Thursday 29 January 2015

Grow Up

James Kirkup writes:

To see where power lies in British politics, consider two positions confirmed by David Cameron this week. The Conservatives will end housing benefit for people under 21 who do not work or study.

They will also allow pensioners to claim benefits such as winter fuel payments, regardless of whether they need it, on top of their ring-fenced state pensions.

Fiscal discipline is like wearing denim: not something anyone over 60 should worry about.

A lot of people, especially young ones, think this is unfair.

They’re probably right, but you can’t really blame politicians such as Mr Cameron for favouring the old over the young.

Politicians work for voters. Old people vote. Young people don’t.

Until the Nineties, variations in voting behaviour by age were relatively consistent: young people were a bit less likely to vote, but not dramatically so.

Overall turnout at the 1970 election was about 72 per cent. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, it was 65 per cent. For those over 65, it was 77 per cent.

But since 1997, the political gap between old and young has widened sharply.

Tony Blair’s first election saw 78 per cent of pensioners vote, but only 54 per cent of youngsters.

By 2005, the numbers were 74 per cent and 38 per cent: the old were almost twice as likely to vote as the young.

The collapse in youth voting under the youngest prime minister for two centuries, a man obsessed with pop culture and newness, is an irony for another day.

For now, what explains that growing wedge?

A lot of analysis goes into the way “the system” fails young voters, larding pensioners with free money while their grandchildren struggle with vast tuition fees, ludicrous property prices and a brutal jobs market.

There’s a lot to be said for all that, though those same pensioners might reasonably retort that life wasn’t exactly a bed of roses for them when they left school in their mid-teens in the Fifties and Sixties.

Some people worry about a vicious circle of non-participation, fretting that young people who don’t vote now will never get into the habit.

The electoral balance will tip ever further towards the old until democracy gives way to gerontocracy.

Maybe.

But here’s an alternative theory of why young people are taking less interest in politics: they are just taking longer to grow up.

In an age of terrifyingly mature-seeming teenagers whose smartphones expose them to every fleshy aspect of adult life, that may appear counter-intuitive.

But there’s more to adulthood than smutty messages on Snapchat.

In 1970, barely one in five 18-year-olds was still at school, most having already left to earn a wage and pay tax; today, education until 18 is the legally required norm.

In 1970, scarcely 8 per cent went on to university; today it’s close to half.

Add in gap years and the painful search for jobs, and many young people don’t enter the world of work as full adults until well into their twenties.

Many of today’s pensioners were already married with children of their own by that age.
The markers of full adulthood are coming later in life too: the average ages at which people move out of their parents’ house, own their own home, marry and have children are all creeping up towards 30 and beyond.

You can debate the reasons for this: “I can’t afford to do it yet” is a common – and reasonable – refrain. But longevity matters too.

In 1970, male life expectancy was barely 68, meaning an 18-year-old was more than a quarter of their way through their life.

Today, the figure is closer to 80, so an 18-year-old still has four fifths of their life to come. Why hurry to grow up when you have so much time left?

The age at which people feel and act like grown-ups has risen.

Is it any wonder that people engaged in an elongated pre-adulthood are slow to engage with the fundamentally adult system of elections and politics, with all its awkward compromises and shades of grey?

What to do about this?

Almost all of the suggestions from traditional politicians involve tinkering with the rules. John Bercow, the Commons Speaker, suggests voting online to increase youth engagement.

Thoughtful MPs such as Graham Allen of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee say even compulsory voting should be considered.

The idea with the most momentum is lowering the voting age to 16. Labour and the Lib Dems are already in favour. The Conservatives are nominally opposed, but behind the scenes the view is shifting.

David Cameron has signalled that he’s open to argument, and people inside the party expect its general election manifesto to offer some sort of debate on the change in the next parliament.

Votes at 16 is starting to feel like one of those political ideas that’s inevitable – even if it’s hard to see how the answer to the problem of young people not using their votes is to give votes to more young people.

Meanwhile, the old-fashioned political art of persuasive argument seems to have been left entirely to new outfits such as the Greens, currently enjoying soaring membership and poll ratings above 20 per cent among 18- to 24-year-olds.

Still, how do you compete with a party that offers voters juvenile fantasies such as free money and an end to economic growth (“the Citizens’ Income will allow the current dependence on economic growth to cease, and allow zero or negative growth to be feasible without individual hardship”)?

Perhaps politicians would be better off simply waiting for voters to grow up instead.

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