The Conservatives are so popular with older people and so unpopular with young people that, for example, 64% of students voted Labour, while 63% of retirees voted Conservative. That’s why attempts to revive the party’s youth wing, in imitation of Labour’s immensely successful Momentum activist group, were always going to be lambasted.
The idea was to create a grassroots right-wing activist group that could attract young people to the cause. Though Conservative Activate would receive no party funding, it had links with senior party activists, reported The Guardian, and former Conservative campaign manager Gary Markwell, who is also a West Sussex councillor, chaired it.
Why do we talk about it in past tense? Well, not only has the launch’s social media launch campaign fallen flat and faced much derision thanks to misappropriation of ancient memes, there’s been a scandal. Yep, just one day after the launch, private WhatsApp messages between several members of Activate (not a very good pun, is it) leaked. And they weren’t pretty.
In the messages, members (whose names have been blurred out) joke about how they should discover ‘chavs’ and then ‘gas them all’. There were also suggestions that these activists could ‘run some medical experiments on them’ or ‘use them as substitutes for animals when testing.’
The WhatsApp messages, leaked to Guido Fawkes, didn’t only ponder ‘why they are so good at producing despite living rough’ but also conceded ‘Okay we gotta be careful otherwise this is tuning to a nazi chat [sic]’.
Still, the Holocaust references continued: ‘Vermin often populate at high rates’ and people joked about 'shooting peasanta', ‘Chavocide’, and, perhaps more tamely, introducing ‘compulsory birth control on chavs [laughing crying face]’
Soon enough, older members jumped into the group chat to end group chats, and advised ‘We don’t take Micky out of the poor’ and ‘Please think before you post’. Another admonished the others for misusing the ‘professional discussion board…it is not a place to gossip or make rather silly jokes.’
Rather silly jokes? We’ve heard of much sillier jokes that aren’t, er, calling for the torture extinction of the working class by referencing the Nazis.
An Activate spokesperson has apologised, saying that none of the members making the jokes about gassing, sterilising or conducting medical experiments on ‘chavs’ were senior, and they’re no longer members anymore. Of Activate nor its fun-sounding WhatsApp group. They added: ‘The comments were sickening and are totally incompatible with what Activate is trying to achieve. We apologise for any offence that has been caused by the people in question. And stress our commitment to an open discussion about the future of our party and the country.’
What is that future? After the past five years in politics, it would be silly to make any sort of prediction. But with the spectre of the previous youth wing scandal, which saw Conservative Future forced to fizzle into electoral nothingness after allegations of bullying and a very real suicide of a young member, over the party, rising tuition fees, cuts to public services, and a vigorous appreciation of Brexit? Don’t expect it to get that far, at least with young people, any time soon.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.