The fewer young people that vote, the worse for the future of Britain

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/18/fewer-young-people-vote-worse-for-britain

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‘Fuck David Cameron!” some chanted while others burnt effigies of Nick Clegg. In November 2010, the government got the shock of its early life. Student protests against tuition fees turned violent when some demonstrators broke into the headquarters of the Conservative party, trashed the reception area and occupied the roof crying: “Greece! France! Now here too!” During further demonstrations to coincide with the parliamentary vote a month later, protesters broke windows at the Supreme Court, urinated on the statue of Winston Churchill, scaled the Cenotaph to rip down the union flag and ambushed Prince Charles and Camilla on their way to the Royal Variety Performance, pelting their limousine with paint bombs. The coalition pressed on with the vote to triple fees, but these eruptions sent a ripple of fear down the spine of the government. I recall one senior minister shuddering to me: “The next five years could be like this.” The Labour MP John McDonnell, a participant in the peaceful side of the protests, was excited: “This is the biggest workers’ and students’ demonstration in decades. It just shows what can be done when people get angry. We must build on this.”

What we know now is that both the thrilled leftwinger and the troubled minister were completely wrong. One of the interesting things about the past five years is how little street opposition there has been to the government. There was one other spasm of disorder the following August in London and several other big cities, but that was not an organised protest against the coalition but an outbreak of smashing and looting. And it turned out to be a one-off summer lightning rather than the long tempest of rage that some had predicted. This apparent quiescence has sustained Tory confidence that, whatever the opinion polls might say, they can prevail when the country makes its decision in May. It has also emboldened the Conservatives to propose a further big squeeze on public spending should they win.

Most striking of all is the lack of visible revolt by young people. If ever there was a time when they had cause to rebel, you might think it would be now. The squeeze on living standards has bitten most deeply on the young. It has been easier for employers to deny wage rises to younger workers who are less well-established in their careers. The young are also the most vulnerable to exploitative zero-hours contracts. People of my generation didn’t expect to be paid much when we secured our first job, but we did expect to get paid something. Many of the young now stoically accept that the entry price for employment is to take unpaid internships. Even with the return of growth, the big economic picture continues to favour older age groups at the expense of the young. The prolonged period of abnormally low interest rates, combined with quantitative easing, has inflated the value of assets, which are concentrated in the hands of the more advanced in years. Rising house prices have been a boon for those who got on to the property escalator when homes were more affordable. For the young, it puts home ownership even further out of reach.

Whenever the government has had a difficult spending choice to make, it has typically put protecting the interests of wrinklies first and the non-wrinkled last. The coalition blithely broke the Lib Dems’ promise on tuition fees. By contrast, the welfare entitlements of pensioners have been treated as sacrosanct. Whenever it has been suggested within government that benefit reductions that hit the young ought to be balanced by removing some of the perks enjoyed by wealthier pensioners, David Cameron has vetoed the suggestion. He isn’t going to risk his silver vote.

The opening weeks of the long campaign have been dominated by the NHS, with the parties competing to promise extra cash for the health service. Young people get ill and affection for the NHS is expressed across all age groups, but let’s be blunt: spending on health is predominantly spending on the old. They consume far more health care than the young. Each additional £1bn pledged to the NHS is £1bn not available to spend on, say, education or housing.

The coalition’s favouritism towards the upper end of the age spectrum has created an opportunity for Labour. The party’s promises to build more homes, cap rents and invest in apprenticeships will be enlarged upon, so I am told, when Labour publishes a “manifesto for the young”. Our recent big poll on the views of the youngest cohort of voters was superficially terrific news for Labour. It enjoyed a 15% lead over its nearest rival, the Tories. Other pollsters find similarly.

Eighteen- to 25-year-olds rate Ed Miliband much higher than his rivals and the young are the one age group who reckon him to be the best candidate for prime minister. This could be a critical advantage when around 3.3 million young people will have their first opportunity to vote in a general election. The millennial generation has the potential to make a decisive difference in a tight contest. Yet Labour can’t turn its advantage into an electoral dividend if many of the young don’t vote. The party’s fear that they won’t was behind Mr Miliband’s visit to Sheffield to deliver a speech at the university just over the border from Nick Clegg’s constituency. The Labour leader accused the coalition of “betraying” young people by letting them drop off the electoral register. Labour people mutter about the coalition parties having a vested interest in leaving younger voters disenfranchised. The government retorts that changing the system from household to individual registration was started by Labour.

This partisan scrap is the symptom of a much more profound problem. The old are generally privileged by the political classes over the young for a very simple reason: the old are much more likely to use their vote. At the last election, 76% of the over-65s voted, which was going on for double the turnout among 18-24 year olds, just 44 % of whom voted. Turnout across the whole population was 65%. Politicians draw the obvious conclusion when they are thinking about which segments of the electorate they should try to charm.

The Labour frontbencher Sadiq Khan recently observed: “If you have got a candidate with an hour spare and a choice to go to an old people’s home or a sixth form college, 99% of campaign managers will say you’ve got to go to an old people’s home.”

It hasn’t been always the case that the young voted a lot less than the old and there are a variety of theories that try to explain why this gap has opened up. A high falutin’ one suggests that, in an individualistic age, young people are much less tribal in their habits, including their political ones, than their parents and grandparents. Added to which the general alienation from Westminster is sharpest among the young. The recent surge for the Greens, who, with just the one MP, are hard to blame for anything, has been powered by young voters. A more prosaic explanation for why many of the young don’t get on the electoral register is that they move about more and are harder to capture on party databases.

Various worthy campaigns are dedicated to increasing turnout among the young, among them Bite the Ballot, Swing the Vote, and The League of Young Voters. The proliferation of these organisations is a sign in itself of the size of the problem. Labour has recruited what it clunkingly calls “student vote activators”. One suggested solution is to lower the voting age to 16. Better and more civics teaching would help. Everyone says social media should be part of the solution and all the parties are trying to exploit it, but little of their effort is imaginative. A typical politician’s tweet will read: “A brilliant afternoon’s canvassing in Acacia Avenue.” That puts me to sleep and I’m paid to monitor them. What would really help is politicians who speak to issues that preoccupy the young and in ways that they find attractive. Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and the Scottish referendum battle showed that younger voters can be the most politically roused of age groups when engaged by politicians who inspire them and issues that excite them.

Something needs to be done because there is a serious danger that this will become self-perpetuating. The less the young vote, the more politicians will feel they can ignore them without risk of being punished at the ballot box. The less politics has to offer to the young, the less they are likely to vote. I don’t see a great future for Britain if it turns into a gerontocracy in which the political classes privilege the interests of the old over investing in the young. There’s quite a lot of evidence that if you don’t get into the voting habit when young, you may never do. That raises the threat of ever decreasing turnouts at elections and governments with less and less claim to have a proper mandate from the people.

Failing to get the young to the polling stations in May could rob Labour of victory. That is one party’s problem at one election. If we don’t address this deficit in our democracy, it will become everyone’s problem at every election.