YOUTHQUAKE!
Social media left TV in the shade as young found their political voice
Afew days before the poll, I was in Oxford, talking to my old college’s history society. The conversation turned to the election, and a student remarked that Jeremy Corbyn was harnessing the power of social media such as facebook and Twitter.
I am ashamed to say I rather scoffed. ‘ Rubbish,’ I said. ‘ People said that about ed Miliband, and look what happened to him!’ well, how wrong I was. for I now think that when political historians look back on the extraordinary election of 2017, they will remember two things.
first, this I believe was the campaign when social media supplanted television as the key means of political communication. And second, this was the campaign when, after decades of relative neglect, young people finally discovered their political voice.
The place that encapsulates all this is Canterbury – a city that had voted Conservative since 1918.
As recently as the 1970s, the Tories routinely piled up five-figure majorities. for decades, a Labour victory would have seemed inconceivable.
But just look at what happened on Thursday.
The long-serving Conservative MP, Sir Julian Brazier, saw his vote increase from 22,918 to 25,385. But with turnout up by a staggering 8 per cent – thanks to a massive voter registration drive on social media – Labour increased its vote from 13,120 to 25,572 and won the seat.
In the vanguard were students at the University of Kent, where academics reported seeing huge queues at the polling stations.
But what happened in Canterbury was merely part of a wider story.
Analysts have talked of an unprecedented ‘youthquake’. An exit poll by the NMe music magazine, which enthusiastically backed Jeremy Corbyn, suggested that national turnout among the under35s rose by a stunning 12 per cent.
who were these people? By and large, they were students – which explains why turnout also sharply in university seats such as Bristol west, Cambridge, Manchester Central and Oxford west and Abingdon.
These are the people most likely to get their news and political opinions from facebook and Twitter.
Almost from the moment the election began, they began sharing jokes and ‘memes’ – electronically transmitted images that are often crude and vitriolic,
but effective nonetheless – trumpeting Corbyn’s supposed virtues and May’s alleged vices.
There was often a very unpleasant side to this, of course.
For all the talk of a ‘kinder, gentler’ politics, Mr Corbyn’s supporters have shown themselves horribly quick to hurl vicious, sexist and anti-Semitic abuse at their online critics.
Still, as any parent or teacher knows, there is no better way to reach the young than through tasteless humour. Hence one popular meme, supposedly comparing Corbyn and May ‘on the issues’, the issue in question being ‘feeding the young’.
‘Free school meals for all primary children,’ says Corbyn. ‘Feeding them to whom?’ says May. Crude, as I say, but memorable. Little wonder, then, that Labour reportedly set aside £1million specifically for Facebook ads, correctly reckoning that by addressing young people on the media platforms they use every day, they could drive up turnout.
Of course this is not the whole story. The Tories spent millions on online advertising, too.
But they were sensationally incompetent at galvanising younger voters.
What did Mrs May have to offer young people unable to get a decent job, a living wage or a place on the property ladder?
Where was her inspiring vision of the future? Where were the policies that would help them realise their aspirations?
It is true, of course, that many young Remainers wanted to punish the Tories for Brexit.
But Labour’s manifesto positively spoiled the young with freebies and goodies, most obviously the hideously expensive promise to abolish university tuition fees overnight – a subject much discussed on social media.
Crucially, Mr Corbyn’s allies recognised that in a society when, proportionately, more young people go to university than ever, it is vital for politicians to tap their idealism.
HenCe Labour’s tireless efforts to rebrand their hard-Left leader as the political equivalent of Star Wars’s kindly sage Obi-Wan Kenobi, and to paint Mrs May as the cruel, wizened Galactic emperor.
It is all very well for cynics like me to mock the young for their political naivety. And it is all very well for their elders to lecture them about the lessons of the past – the economic turmoil of the 1970s, the horrors of the IRA, the folly of Left-wing extremism.
But young people have no collective memory of these things, and neither, frankly, do they care.
And what is more, they are taught in universities where Left- wing ideas are more powerful than ever, and where Tory academics are more rare than snowmen in the Sahara.
A pre-election poll by the Times Higher education Supplement found that 54 per cent of university academics planned to vote Labour and 24 per cent Lib Dem. Just 7 per cent – yes, you read that correctly – planned to vote Conservative.
For years, the Tories shrugged such statistics aside. Young people don’t vote, they said. The grey vote is all we need.
Yet the truth is that no successful political party can afford to ignore the idealism of the young. Moreover, it is a myth that young people never vote Conservative.
People are often surprised to be told that in 1979, Margaret Thatcher went out of her way to woo young first-time voters, particularly through her policy that allowed council tenants to buy their home at a discount. She concentrated her efforts on the most important electronic medium of the day – television – and was rewarded with a swing of 11 per cent to the Conservatives among skilled workers, with most of the defectors being young men and women in their twenties and early thirties.
What Mrs May would have given for such numbers! But she was never going to get them, because her team did not even bother trying.
TO compound their folly, the Conservatives also contrived to alienate their single most important electoral bloc, voters over 65, by floating a so-called ‘dementia tax’ and abandoning pensioners’ ‘triple lock’.
As it happens, I think Mrs May was right to recognise that social care is one of the great challenges facing our society in the next decade or so. But it was criminal folly to spring the issue on the electorate without carefully preparing the ground first. And it was even greater folly to abandon the pledge after just a couple of days, destroying the PM’s reputation for strong leadership.
So it was that the Conservatives ended up with the worst of all worlds, antagonising their older supporters while failing to win the votes of the young.
Voting, the experts say, is a habit. So although turnout could conceivably fall next time, many of the idealistic first-time voters who backed Jeremy Corbyn on Thursday will certainly vote again when Britain next goes to the polls.
Unless the Tories find a way to reach them – both by tapping their idealism and by using the social media they love so much – they will, I think, stand little chance of preventing further Labour inroads.
Browsing on the internet yesterday, I noticed a tweet from an academic who is the founder of the group ‘Scientists for eU’.
Accompanying a photo of Mrs May looking furious and sinister, a caption read: ‘I would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for you pesky kids.’
The message expresses a deeper truth. The pesky kids are not going away. And unless the Conservatives work out a way to tap their idealism, we are, I suspect, going to be seeing a lot more of Jeremy Corbyn.