We’re always keen on a bit of a tell-it-how-it-is politics, and that’s why it’s almost a welcome relief that a Labour MP has acknowledged that MPs basically don’t give a crap about young people, because they don’t vote.
Sadiq Khan seemed to be courting, not damning young people and their votes, by putting it simply, ‘If you speak candidly to a campaign manager of any of the mainstream parties, they will say that they concentrate their energies disproportionately on those they know are going to vote,’ reports The Guardian. ‘If you’ve got a candidate with an hour spare and a choice to go to an old people’s home or a sixth-form college, 99% of campaign managers will say you’ve got to go to an old people’s home. That’s because 94% of them are on the register and 77% of them will vote. That’s not true of the younger generation.’
In fact, according to the British Election Study, only 51% of 18-to-24 year olds cast a ballot in the 2010 election, compared to 75% of the over-65s.
Sadiq continued, ‘You look at any empirical analysis of this government’s policies and you can see they are going for the silver vote.’
And what is he going to do about it? Well, he wants young people to engage more, andinstead of trying to change them, he wants to change the way we are meant to vote, ‘We as politicians have to understand the responsibility on us to engage young people in politics. If someone is not voting that is a problem.’
He’s called for a few changes to the voting system as we know it:
1. A longer voting period – really, who’s going to spend 7 May, the first Thursday of the month, the first Thursday after payday, the first month that might give some post-work sunshine, trundling home from work to a local school to fill in a ballot paper?
2. The voting age to be lowered – if 16-year-olds are old enough to handle A Levels, apprenticeships, the IBAC or actual sex, then they’re old enough to vote. Besides, loads of Scottish teens showed they can handle voting way back when they cast their ballots at the independence referendum.
3. Online voting – we can do so much of our life admin online, and so much of our political squabbling online, so why can’t we cast a vote online?
It all makes sense to us… and maybe even if it takes a while for these changes to come into practice – trust us, we know how long it takes to set up a website – Sadiq’s words will encourage young people to realise the changes they can affect if they do bother to vote…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.