Picture the scene. A cavernous school hall somewhere in Britain. Thirty or so local people argue passionately about the future of the Labour Party. There’s so much knowledge, so much experience in this hall – probably over a thousand years-worth of commitment to the cause. These people epitomise the deep, visceral loyalty to the Labour movement common to so many of their generation. It’s impressive and it’s moving. But you can’t help noticing that there’s hardly anyone here under 50 years of age, and most are a great deal older. So where are the young ones?
I’ve visited about 40 constituencies over the last year and at only one, in a university town, were there more than four people present under the age of 30. And the same thing seems to be true at many union meetings. Despite the heroic efforts of a handful of visionaries at Congress House and in some of the more progressive trade unions, the impact of young people on many parts of the Labour movement has been negligible. Scan the hall at the TUC conference. How many young faces do you see? Even fewer than black ones!
Not that changing this culture is easy. A couple of years ago I took part in a TUC initiative which had the specific aim of attracting young people as conference delegates. In addition to their usual delegation, each union was encouraged to invite two youth delegates, for whom special events, training sessions and entertainment would be arranged. The result? Only a handful of unions responded, and we ended up with the grand total of 25 youth delegates over four days, many of whom admitted they were part of that rare breed of young activist who would have been members of their union’s delegation anyway, but who took the youth nomination simply to increase the size of their delegation.
It has been argued by some in my own union that this isn’t a problem to get hot under the collar about. Young people nowadays are individualists in a cut-throat market place, the argument goes. They need to expend their energies on getting trained, finding a job, and forging ahead with their careers. Their leisure time is crammed with intoxicating possibilities. They haven’t got time for politics. They’ll come round to a more political way of seeing things when they’re older with more responsibilities.
This argument may be superficially attractive if you’re getting on a bit and don’t want your boat rocked by young slip-of-a-things. Particularly if, in order to attract them, you might have to relinquish the committee position you’ve held for the last decade, or be forced to rethink how, when and why you do the things you do on that committee. But the notion that political engagement tends to arrive late in life doesn’t bear close scrutiny. Indeed, the post-war experience in Britain seems to indicate that the opposite is true. The new generation of MPs in the Attlee government were radicalised by their youthful experiences in the war, and once our higher education system began to expand, many political leaders were forged on the anvil of student politics and debating societies. While there are a few honourable exceptions, it’s hard to imagine a whole new Labour leadership emerging fully formed in middle-age. Surely if we care about the future of the trade union movement, and we want to take up Tony Blair’s challenge to make Labour the natural party of government in the twenty-first century, then we must recognise that seizing the imagination of the young is a priority that has been ignored for far too long.
However, the Labour Party and the unions are probably better positioned to respond to this challenge than many other political parties. Labour Students still flourishes, there are some well-organised and active Young Labour branches, and the traineeships for the young run by the TUC at its organising academy have injected a well needed sense of urgency into the debate. Indeed, a new seat on the TUC General Council has recently been created specifically to represent youth. Whereas the Young Conservatives, who at their peak had a staggering 250,000 members, saw membership drop to approximately 3500 before they disbanded in 1998.
At first glance, the fact that other British parties are worse than Labour at recruiting and retaining members might seem cause for celebration. But I doubt it. A democracy requires flourishing political parties, and citizens who are impelled to vote for them. As less and less people become engaged with the political process, its very legitimacy can be called into question. Our government is only able to function because of a loosely held assumption that it has the right to legislate. The people have spoken, and they’ve willed it to be so. If only fifteen people out of every thousand vote, as happened recently at a polling station in Sunderland, whose will is that? And Sunderland is only an extreme example of a developing trend. Labour won its historic 1997 victory on the lowest turnout since 1935. On 10 June 1999 the percentage of people voting in the Leeds Central by-election fell to a record low of 19.6 percent. In the European elections on the same day, turn-out was a dismal 23.3 percent. According to Paul Richards in the Fabian essay Is the Party Over? political party membership in the UK fell from 9.4 percent in 1980 to 3.3 percent in 1990. And these chilling figures are duplicated throughout Europe. In Denmark the fall has been from 21.1 percent to 6.5 percent, in Austria 26.2 percent to 21.8 percent, Finland 18.9 percent to 6.5 percent, The Netherlands 9.4 percent to 2.9 percent.
So, is this because in our fractured, computerised, stay at home society people are no longer joiners, and are happy to cede control over the outside world to an elite class of political engineers? Other figures don’t seem to bear this out. While membership of political parties is declining, pressure groups and campaigning organisations have been growing by leaps and bounds. Voluntary agencies, like Oxfam and Save the Children, which propose radical solutions to developmental problems, have massive support, membership of Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace has risen from 55,000 to 550,000 in 25 years, and the National Trust now has more members than all the political parties put together.
