You think broadband is expensive now? Just wait till it’s free. You don’t like the energy companies? Wait till they’re run by the state. Fed up with late trains? Oh boy, wait till someone tells you about British Rail.

The facts of life may be Conservative. But the facts of life are, by definition, learnt rather than intuited. No child – pace Gilbert and Sullivan – is born a little Conservative, because Conservatism rests on experience rather than theory. Or, to put it the other way around, socialism sounds perfectly reasonable until you try it.

Why, after all, have two companies producing the same thing when one can be reallocated to a more socially useful purpose? Why leave the economy to arrange itself higgledy-piggledy when central direction might eliminate inefficiencies? Why trust the profit motive over the accumulated intellectual resources of an entire state? These questions recur in every generation.

In reality, of course, socialism leads to misery and squalor every time it is implemented. Let me repeat that. Every. Time. It. Is. Implemented. But, because it sounds plausible as an abstract proposition, people who have no memory of its real-world failures keep coming back to it.

This difference in experience explains, in large measure, why there is such a vast disparity in voting intentions. According to YouGov, among voters over 70, the Conservatives lead Labour by 66 per cent to 10. Among those aged 18 to 29, Labour leads the Tories by 51 per cent to 20. That differential is not wholly new, of course. It rests on several factors, including parenthood, changes in people’s financial status and alterations in brain chemistry. But the gap has never been so wide, and the reason seems clear enough. Young people do not have any memory of socialism.