If Labour has “captured the mood of the times”, the Tories have captured the mood of the old-timers. That was the overwhelming sense I got at my first party conference. At the Tories’ gathering in Birmingham, I saw no equivalent of the Labour activists in their teens and 20s, with whom I went to university and who turned out in droves at the last election. In their place, there were clutches of 50- and 60-year-olds at fringe events discussing how to win over the under-40s.

Convincing that cohort will be the first hurdle in a long race. In the 2017 election, a 30-year-old was almost twice as likely to vote Labour as a 70-year-old. The Tories know that time is ticking against them.

The answer, they are convinced, is to take action on housing. Home ownership among young adults on middle incomes has more than halved in the past 20 years. It’s hard to remake the case for property-owning capitalism when my generation barely has a chance of owning property at all. That’s why Theresa May announced that she would scrap the limit on councils borrowing to build new homes. She also sought to present her party as inclusive of all identities, pointing to Sajid Javid and Ruth Davidson as living proof.

But the Tories’ pitch to the centre ground won’t do much for people in their early 20s. Lifting the borrowing cap now won’t make them cool – that has been Labour policy since April, as part of a plan intended to address declining home ownership and soaring rents. On its own, the measure will take years to bear fruit. Meanwhile, the Tories are all but paralysed on other major areas such as education and welfare. Many of them know it; when I told a cabinet minister at the conference that his party had nothing to offer young generations, he seemed to agree.

To us, the Tories seem as though they’re trying to mend a leaky tap in a burning building. They appear to be ideologically averse to intervening in the system we see as broken. At a fringe event, I watched Javid get asked how he would hypothetically spend the £40bn windfall if the UK refused to pay its Brexit divorce bill. I was struck by his answer: he said, to rapturous applause, that he’d rather hand it back to the taxpayers it came from. With £40bn, you could fund more than 80% of Labour’s manifesto. I can think of no clearer example of that difference in vision.

That’s why Labour has an offer that to many young people is irresistible. We are more aware than ever that we live in one of the most enduringly unequal, class-divided countries in Europe. For a young couple hoping to become parents, the prospect of juggling two full-time jobs and childcare in an uncertain economic climate where wages are stagnating is truly daunting. Nice houses and top jobs are reserved for a select few whose parents have cash and connections. The Tories have only just begun to acknowledge this and so are playing catch-up. To us, a pledge to end austerity is unconvincing, coming from the leader of the party of austerity. And claims to embrace diversity sound hollow from the architect of the “hostile environment” immigration policy, whose cabinet is made up of four women and 18 men.

Determined not to be seen as the party of no change, May has opted to become the party of a little change. That may yet work for older Labour voters who cannot stomach Jeremy Corbyn. But while May tries to woo those looking for a party that is “decent, moderate and patriotic”, for many young people the state of Britain calls for something much more radical. If the Tories are serious about capturing young votes, they need to shed their image as the establishment party and craft a bold domestic programme geared at helping our generation get ahead. But with the government divided and Brexit taking up its entire bandwidth, that doesn’t seem likely to happen soon. That’s why young people like me feel like we’re at the heart of Corbyn’s programme, while in May’s, we’re little more than a footnote.

• Eleni Courea is the winner of the prestigious Anthony Howard award for young journalists 2018