According to Ed Miliband, my generation is about to be disenfranchised by the coalition. He’s getting quite worked up about it. On Thursday, he accused David Cameron and Nick Clegg of…
“sitting by and watching hundreds and thousands of young people in our country lose their sacred democratic rights.”
So what’s going on? By what treachery is my generation being disenfranchised? Well, in an attempt to reduce fraud the government is removing the option to register everyone in a household at once – all voters, young and old, must now add themselves individually to the electoral roll. One of the effects of this is that universities can no longer register students living on campus: undergraduate have to do it themselves, like everyone else. Labour argues that this somehow means they’re losing their “sacred” rights.
It’s true that the number of registered voters has decreased by almost a million in the past year. A study conducted by Labour has revealed that the decline has been particularly marked in university towns. Cardiff saw a 9% decline in the number of people on the electoral role, while Newcastle and Nottingham had drops of 9% and 6% respectively. London lost almost 100,000 registered voters. In Oxford, registrations in some wards with large student populations fell by almost 60%.
So Ed Miliband’s talk about falling numbers of student voters doesn’t surprise me: I’m a student living in one of those Oxford wards, and many of my friends’ names don’t appear on the electoral roll. Just before the start of the Christmas holidays, we got an anxious email from our college: apparently less than half of students who should have registered had done so, despite being sent numerous reminders throughout the term. For the college that produced five members of this government’s first cabinet, it’s not a good showing.
That Individual Voter Registration is set to reduce the number of young voters is certainly depressing, but it doesn’t mean its a bad system. It might well be that young people look at the electoral menu, and yawn. When faced with a choice between filling in a form, or not voting at all, they go for the second option – perhaps because they’re not excited by the idea of enstooling Ed Miliband (or protecting David Cameron).
Ed Miliband seems to think that 16-year-olds are capable of casting a considered ballot, only to be horrified at the suggestion that 20-year-olds should be asked to fill out their own voter registration forms. So what does this say about what he really thinks about British under-25s? We could be forgiven for thinking that the Labour leader is hoping that ‘unthinking’ but generally left-wing young voters will give him a nice boost in the polls – which also doesn’t say much about his confidence in his own policy ideas.
So no, Ed, young British people are not being disenfranchised – merely asked to spend five minutes putting their name on the roll. Even students who completed their education under 13 years of Labour rule should be able to manage his. Is it really a “democratic scandal”? Listening to his rhetoric, you’d think the situation was akin to that faced by African-Americans in the post-Civil War South.
Miliband’s hysteria anyway serves as a helpful reminder: Ed Miliband is not the leader young people need. I want a Prime Minister who thinks I am, actually, capable of filling out a two-page form.
Comments