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Catherine Ellis, No Hammock for the Idle: The Conservative Party, ‘Youth’ and the Welfare State in the 1960s, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 16, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 441–470, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwi054
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Abstract
The postwar ‘baby boom’ focused unprecedented attention on young people in Britain and made ‘youth’ a new and increasingly worrying category of both social and political identity. Belief in the uniqueness of postwar youth was widely shared among political parties but it caused particular anxiety for the Conservatives who feared that young people in the 1960s were shaped by values that predisposed them to socialism, not conservatism. This article traces the Conservative party's interaction with ‘youth’ through an examination of the policy-making efforts of the Young Conservatives (YCs) organization. After the 1959 election, the Conservative party was anxious to retain the support of younger voters and saw the YCs as a vehicle to publicize its commitment to them. Departing from the YCs’ long-standing emphasis on social activities, the party established a Policy Group Scheme to integrate younger members into policy-making and encourage a ‘youth’ perspective on key policy areas such as the welfare state. However, in 1966, the Policy Group Scheme ended as it became clear that young people's loyalty to the main party was not conditional upon participation in policy-making and the YCs’ model of postwar conservatism differed very little from that of older Conservatives. This analysis of grassroots discussion of the welfare state thus establishes the limits of a distinctive ‘youth’ perspective on major issues in modern conservatism such as individual freedom and the role of the state, and contributes to recent discussions of the role of age and demographic structure in postwar Britain.
