Glasgow Councillor: Tories aren’t inspiring young people

Shettleston Councillor, Thomas Kerr

Thomas Kerr is not your stereotypical Tory: no private education, no nanny growing up, no connections to Eton and no silver spoon wedged firmly wedged between his teeth.

In fact, he is the exact opposite.

He grew up in a high rise in Cranhill and attended Eastbank Academy, a school in Shettleston. From a young age he’s had to deal with parents addicted to drugs.

Kerr was disadvantaged from the start but didn’t let that stop him from achieving the impossible (or at least implausible): a seat in the East-End of Glasgow’s Shettleston ward. A ward that only a few years ago was reported to have a life expectancy lower than that of war-torn Iraq.

Kerr explains he is a Tory, not despite growing up poor, but because he grew up poor.

“To me the only party that offered somebody from a working-class background, like myself, opportunity was the Conservatives.

“To me, the SNP and Labour’s ideology is to try to keep people in their boxes because if someone is in their box they don’t open up and they don’t want to try and explore the world. My whole thing is about giving people potential.

“I don’t care what your background is; I don’t care about where you came from; I don’t care about anything like that; it depends on the work that you do. And to me, that’s the ethos of The Conservative Party: aspiration and hope and unlocking everyone’s potential,’ said Kerr.

Kerr accused Labour of using the class structure in society as a tool to gain power, saying: “I think Labour…like to keep people in their box because when you’re in that box they can then consolidate that vote. They looked at it and said: the working class are always going to vote Labour because we are a working-class party.”

If Labour’s goal is to consolidate the vote of the working-class then it’s fair to say that strategy has failed miserably as a YouGov poll in 2017 showed not class to be the determining factor in voting, but age.

The poll showed that a pitiful 19% of 18-19-year-olds voted Conservative in the 2017 general election, compared with 69% of over 70s. This stark contrast in voting is something the 22-year-old feels the party needs to deal with urgently.

Credit: YouGov.co.uk

“You need to open up your arms to young people. That’s what of the things I’ve been saying to the party for years is that we need to be more accepting of young people.

“The idea down south that we are campaigning against votes at 16 I think is absolutely bizarre,” said Kerr.

Kerr later commented on the perception many members of his party have of young people.

“The problem my party has had for years, and I’ve said it loads of times to people within my party, is that we judge young people.

“So, between the ages of 18-24 -and I’m in that age group- you judge people within that age group and you think they’re going to be more radical; they’re at university, we are never going to get that vote, so, we just say we aren’t going to even touch it with a bargepole.

“That’s not the right way to look at it because the reason why we aren’t getting that vote is because we aren’t inspiring young people enough,” said Kerr.

Kerr still believes that the Tories are the right party for young people, imploring them to look at the party’s record in government, citing 3 million jobs created since 2010 and the so-called ‘living wage’ brought in by the Conservatives.

A wage, incidentally, not applicable to those under 25.

However, Kerr has made clear with his stance on the legalisation of cannabis, his fury at the scrapping of the climate change department by Theresa May and his dismay with the party in England campaigning against votes at 16 that he isn’t going to wilfully toe the party line.

As a young, more liberal Tory in the East End of Glasgow that strategy may be well needed in a constituency that’s more likely to reward principle over party loyalty.