Wednesday was budget day: that time of year when the chancellor moves money around ostensibly to manage the economy, when really it’s to give us all a reason to vote their party back into power come the next election.

And it is with that in mind that we turn to the millennial railcard, one of the measures heavily trailed in the budget’s run-up. The government is promising to extend the cheaper train fares that apply for the under-26s to those aged 26-30, presumably as a way of signalling that it cares about the fortunes of young people. Actually, the railcard functions more as a symbol of the kind of government we have: one that recognises that young people in this country are in economic crisis, but hasn’t got the faintest idea of what to do about it.

Q&A What is a millennial? Show Although precise definitions differ, broadly speaking millennials are those people born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. They are so called because they turned 18 in or after 2000. They are also collectively known as Generation Y

One can just imagine the Conservatives, who seem to have reconstituted themselves as a lobbying firm for the elderly in recent years, trying to come up with some little doozy that might distract today’s youth from rising house prices, spiralling debt, a precarious job market and the fact that two thirds of the world’s cities may soon be underwater. A railcard is just one step away from offering a £25 Topshop voucher to every young person who votes Tory. In fact, perhaps a Topshop voucher might have been better, since the railcard doesn’t apply to the peak trains millennials use to get to work. Millennials will even end up funding it themselves: according to the Treasury it will be “revenue neutral”, because it will help fill less popular off-peak services.

There were other measures aimed at the young in the budget – and some of them weren’t a total disaster. The chancellor promised that 300,000 new homes would be built every year by 2025, which is good, but won’t exactly help young people today who are currently deserting the Conservatives in droves.

But the promise of housebuilding was overshadowed by the abolition of stamp duty for first-time buyers of homes worth up to £300,000. This appallingly wrong-headed policy, supposedly the government’s flagship housing announcement, has only moved homeowners from the frying pan into the fire. The Office for Budget Responsibility says those who stand to gain most from this announcement are sellers, not buyers. It even thinks the resulting increase in house prices forecast could be higher than the savings from the cut in stamp duty, leaving first-time buyers in an even more unaffordable situation than they were before.

A lot of column inches have been filled discussing why young people in debt are no longer voting for a party that was founded as the political wing of the landed gentry. The free-market policies championed by the Conservatives – and New Labour – over the last 40 years have ended the promise of decent wages, home ownership and a stable future for these young people, but the Conservatives are not ergonomically built to rectify that. They are, and always have been, the party of the 1%: they can’t solve the housing crisis any more than a great white shark can be vegetarian. They’re just not designed that way.

My colleague Owen Jones was once at a meeting where an influential Tory grandee confided that the party was a “coalition of privileged interests. Its main purpose is to defend that privilege. And the way it wins elections is by giving just enough to just enough other people.” Young people are not fools, and they have observed this about the Conservatives themselves.

And so the Tories are left with the somewhat intractable problem of recognising that things are bad for young people, while being duty bound to implement policies that will probably make everything worse. They’re sticking with austerity, which has hammered the job market, slowed economic growth and closed public services. And they might talk a good game on protecting the climate for future generations, but they just couldn’t resist slipping in a tax break for North Sea oil.

Even in terms of housing, they’ve got some obligation to keep prices high to keep their pensioner base happy. Young people have been failed by the free market and they want something different, but for the Tories to deliver would require them to go against everything they, their core vote, and their donor class stands for. And this is without even mentioning the fact that young people’s views on social issues deviate wildly from those of the Tory base.

So, yes, the railcard is a symbolic gesture, but perhaps not in the way that the Tories intended. Like the budget itself, the railcard looks shiny and appealing but really doesn’t do much good at all. It’s a symbol of a party that is intellectually bankrupt when it comes to the concerns of young people.

• Ellie Mae O’Hagan is an editor at openDemocracy and a freelance journalist