Will the rise of young voters continue?

Young people don’t vote, so who cares about them, right? That’s been the attitude of so many of our politicians for so long. It perhaps reached its latest apotheosis in the Brexit vote last year, where huge numbers of millennial voters stayed at home and, as a result, gifted Brexit to their own and future generations.

But this year they made up for that. Big time. While early voting indications on 8 June looked to be giving Theresa May her ‘strong and stable’ majority, as polling day wore on there were increasing reports of huge numbers of young voters turning up at the last minute and late at night at polling stations to make their democratic voices heard. And the majority of them weren’t voting for May.

It didn’t take long for Jeremy Corbyn to work that out during the election. In fact, he outsmarted the Tory campaign most of the time. Since the election, every City-based baby boomer I know has told me that their ‘kids’ voted Labour all the way. Watching the chants of ‘Oooohhh, Jeremy Corbyn’ at Glastonbury it looked like a lot of their latte-sipping children confirmed just that. Asleep for so long, something has been both shaken and stirred among younger voters.

Turnout in #GE2015 among 18-25 year olds was 43%. And that same group turnout for the Brexit referendum had dipped to 36%. In 2017, though, 57% of 18-19 year olds and 50% of 20-24 year olds voted. But it was still the lowest level of all the age groups. Turnout was also up for the 25-34 year olds, but remained unchanged for the rest of the population. And there you have it. That’s a big reason for the last-minute Labour swing.

This election showed that for every ten years older a voter is, their chance of voting Tory increases by around 9% – and the chance of them voting Labour decreases by the same amount. The tipping point – the age at which a voter is more likely to have voted Conservative than Labour – is now 47. Amazingly, this number rocketed up during the election campaign itself from age 32 when May called the election – according to numbers from YouGov – who called it pretty right after a lot of sweaty nights.

New politics probably means we need some new politicians to listen to them

Age 49, I am just on the other side of that electoral tide. But I find my own experiences, sandwiched between baby boomers who have benefited from the post-war welfare and housing economics consensus, and millennials who don’t benefit from so much or indeed from any of that at all, means that I can’t help but listen into both.

Among first-time voters, Labour was 47% ahead of the Tories in 2017. Among those aged over 70, the Conservatives had a lead of 50 points. Ipsos Mori recorded the largest gap in vote by age since they started analysing how people vote way back at the election of October 1974.

The new divide in our politics is no longer social class. It’s age. The data is clear and unmistakeable. The divide has been growing for years but while the baby boomers continued to enjoy the perks of policy preferment they continued to turn out and vote for those perks to be maintained. So in this election the tide started to turn. Conventional political ‘wisdom’ has been upended.

Since 1964 there has been a seemingly inexorable trend of decreasing turnout among all age groups. However, the drop has been sharpest among the younger voters. Indyref in Scotland did something to change that, but only with voters north of the border. But the 2017 general election will be remembered as the moment when the youth vote got up and made its voice heard loud and clear.

I thought Jeremy Corbyn was a brilliant choice for Labour – for the election of 2030. In the end he proved to be a pretty good choice for Labour in 2017. But, of course, he didn’t win this time.

So the real question now is will those new and many first-time voters do so again? Was this just a flash in the pan, and will politics return to ‘normal’ soon. You know what – I think younger voters are now more engaged than ever. If they continue to vote in such numbers, British politics will be changed forever. New politics probably means we need some new politicians to listen to them. About time.

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