I’m so tired of politics depicted as the young versus the old
orgive me for being somewhat facetious, given the political landscape we currently find ourselves in, but I can’t help smiling at the image of Jeremy Corbyn as the Pied Piper of Brexit-land, leading the children away to a beautiful world where debt is wiped out and everyone gets a free HMV voucher and a book token (or whatever it is young people are incentivised with these days. I have no idea – I will be
37 next month).
Anyway, the “youthquake” is said to be responsible for Corbyn losing the election by just under 60 seats, as opposed to the 60,000 predicted when Theresa May had the bright idea of calling a snap election without consulting a single member of her Cabinet. I don’t know about you, but I woke yesterday morning from my 45-minute sleep with a real sense of optimism and hope. What a country we live in!
I’m not even joking. I couldn’t help but be cheered by rumours that the turnout of 18- to 24-yearolds had been 72 per cent – compared with 43 per cent in 2010 and 45 per cent in 2015 (and far higher than the blockbuster 68.7 per cent across the country).
Owen Jones, the darling of the Left who is only about 15, tweeted fervently about the triumph led by sixth-form students. “Here’s to Britain’s young. You were ridiculed. Patronised. Demonised, even. And you may have changed history.”
Even the Today programme got carried away with this apparent youthquake. “The markets today were more WTF than WTO,” said the business reporter yesterday, before adding, quickly: “Am I allowed to say that?” (No, I don’t think so, replied Nick Robinson, a lobby veteran who covered his first vote in 1802.) This, then, was the emoji election, and how long before some bright spark suggests that in future we mark our ballot papers with a series of doodles of smiley faces and thumbs pointing up?
Youth, it seems, is not wasted on the young. Pre-exit poll, the view of this demographic was perhaps best summed up by an anonymous Tory who told the Huffington Post: “Under-thirties love Corbyn, but they don’t care enough to get off their lazy arses to vote for him.” Apathetic, vapid, self-centred, an insult to the people who fought for the vote, there were real fears that 2017 was going to be a repeat of 2016 and 2015, whereby youthful whingers tweeted into their echo chambers about the unfairness of a democratic process they hadn’t actually bothered to take part in.
Not so this time. Nobody could complain that they were at Glastonbury. University terms were, mostly, still in full swing. Bruised from the Brexit vote not even a year ago, the young – furious that their futures had been decided by people who wouldn’t even be around to see them – apparently fought back. They showed everyone that they were prepared to do more than simply post surly status updates on social media.
They finally kicked Nick Clegg out for his tuition-fee betrayal. The snowflakes turned into icicles. They demonstrated what they were, and how heartening to learn that they are engaged in more than just their own backsides.
But, on closer inspection, the magic 72 per cent figure tweeted out by the likes of re-elected Labour MP David Lammy could not be pinned down. Lord Ashcroft’s polls showed that the demographic most likely to vote for the Labour Party were 18- to 24-year-olds, but this is hardly news worth holding a front page for (unlike, say, the lurid and unbelievable claims in his most recent book that David Cameron had sex with a pig). No data is collected about age groups during polling, and final figures about turnout will not be released for several weeks, according to Ipsos Mori. Fake news, in other words, has been spreading through social media. True, there was anecdotal evidence of queues snaking out of doors in university towns and, according to Owen Jones, “between a third and a half [of Labour campaigners] had never knocked on a door before”. But let us not forget that if the Labour vote really was shored up by young people, then these whippersnappers all voted for an old man with an allotment who, if rumours are to believed, voted to leave the EU. Indeed, if Corbyn had campaigned for Remain as hard as he did over the last few weeks, perhaps we would never have had this snap election in the first place.
In truth, very little about the last few days suggests a battle between baby boomers and millennials. Reports of a youthquake are – currently – greatly exaggerated; more like a two on the Richter scale.
And that, I think, is a good thing. It’s not that I want to do down millennials. Having been born in 1980, I am very, very occasionally even described as one myself. I have previously said that if the worst that can be said about the snowflake generation is that they are a sensitive, feeling bunch, seeking to stop others being hurt, then that is hardly a bad thing. Partly, my frustration at the notion of a youthquake is because the more we seek to stereotype and simplify each section of the electorate, the more likely we are to have a result that leaves us completely stupefied.
To whit: it was not just the Tories, or “Bluekip” as some Left-wingers dubbed them, who gained from the collapse of Ukip. Labour also did quite well out of Paul Nuttall’s humiliation.
But mostly, it is because I fear this desire to pitch young against old, to create a sort of inter-generational warfare in which newspapers gleefully report fallouts within families and heated arguments over dinner tables that have ended with relatives refusing to spend Christmas together. We have spent the past two weeks rallying against the politics of division.
Were we not, just six short days ago, praising the likes of Ariana Grande for creating an event that united the country? Did we not, just four days ago, all stand for a minute’s silence in remembrance of the eight people who lost their lives last Saturday at London Bridge? It was mostly young people who were targeted by Isil in these attacks. But those young people had mums, dads, aunts, uncles, grandparents. How can we talk about pulling together one week and then spit bile at each other the next?
Next weekend marks the oneyear anniversary of the murder of Jo Cox and a series of street parties and picnics will be held in her honour across the UK, as part of the Great Get Together initiative. Today, as we face yet more political turmoil, it would be good to remember the words from her maiden speech: “We have more in common than that which divides us.”
Another hung parliament might suggest a country torn in two, a black-and-white political system with no room for shades of grey. In reality, it shows us that, young or old, we are all a little unsure; in the words of one former prime minister, who ironically did his best to drive a wedge between the generations, we are all in this together.
This was the emoji election. How long before we mark our ballot papers with smiley faces?