservative revival

The Conservative Party should abolish National Insurance Contributions, shift candidate selection away from “gold star councillors” toward “intellectual seriousness”, and be honest with voters that without growth the triple lock risks unsustainability.

Those are among the more eyebrow-raising recommendations in a new report from Next Gen Tories – a group launched in 2023 to highlight how millennials have been hardest hit by today’s challenges – exclusively seen by ConservativeHome ahead of its official launch this week.

Titled Conservative Revival: A New Radicalism, the paper is one of the more ambitious, and potentially internally combustible, pieces of Conservative thinking to emerge since the 2024 defeat.

As James Cowling, founder and managing director of Next Gen Tories – and author of the report, alongside director of policy Josh Smith – tells me: “The risk of inaction and not showing change is greater than the risk of staying still.

“Kemi is doing well, they’re almost there, it’s just turning the dial up. The party needs to set the vision and up the boldness.”

The paper has attracted backing from both ends of the party’s generations. Established shadow cabinet ministers Andrew Griffith and Claire Coutinho have provided supportive quotes, as have three MPs of the new intake recently tipped for promotion: Katie Lam, Blake Stephenson and Jack Rankin.

It was Rankin who perhaps captured the paper’s spirit most directly: “From a single planning code across the UK, to an acknowledgment that the triple lock will be unsustainable without policies that achieve growth.

“This paper signals a clear break from the Conservative Party of the past. This is a blueprint for a party which confronts this country’s issues from core principles first.”

It is hard to cover each recommendation of the 32 page report but the core principles, intended as the golden thread running through Conservative policymaking and communications, are framed through three pillars: wealth creation, aspiration and community.

On economics, the diagnosis is stark. They note that real GDP per capita was barely higher in 2023 than in 2007, with Britain caught in a self-reinforcing loop of high spending, rising taxes and anaemic growth.

“For too long, debates about public spending have been conducted in isolation from economic reality,” the report reads. “Policies such as the triple lock can illustrate the point. While politically sensitive and unlikely to be scrapped, it should be stated plainly that without stronger economic growth, long-term guarantees of this kind become increasingly difficult to sustain.”

The remedy involves tackling three structural constraints: the failure to build housing and infrastructure at scale; public spending weighted toward consumption over investment; and an uncompetitive tax system. France’s nuclear build-out and New Zealand’s planning liberalisation are cited as models of what political courage can achieve. Hinkley Point C – “the most expensive nuclear project in the world” – is the counterexample.

On aspiration, the paper identifies the nearly nine million voters expected to be paying higher or additional rate income tax by the next election as natural, underexploited Conservative territory. “Aspiration,” Cowling tells me, “is open goal territory for the Party”. The ‘HENRY’ voter – High Earner, Not Rich Yet – is heavily taxed, priced out of housing and, the paper argues, ripe for conversion. Hence the pitch to abolish NICs and roll them into income tax to “reinforce the stance of supporting work”.

The community chapter calls for a “civic nationalism rooted in shared values, equal citizenship and common responsibility,” with enforceable language requirements and welfare access linked to integration milestones – an answer, the authors argue, to the fact that “high levels of immigration have been met with almost no policies to promote integration.”

“Framed positively,” the report says, the approach is not about exclusion but “fairness, cohesion and equal citizenship”.

It also makes a more pastoral argument: that pubs, sports clubs and community centres are “civic infrastructure” whose decline has “hastened the atomisation of our society,” drawing a direct line between pro-growth economics and keeping the local high street alive.

One of the paper’s most striking contributions is its diagnosis of “the seven deadly sins” of modern politics – failings attributed not just to the Conservatives, but to British political culture more broadly.

The first and most fundamental is a failure of political courage: the tendency to downplay the scale of national problems during a campaign, only to discover in government that you lack the mandate to fix them. Labour’s ‘Ming Vase’ strategy in 2024 is the cautionary tale – by declining to level with voters about the structural challenges, the paper argues, the government entered office without the authority to act.

The message to Conservatives is clear: don’t make the same mistake in reverse. The paper recommends spending 2026 and 2027 making a frank public case for the scale of change required, without needing to announce bold policies immediately.

The remaining sins – short-termism, institutional sclerosis, stakeholderism, hyperlocalism, demographic targeting and over-reliance on polling – are each dissected in turn. The critique of demographic targeting may act as a wake-up call. The 2024 election saw the party pander so visibly to older voters that it alienated younger ones it needed to win.

Citing Nuffield College research, the report notes that voters in their fifties and sixties actually turned away from the Conservatives partly out of concern that their children are worse off – a cohort potentially representing 17 per cent of the electorate. “Baby boomers,” the paper drily notes, do not in fact have “saturnine desires to eat the young”.

Hyperlocalism is a clear target for Next Gen Tories: the drift toward MPs as “gold star councillors” rather than legislators. They want to see candidate selection, training and parliamentary management refocused – prioritising “intellectual seriousness and communicative strength” over local activism alone.

They propose a Future Leaders Scheme for the best candidates with a proven record of party involvement as part of the selection process, designed to identify stronger prospects without repeating the mistakes of the old A-list. Local constituencies could be offered benefits for picking one of these candidates, like earlier selection and additional resources, to maintain choice but incentivising “better choices”.

The paper also recommends moving the current fresh talent in the parliamentary party up the ranks into shadow ministerial and cabinet level as a way to “demonstrate that the party has changed” and prove there is “a bedrock of talent that Reform simply doesn’t have”. (A subject I have written on before.)

A “Bond with Britain” announcement this summer should be used as a first public statement of renewed purpose, and the 2028 London Mayoral election could road test the new approach among HENRY voters and affluent suburbanites the party needs to recover.

The dividing line the authors want drawn is “serious change with Conservatives versus chaotic change with Reform UK”. Whether the party has the collective discipline to hold that line – rather than retreating, as its own seven deadly sins suggest it historically does, into short-termism and timidity – is the question Conservative Revival asks, but can’t yet answer.