Could it be then that it’s simply the act of voting which has fallen out of favour? Again, the opposite would seem to be true. Phone, fax and e-mail opinion polls have never been so popular. Thousands of people, particularly the young, vote for the Man of the Match after the televised Premier League match every Sunday, and millions participate in TV voting. One week my son voted 35 times in order to keep Mel in the Big Brother house. I don’t doubt that simplifying the procedures for postal voting will ensure more participation and experiments to locate polling stations in pubs, clubs, supermarkets and fish ‘n chip shops are to be welcomed. But they only address the symptoms, not the malaise. If people in general, and the young in particular, are failing to engage politically, it is because they are alienated from the political process. For my son and his friends, the word ‘politics’ is synonymous with ‘naff’ or ‘drear’. It epitomises everything that is dull, repetitive, pompous and middle-aged.
So do we have to accept that this disenchantment is an inevitability or is it possible to buck the trend? I am cautiously optimistic. It is clearly not real politics with which the young have grown disenchanted. However cynical they might be about politicians, they are still passionate about the national minimum wage, student grants, GM foods, housing, transport – and the price of beer! Their contempt is for political forms which have outlived their usefulness. Labour and the European social democratic parties were born out of the coming of universal suffrage. However radical their political aspirations may have been, these parties were created simply as mobilizing machines to deliver this mass vote for a new breed of politicians.
Times have changed and so have people’s expectations. And yet party rhetoric and party structures far too often seem frozen in the reality of the late nineteenth century. All of us involved in politics spend vast swathes of our time saying and doing things that are of no relevance to anyone outside the charmed circle of political activists. As former Labour Party Assistant General Secretary David Pitt-Watson points out: “About one percent of party time is spent on recruitment… while 20 percent or more is spent on internal party meetings. The fact is that if you look at it objectively, the party is more concerned with being a meeting place for its own members than in being a vehicle for representing others. It falls far short of being the people’s party we want to create.” Today’s young aren’t stupid. They can see this. If we can have the humility to reach out more, to discuss with people the things they want to talk about, at times convenient to them and in an environment that is welcoming, warm and comfortable, then I believe we can be even more successful than the National Trust. The 21st Century Party initiative has taken us the first few tottering steps down this road. But it should be seen only as the beginning, not the end, of a process of radical transformation.
In fact opportunities for change are on offer and the new Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act could be one such catalyst. Every organisation closely associated with a political party now has to have a much clearer financial relationship with that party. This means that Labour Students can no longer be, on the one hand, autonomous, but on the other dependent, on Labour Party cash to fund its sabbatical officers and organisation. A rethink will be required. This could simply involve a bureaucratic fudge which ultimately leaves things much as they were, or we could use it as an opportunity for a complete reappraisal of the youth wing of the party.
Currently there is very little for Labour Students to do between elections. They are often viewed within the party as, at best, politically irrelevant and, at worse, as potential Trots who must be firmly managed. Either way they are marginalised. Likewise little attention is paid to the development of Young Labour groups. Every year a few such groups spring to life when a regional organiser encourages the leadership potential of a handful of committed young people. But being young they tend to move on, and once they leave such groups tend to wither and die. But if youth development was seen as a genuine priority, if the resources and personnel were on hand to support and develop young activists, I’m confident they would begin to develop a culture which would attract more and more of those who are currently put off by the dead hand of constituency politics.
Not that we should do this simply to increase our membership. We should do it in order to increase our understanding of the world. The young have an ease and familiarity with the new technologies which the rest of us will never acquire. They have been brought up from birth in a multi-cultural society, and most feel at home with it. From the moment they leave school they are confronted by work patterns totally different to the ones most of us have experienced.
I don’t want to romanticize the young. They represent only one part of the human experience. But they have vital insights and experience which we need if we are really to be the radical party of the twenty-first century. Not that we should rush into instant top down solutions to the problem of youth recruitment. But if we can agree that a coherent youth policy is a number one political priority over the next few years, and if that agreement can involve action and resources rather than empty words, we should be able to create the climate in which imaginative solutions can be found. Only then will we be able to move towards a genuine 21st Century Party.
One final picture. The evening after I started writing this article I drove down to Clevedon, near Bristol. A young party member (he was actually the youngest delegate at last year’s Labour Party conference) had invited me to a meeting of his Young Labour group. It wasn’t an exclusive meeting. He’d put up posters all over town inviting anyone under 25 to come along for a chat. A couple of dozen people turned up. There was beer, a few nibbles, lots of balloons and we just talked about politics. People were encouraged to say what they wanted. It wasn’t evangelical, no-one waved membership forms about. And after an hour and a half everyone left in a spirit of friendship, saying they knew more now than they had when they arrived. It was one of the best political meetings I’ve ever been to. And before they left, three people said they wanted to join the Labour Party!