Ed Miliband wants the youth vote enough to have spent an evening with Russell Brand earlier this week. My generation could decide the election next Thursday, and politicians seem to think there are two ways to win young voters’ hearts: celebrity endorsement and self-interest.
The battle for the youth vote has hinged around promising to save us money. Now they’re done bickering about tuition fees, the party leaders are busy telling students how we would personally benefit from their governments: Labour would ban unpaid internships, the Tories would help us buy our first homes and the Lib Dems would cut our bus fares by two-thirds.
But when it comes to young voters, self-interest doesn’t sell: we want a vision for society.
Politicians have got it into their heads that ideology is a vote-loser among the young: it has become a dirty word, used to smear the coalition’s cuts. The past five years have, David Cameron assures us, been spent under a government ‘led by people with a practical desire to sort out this country’s problems, not by ideology’. Practical it may be, but ‘take-it-as-it-comes’ politics isn’t very inspiring.
That the young want a vision for the future, not freebies, has long been obvious. In September, the response of Scottish young people to the question of independence was anything but apathetic: 68 per cent of eligible 16-24 year olds voted in the referendum, compared to the 44 per cent of 18-24 year old voters who cast a ballot in 2010.
The young vote with their hearts, and failing to heed this basic principle can prove politically fatal. In just two months, the Green party’s new anti-growth, anti-progress approach has seen them almost halve their share of the student vote – falling from 28 per cent to a dismal 15. Once the inspiring party of social justice and a cleaner planet, the Green vision is now just a list of things they disapprove of – and promising free university education hasn’t helped them hang on to the youth vote.
David Cameron would do well to learn from the Greens’ mistakes. Terrified of looking too Thatcherite, the Conservatives are the least visionary of the lot. Martin Freeman’s deeply misleading Labour election broadcast (which, incidentally, was a big hit with my friends) does at least attempt to set out a difference in values and vision.
Since the Big Society idea went quiet, there has been no discernible vision for a Conservative Britain: Cameron himself is supposed to be the vision. His official Twitter feed is plastered with online posters even more egotistical than the air-brushed billboard mugshots of 2010: prime-ministerial photos coupled with ‘inspiring’ quotes. The Tory election broadcast finishes with the Camerons eating dinner together.
We’re supposed to vote Conservative because we believe that Cameron will make the right decision in any given situation: his response to the emerging Ukraine crisis was to tweet a picture of himself looking serious on the phone to Obama. In the absence of an ideological programme, you end up with a cult of personality.
My generation should have the highest turnout rates in the country on 7 May, but instead we’re set to have the lowest. If they want to get the youth vote out next week, politicians should stop bribing us with cheap houses and tuition fee cuts, and start trying to sell us a vision.
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