I don't want to lose the Conservative party to hardline, right-wing Brexiteers

Being that we’re now the ‘party of Brexit’ it’s difficult to see how we can make progress with young voters given the importance they attach to the most important decision our country has taken in decades

Removing blocks to building more affordable homes and the Help to Buy scheme alone won’t cut through the growing antagonism of young voters towards my party (PA)

I was in trouble again this week. I was admonished for tweeting that all the young people at my party’s annual conference in Birmingham look and sound like mini-Moggs. I was wrong. A few of them were women and yes, I met enough young Remain-voting Tories to give me hope that my party is not entirely lost to the right-wing hard Brexiteers.

The Conservative Party is specialising in warm words, as the prime minister’s conference speech eloquently and powerfully proved. Meanwhile in the fringes of conference and among the more sensible members like Putney MP Justine Greening, there’s a strong recognition that the Tory party has a lot more to do to win the “young vote” given that a recent YouGov poll revealed a whopping 78 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds would vote Remain.

With my party now the party of Brexit it’s difficult to see how the Conservatives can make progress with young voters given the importance they attach to the most important decision our country has taken in decades. And who can blame them – they are free of nostalgia for a Britain that never existed, open-minded in their view of immigration, reasonably well-informed as to the benefits of free trade with the world’s largest free trade area and understand the benefits of being able freely to live, work and study in 27 countries on their doorstep.

Removing blocks to building more affordable homes and the Help to Buy scheme alone won’t cut through the growing antagonism of young voters towards my party. To see off Corbyn’s Labour we need to start the debate as to how and why a market economy is the way to deliver prosperity, social mobility, fully funded public services and the means to address their concerns about the environment and social justice.

It’s thriving, responsibly regulated business that does the research and development to provide the tools as well as the means to a better country. Through argument and example we must show that Corbyn’s hard left socialism will destroy business – the engine at the heart of our economy. Instead we say we “back” business while continuing to ignore their pleas for the softest Brexit, and positively recruiting and embracing the ideologically driven whose hard Brexit would indeed “f**k business”. The irony will not be lost on most voters.

Last weekend I was in my home city of Nottingham spending four happy hours in the autumn sun talking to shoppers about Brexit. I met Keith who told me he voted Leave but now wants a People’s Vote because he’s changed his mind on Brexit. He’d been won over by the views of his student grandsons. I’m detecting a softening of that older Leave vote as they turn their attention to the growing concerns about the economic prospects of their children and grandchildren.

We know that the older you were the more likely you were to vote in the 2016 referendum and the more likely to vote Leave. Conversely younger people tended not to vote but those that did overwhelmingly voted Remain.

At 61 pretty much anyone under 45 is young in my terms so my 27- and 28-year-old daughters are well within the definition. After the EU referendum my youngest told me: “I feel like older people have robbed me of my future”, and she was far from alone in believing what I fear is the truth.

We have less than six months to continue to shift public opinion to win a People’s Vote and save our country from making the most damaging decision in recent history. If we fail and leave next March, I take some comfort in this. It will be my daughters’ generation who will take us back in to the EU. The tragedy is we will never have it as good as we have it now. And if we allow both main parties to head off to the extremes we will have delivered the double blow of Brexit and a hard-left Labour government.

Anna Soubry is the Conservative MP for Broxtow in Nottinghamshire