I am 20 years old and at a Russell Group university but have yet to meet anyone my age wanting to go into politics. They must exist, perhaps somewhere in the depths of my university’s debating chambers or among the student members of the usual mainstream political parties.
Unfortunately, to the chagrin of my deeply politically engaged Thatcherite granddad and my Corbynite aunt, spending time actively pursuing politics isn’t for me.
But what about my friend who is the editor of an award-winning student newspaper? Or my ex-roommate, a terrifyingly intelligent mathematician three internships deep in Canary Wharf? Sadly, it’s not for them either.
The truth is that the majority of people around my age show only a passing interest in politics, usually sufficient to sling snowballs from the sidelines but not enough to offer anything constructive.
In short, students can quite happily tear into politics with an undergraduate’s passion but are mostly unwilling to contribute anything in return. I’m afraid my generation’s true default mode is apathy: we tend to shrug off Boris Johnson’s litany of howlers with mild amusement rather than anger.
Why are we like this? My hunch is that we have become so used to political turmoil that it has begun to feel like business-as-usual – it is all we have grown up with.
If you are around my age, your first stirrings of political awareness may well have begun with the 2008 recession like mine did. Since then, we have lived through Afghanistan, Brexit, Trump’s America, still-raging culture wars, an inexorably heating planet, a pandemic, party-gate, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and now we are staring down the barrel of a huge economic downturn. In the face of all that, a career in politics feels pointless to many young people, the problems too huge to tackle and change.
Part of the problem is that my generation uses the internet as its major news source (Ofcom, 2021). There is no six o’ clock news on Twitter, no neat and orderly presentation of political news, just an endless flow of information. National and global events can be followed in real time, accompanied by an ever-updating commentary. This degree of access to the world unsurprisingly galvanizes interest behind political causes, but it can also overwhelm.
What would typically be a little story becomes a big one, a geographically distant event suddenly feels very close. For a young person, what good is it running in a Northampton council election if your political awareness has always been global instead of local; cynical rather than constructive; concerned with the systemic rather than the particular?
That being said, I still sense many young people are acutely politically conscious. Millions of us worldwide rallied behind Black Lives Matter following George Floyd’s killing; thousands of schoolkids walked out of school following Greta Thunberg’s example.
Another issue, apart from one of information overload and problems too large to fix, is that only 19% of young adults in the UK feel that democracy actively serves them. Why would young people take part in a political system when their only experience of it is the various ways in which it has upset or wronged them?
What can we do? We can’t be permanently enraged without a threat ultimately to our mental health and even our sanity, but neither is it useful to retreat into apathy or deep cynicism, because this way offers no solutions.
Somehow we must plot a middle path that allows my generation to participate more meaningfully in party politics and from which we can feel that our contributions count.
In the longer run, British democracy, if it is to thrive, needs a deeper pool of talent from which we can choose our future leaders. But I can understand all too well why there’s no long queue of young people straining to enter party politics.
By Jack Coombs, a university student and former intern at Paternoster Communications
