By Jack Schofield
Don’t underestimate the youth vote this election. Brexit has injected enormous political passion into young people. In Scotland the politicisation started even earlier – with the independence referendum in 2014.
In 2017 research found it was a “youthquake”, as it was dubbed, that took away Theresa May’s majority. Growing poverty, the commercialisation of higher education, and tackling the climate crisis with the seriousness it demands all motivate young people, but the top driver is the burning desire to stop what we see as the impending Brexit disaster. Because we are convinced Brexit will exacerbate every other problem and remove our rights for no gain.
In the youth’s quest it’s a matter of “so far, so good” – we’re still in the EU, are we not? And yet Brexit limps on. On Thursday young people have one central mission: finish what we failed to do last time. Knock Brexit dead.
Whereas older voters have had decades to build loyalty to one party, young people are much more fickle. It isn’t just in voting. In the past you had to buy a whole music album and be loyal to an artist. Now young people stream music and listen to the individual songs they like and ignore the rest. This floating habit will manifest itself in an unprecedented willingness to vote tactically to defeat the Tories on a seat-by-seat basis, whichever party that means opting for.
Yesterday young black and minority ethnic (BME) people from Boris Johnson’s outer-London constituency held FCK BORIS LIVE, a rave in support of ousting the Prime Minister from his own seat. In 2017 Grime4Corbyn held concerts which helped Labour achieve the 77 per cent vote among BME voters nationally that a study says it reached.
In the run-up to the 2017 election, voter registration surged to more than two million. For this election it was more than three million. About a third of these voters were already registered, because our system doesn’t enable you to check. Some commentators have taken this as reason to downplay the size of the next “youthquake”, but I view it differently. Young people are determined to make sure they are registered, and this shows they will then follow through and vote on the day.
In this age of social media, young people are taking their passion to everyone they’ve ever known, through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. Special photo filters and icons on Thursday will make voting look like “the thing to do”. Facebook also made it easy for Britons to share that they were registered to vote, with a link to the online form ahead of last month’s deadline. More than 300,000 people shared it. But many didn’t wait for Facebook’s prompting, having started sending out the link before the election was called.
Cold conditions and early nightfall don’t stop young people having numerous pre-Christmas nights out, so, as bleak as it gets, the fact the election is in December won’t keep them from having their say on who governs Britain.
Young people can’t decide the outcome alone, but we will be out in force, set on snatching a majority out from under the Tories yet again.
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