IT’S not that we’re out for revenge. It’s more that we’re looking for reparations and it will be a sore one if our enemies do not provide.

An interesting column in the Financial Times last week pulled together data showing millennials are deviating from the standard human condition of becoming more right-leaning as they age.

Each generation since 1928 has, according to John Burn-Murdoch writing in the FT, clearly followed that trend. Until we get to my generation, the hoodlums.

As is said in the piece, young people think with their hearts and become less liberal as they age and begin to think with their heads. It’s perhaps the fading of idealism or a desire to protect the assets accrued during a successful life, those Conservatism pledges to protect – home ownership, pensions, savings, children.

Probably it’s a bit of both. That simply isn’t happening with millennials and the only surprise is that anyone would be surprised.

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Since the dawn of generational cliches, no age cohort has been more maligned or discussed than the millennial. We are the Meghan Markle of our peer group. 

Millennials have been poked and prodded, dissected and scorned. Broke, woke, narcissistic, spendthrift, selfish, big babies with delayed development ... you could be here all week trying to condense the vast literature dissecting the character of the millennial.

The avocado-toast myth is the most egregious of the type. This is the oft-repeated trope that moaning millennials could well afford to buy property if they gave up fripperies such as Netflix, gym membership and avocado on toast. There’s a thesis to be written on the avocado as a symbol for profligacy and middle-class entitlement but now is not the time. Let’s just say that the avocado has become a conservative trope used as a semaphore for all that is wrong with the millennial generation.

Saving for a home is tough and involves tightening of belts, cutting of cloth. But no other generation has been expected to live a life of absolute privation in order to put an affordable roof over their head, not least take so long to be able to save to do it.

Instead of looking at the structural changes needed to rectify more than a decade of Tory policy, it’s easier to say the younger generation is wasting money on flat whites instead of sticking it in a Lifetime ISA.

Recently, for example, Tory backbenchers have been trying to scupper house-building targets in England and Wales by pushing to amend the levelling-up and regeneration bill. Rebels campaigned to make Whitehall housing targets advisory instead of mandatory, allow councils to ban building on green belts, and remove a presumption in favour of housing developments.

There is scant focus on the need for more homes for social rent.

Millennials are also having children far later than their parents’ generation. Reasons for this are multifaceted – and they include ones that could be framed as self-centred: women are more focused on their careers; travel and living overseas is far easier and more alluring; people are playing the field for longer rather than settling down.

But they also largely involve the daunting cost of having children and the knock-on effect of affordable housing shortages.

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Much has been made of the laziness of pitting boomer against millennial and the potential fallout from setting up generational wars but looking at this data, millennials, it would seem, really are politically different from their older peers.

We seem to take a collegiate approach to fixing social ills and have a far greater awareness of the need for a political rising tide rather than individual lifeboats.

Support for conservative parties has long been low among millennials but this data shows we are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in history, in both the US and the UK. The shift suggests the Tories have a millennial problem.

But, rather, millennials have a Tory problem. It’s difficult to look back over the past 13 years and come up with some meaningful positives the Conservative government has achieved for my generation. It’s going to take a significant pivot and serious policy to reverse the trend and shift us towards the right.

Instead, we’re seen as an electoral joke, plagued with the image of being nothing but soft whingers.

At the next General Election, millennials, and our friends in the next age group down, the Gen Zs, look likely to cast more votes combined than the boomers. Such power in such maligned, underestimated hands.

Well, revenge, as the saying goes, is a dish best served at the ballot box.