For all its faults, and there were many, the Conservative party of my youth growing up in England was clearly a Christian party. Its conservatism included support for tradition, the established church, and the importance of our Christian heritage. Shops were not open on Sundays — and schoolchildren prayed Christian prayers every morning in the public schools. Although there were some good Christian socialists, it was the Anglican Church that was known as “the Conservative party at prayer” — but the rot was already setting in.

Coming home from school on winter nights in Britain in the early ’70s was a difficult experience for young children. The country was in crisis, held ransom at that time by the trade unions, notably the National Union of Mineworkers. Coal was running out due to constant strikes and, in January 1974, the Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, called for a “Three-Day Week,” which meant exactly what it said.

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Power was cut off, the lights went out and homes in the height of winter were bitterly cold. Coupled with the strikes, world oil prices were at astoundingly high rates due to the war between Israel and the Arabs.

My sister and I, aged nine and 10, would come home in the dark and gather around the one source of heat in the house, our coal-fired “Aga” or cooker — it was my job to go down to the cellar every day and fill up the coal-scuttle to keep the cooker going day and night.

My mother would make our supper, boil any water needed and, by candlelight, we would do our homework before taking a candle up to our cold bedrooms.

This was not the workhouse in a Charles Dickens novel — it was ordinary life in a 20th-century Britain held ransom by socialism.

Edward Heath called a snap election, rather like the unfortunate current Conservative leader, Theresa May, has done; it went as successfully for him as it did for her.

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The Labour party defeated the Conservatives but did not have a majority, so another election was called. Labour had a tiny majority and Britain drifted into decay and international irrelevance, with industrial unrest and failed socialist economic policies. That went on until the dawning of a new age, when Margaret Thatcher was elected as Conservative prime minister in the landslide victory of 1979 — the first time I was able to vote.

Just like Prime Minister Heath in the ’70s, Theresa May in 2017 did not need to call an election. She had a majority, she gambled, and she lost all the seats needed to keep that majority. The extraordinary thing about this election, rather like the last U.S. presidential election, was the youth vote — and where it went.

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Young people voted, apparently in large numbers, for the extreme socialism of Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, as in the U.S., where college students — educated into invincible ignorance at the great expense of their parents — rallied to an elderly socialist from Vermont by the name of Bernie Sanders. So in the United Kingdom, not the Greatest Generation but the most indulged generation flocked to support a man who not only espoused the failed socialism of the 1970s but who consorted with terrorists.

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The young, we were told, found both Corbyn and Sanders “authentic,” and that might, indeed, be true. They were, and are, authentic socialists; they both believe and advocate for economic policies that led to the ruin of Great Britain until Thatcher — and they hold up the failed states of Venezuela and Cuba as models. That’s an authenticity that leads to disaster; as former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once quipped, “Socialism is only workable in Heaven, where it is not needed, but not in Hell, where they have it already.”

As with all socialists, they promised lots of “free stuff,” as former President Barack Obama did — and we all have to admit, we like free stuff especially when someone else has paid for it. In my own home city of Canterbury, which has had a Conservative member of Parliament for 100 years, the sitting MP was defeated.

Interviewed the day after the elections, most young people mentioned tuition fees as a major reason they voted Labour — part of the Labour manifesto was to make tuition “free.”

The fact that 50,000 students happened to be in the city — because the semester had not finished — clearly had nothing to do with that outcome! Interviewed on local television the day after the elections, most of the young people mentioned tuition fees as a major reason they voted Labour, as part of the Labour manifesto was to make tuition “free.”

The young cannot be faulted for having no memory of what socialism is and does, but the “authenticity” of a system that has failed — and not just failed, but ultimately led to the gulags — needs an equally authentic, strong and convincing conservative response. Otherwise youthful naiveté will take us back to the future.

The real tragedy is that there is no real Conservative party in the U.K. Like so much of Europe and the West, we have cut ourselves adrift from the moorings: Christianity, tradition, respect, and the rule of law. Is there a leader who can convince idealists on both sides of the Atlantic that, as Margaret Thatcher said, that “the facts of life are conservative?”

Fr. Benedict Kiely is a Catholic priest and founder of Nasarean.org, which is helping the persecuted Christians of the Middle East.