The me me me generation can swing the next election. If it can be bothered

According to IPPR, just 32 per cent of 18-to-24 year-olds voted in the May local elections, compared with 72 per cent of those aged over 65.

It isn’t only local elections where young people don’t turn out to vote, either. Just 39 per cent of eligible 18-to-24 year-olds voted in the 2001 general election, falling to 37 per cent in 2005 and rising again to 44 per cent in 2010 – still well below the national average.

As if the two things are related, young people are also being hit hardest by coalition spending cuts. 16-to-24-year-olds face cuts to services worth 28 per cent of their annual household income, compared with 10 per cent of the income of those aged 55-74, according to IPPR.

This is why narcissistic celebrities calling on young people to disengage even further from the political process is so unhelpful. The problem young people face is that politicians hardly listen to them as it is. The reason they don’t, however, is quite simple, and has nothing to do with the usual buzzwords of inequality, Thatcherism, big business et cetera ad nauseum. Young people don’t pretend to use their collective voice and therefore politicians don’t pretend to listen to them. And why would they? It would make about as much sense as formulating policy for an imaginary constituency of little green men: if you won’t be turning out on polling day, why would anyone give a damn about what you think?

There is, of course, the usual chicken-and-egg argument: do young people decline to vote because they get so little from politicians, or do they get so little because they choose not to vote? A glance at the way politicians pander to pensioners as each parliament approaches its termination, however – pensioners who are almost certain to turn out to vote – should make it fairly clear that it’s the latter.

I also suspect that the problem of apathy among the young is more deepseated than most of us have thus far chosen to recognise. There are more reasons than ever today for young people to engage in the political process: there is no longer any such thing as a job for life, a university education incurs a prohibitive debt, and for most young people the prospect of buying a home is little more than a pipe dream. And yet my generation, and those younger than me, still choose not to do the only thing in our power to change things: to take 10 minutes once every few years to turn up at a polling station.

Some people make the fashionable argument that the three main political parties are ‘all the same’ when rationalising why they themselves don’t vote or in seeking answers to the broader phenomenon of apathy among the young. I have very little time for this argument, and it tends, in my view, to indicate either a level of detached privilege – ie it makes no difference to *me* who is in power – or an unwillingness to actually look at anything in any detail. There is also no reason to think that older voters are any more credulous than the young in this respect; if there really was no difference between the parties it’s unlikely only the young would notice.

It isn’t verifiable, but I suspect the disinclination of the young to vote has something to do with the generational retreat from other forms of collectivism, such as trade unionism. This perhaps helps to explain why so much of the opposition to austerity has been defined by autonomous rebellion rather than through collective structures, such as unions and political parties. It isn’t so much that the political system is broken, or that trade unionism is not an effective bargaining tool; it’s that young people are far less willing to sacrifice their own individual ‘voice’ and be absorbed into a larger movement. We’re forever encouraged to express our ‘individuality’ these days, and as a result we seem to have forgotten than most change comes as a result of sacrificing at least a bit of that individuality for the greater good.

I don’t pretend to have the answers when it comes to getting young people to vote. I’m fairly sure, however, that the blame can’t be laid squarely at the door of politicians for youth disengagement from the political process. Perhaps this has more to do with me hitting 30 and (inevitably) shuffling gradually to the right, but in my own humble opinion it’s about time my young comrades demonstrated a bit more personal responsibility and a lot less narcissism. Apathy is fine – so long as you don’t complain when politicians are apathetic about you, too.

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James Bloodworth is editor of Left Foot Forward and writes a weekly column for Progress. He tweets @J_Bloodworth

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Photo: lamont_cranston