What does Britain’s election mean here?

Does the widely unexpected outcome of the snap British general election last week, which saw Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives lose their majority, carry lessons for our opposition parties ahead of our general election in September?

It’s a natural question, given the immediacy of that result, complicated somewhat by the rash of other big electoral decisions that have dominated headlines over the past year, in the United States, France and, most notably in relation to last week, the referendum on whether Britain should leave or remain in the European Union.

Brexit probably makes it difficult to draw too direct a correlation between Britain and New Zealand, because some of Labour’s surge in support will certainly have related to the Leave campaign’s benighted victory.

But there absolutely must be a lesson for opposition parties here in the Labour campaign’s success in drawing out the youth vote.

There are any number of impressive statistics one can quote about the youth influence on the British election.

For one, the turnout among those aged 18 to 24 is estimated at about two thirds, compared with just 43 per cent in 2015.

The number of ‘‘young people’’ registered to vote was nearly 250,000, compared with just 137,000 two years ago, according to a report in The Independent, citing data from Sky News.

Similarly, two thirds of voters in that age bracket are estimated to have voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, along with more than half of those aged 25-34 and 50 per cent in the 35-44 bracket, against 30 per cent for the Tories.

So why don’t young voters usually turn out in those sorts of numbers? And how do opposition parties in New Zealand get the youth vote out?

Is it as simple as saying young people feel the system simply doesn’t care for them?

And therefore, that getting them out is nothing more than a case of showing genuine care about their needs in drafting policy?

Certainly, in Britain, it won’t have been the young people reading the broadsheet newspaper op-ed columns pontificating about how Corbyn as leader meant certain electoral oblivion for Labour, or the character assassinations of Corbyn vomited out by the Sun and Daily Mail.

Instead, they would have been responding to Labour’s work at their level, its inspired slogan of ‘‘for the many, not the few’’, and Corbyn’s celebrity endorsements, by such figures as musician Stormzy – people they related to.

Right now, opposition parties here seem to be tied up in accusations of being antiimmigration, when clearly that’s a dramatic over-simplification of their policies.

Do they try to argue their way out, or totally change tack? After all, it’s only 12 years since Labour used interest-free student loans to win another three years in power.