The 2024 General Election has so far been dominated by issues which matter most to older voters. House prices, pensions, the NHS and the impact of immigration on care services have all been key talking points. Issues that resonate with younger voters, among them climate change and wages, have gone unaddressed. In the latest comment piece written in partnership with Pass the Mic, which tackles the under-representation and misrepresentation of women of colour in Scotland’s public life and media, Ellie Koepplinger looks at the dangers of apathy setting in. 

Rishi Sunak’s election announcement may go down as the cringiest Prime Ministerial podium speech in recent history. I loved every second.

Yet while I stayed late in the office to watch the announcement, glued to BBC Live like the political junkie I am, my twenty-something colleagues shrugged and giggled on their way out the door: “What even is a general election”?

It’s no secret that the challenges faced by today’s young people are uniquely disastrous. You’ve heard it before; climate change is an existential threat, inflation driving food prices to astronomical levels and bringing real wages down, et cetera et cetera. Ours is the first generation in centuries to be economically worse off than our parents. I’m supposed to be one of the lucky ones; I got a good degree from a good university, scrimped and saved, and am finally on the property ladder. Hurray! The twist? My new home is three times the price, yet a third of the size, of the house my parents bought in the ‘90s.

So it should surprise no one that tumultuous road ahead of us leads to political apathy. In the 2019 general election, turnout amongst under 25s was less than 50%. This makes unfortunate sense. As a generation, Scottish young people voted overwhelmingly to leave the United Kingdom in 2014, and we were ignored. We voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU in 2016; we were ignored. Many young people are asking themselves, why would this election – any election – be meaningfully different?

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What’s surprising to me, though, is the reluctance on the part of all parties to attempt to reverse this trend. I challenge you to find me a single student union in Scotland - perhaps even the UK -  with a consistent presence from any major political party.

This reluctance to engage young people is mired in the policies themselves. We all know the Tory vote is driven by older votes; fine. But if young people make up the largest potential voter base for Labour, then why wouldn’t Keir Starmer support free movement around Europe? Why won’t he commit to not privatising the NHS? Closer to home, the SNP’s commitment to free bus travel for under 22’s is a good start; but it’s too little to late to combat the meatier issues young people gripe about in the pub (like the Tory-engineered cost of living crisis).

It’s fair to want to blame social media, and yes, it’s true that my generation have wildly short attention spans. Yet at the same time, platforms like TikTok and Instagram bring a kind of visibility to political activism our elders never saw. Our feeds are full of young people organizing encampments for Palestinian liberation, or dissecting the opulence of the Met Gal, documenting queer pride protests in Ghana, or standing up for persecuted Uighurs in China.

Ellie KoepplingerEllie Koepplinger (Image: Gordon Terris/Herald Scotland)

Here lies the opportunity to reframe what political activism looks like in 2024, and we should commend the politicians who are leading this charge. Anum Sarwar of the SNP has ~30K followers, and both Grant Shapps (@grantshapps) from the Tories and Zarah Sultana (@zarahsulatnamp) from Labour also have meaningful followings. These politicians garner a well-deserved dedication amongst their fan-base, and do the work of bringing politics to where young people’s eyes are already focused.

To earn young people’s attention in this general election, parties should not look to fill feeds with manifestos. Rather, all parties should begin by catering those manifestos towards issues young people care about by actively including young voices in the policy making and manifesto writing process. The SNP’s commitment to having a young person sit on their National Executive Committee, for example, is a great place to start. This attitude should also be reflected in party communications, which could mean letting go of the typical stoicism we see in politics today towards a more progressive and inclusive tone of voice.

Britain is in danger of seeing record low turnout amongst young people; but it would be incorrect to assume that as a generation, we are simply disinterested. Any party that hopes for electoral success on July 4th must build a politics that centres and uplifts young voices.