If Gen Z votes for Farage, don’t blame us, blame the boomers

If you want to understand how politicians treat young people, last Thursday’s debate told you everything you need to know. A 19-year-old University of York student deigned to ask Rishi Sunak: “Is there any policy you can offer me that would positively impact my life and the life of people my age?” With seconds left on the clock, Sunak feebly answered: “When you get a job, I’m going to cut your taxes.” The prime minister’s response completely missed the point: that this undergraduate, already burdened with enormous debt, was most likely worrying about finding a decent job at all. And yet the next day, Times columnist Camilla Long scathingly noted this exchange had all the hallmarks of a “sense of hurt entitlement and rage: me, me, me”.
From politicians to commentators, nobody seems to be that fussed about young people in this country, which is why, come 4 July, we shouldn’t be surprised if the young aren’t that fussed about them either.
As someone who worked for a succession of youth media companies, I’m well-acquainted with the suspicion that accompanies any mention of “yoof” politics. The cliche is that everyone is born idealistic and left wing, before accumulating a spouse, house and children. It’s a sentiment epitomised by that widely misattributed Winston Churchill line: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.”
But in Britain, more young people than ever before feel disenfranchised by politics and are refusing to vote. Exclusive polling for The Independent by Techne UK, showed that four in 10 people – 41 per cent – aged 18 to 34 have either not registered to vote (24 per cent) or are registered but have decided not to go to the ballot box (17 per cent) next month.
Leading pollster and Tory peer Robert Hayward described the figure as “very high” for this stage of an election. He told The Independent: “That is what we would expect for a normal turnout in terms of people not voting. But you have to remember that among the 59 per cent who say they will vote a sizeable number of them will also not vote.”
The logical conclusion to this, supposedly, is that it’s not worth expending energy on appealing to those born since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Just like that fake Churchill quote, however, there’s a huge gulf between fact and what we shamelessly assume to be true.
Take, for instance, the idea that the young always vote left and the old right: principal economist for the Resolution Foundation think tank, Sophie Hale, tells me that this wasn’t always the case. “As recently as 1992, it was income that was a big defining characteristic on whether you chose to vote for the Conservatives or Labour,” she explains. By 2019, the defining characteristic became age and according to YouGov polling, 37 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds intend to vote for Labour, with the Tories only on 7 per cent.
When it comes to the turnout gap between age groups, the split is also a relatively modern phenomenon. “If you look at the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds and those over 65 and above who were voting, it was relatively similar [before 1992],” Hale says. “In the elections following, you start to see this really big turnout gap emerging, peaking in 2001 and then again in 2017 [at 35 per cent].”
The much-discussed youthquake failed to swell the ranks of voters enough for Jeremy Corbyn to enter No 10. Message received: young people don’t vote and they don’t care, so why bother talking to them?
But, their non-vote should matter as much as their vote. If you are a generation facing as many challenges as Gen Z, and you don’t see the electoral system as being able to move the dial, that is a crisis not just for you, but for democracy as a whole.
According to a report from the Centre for the Future of Democracy at the University of Cambridge, under half of British millennials (48 per cent) in the UK felt satisfied with democracy when they turned 30, compared to 62 per cent of Gen-Xers when they reached that age in the 1990s and 2000s. Furthermore, in findings from an Open Society Foundations survey of 30 countries (including the UK), only 57 per cent of young people now prefer democracy to any other form of government versus 71 per cent of those aged over 56.
Democracy is messy and not everyone’s a winner – you have to have a high tolerance of failure for it to work, but if the younger generation is losing faith, the game itself could now be in play.
So how did we get here? There was the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent recession, with British millennials still bearing “economic scars” meaning they now earn 8 per cent less than their parents when they were that age. Then Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg courted the youth vote in 2010 but instantly U-turned on the party’s flagship tuition fees pledge once he entered No 10 with David Cameron. Covid hit the young hard with schooling disrupted (lest we forget theme parks and pubs opened before schools did) and universities charging fees for learning that was largely done at home.
The average student now leaves university with an average of £45,000 in debt, and wages in real terms have stagnated. Exorbitant housing costs mean young people are still much less likely than previous generations to own a home. Those who have managed to scrape together a deposit – or beg, steal or borrow from “the bank of mum and dad” – now face a soul-destroying hike in mortgage payments.
“A lot of people my age are struggling just to pay the bills [and] just to do basic things,” says Sophie, 29, from Somerset. “Rent is so crazy right now, especially in cities.” Sophie is a member of the Young Women’s Trust and is currently out of work due to the fierce competition for jobs among her cohort.
There are also practical reasons that may explain why turnout took such a dive after 1992, Hale explains. “Young voters are now much more likely to be in the private rented sector – that means they’re much more likely to be moving on a regular basis and less likely to become registered.”
University of Bath student Adam, 23, has some personal experience of this. He is living in London for a work placement, but he can’t move back into his student house till August – so has had to register himself at his parents’ house in the new constituency of Sussex Weald. “It’s been a bit of a logistical situation trying to figure out where I can and can’t vote,” he sighs.
Adam, like Sophie, is planning to vote tactically to oust the Conservatives, adding: “Mainly people don’t think their vote will change anything. They’re quite cynical. If they do vote, it’ll be a protest vote as opposed to a vote for Labour”.
Cynicism is understandable if you’ve grown up only ever knowing one political party in power. “One of the things people talk about when they study elections is democratic efficacy – how efficient the democratic system is in delivering to people the policies they say they want,” says Keir Milburn, a lecturer in political economy at the University of Leicester and the author of Generation Left.
“Younger people have lived in a period when they’ve never had a chance to vote for the policies they want and they’ve never had any reasonable or meaningful expectation that engagement in politics can address the problems in their lives.”
Michael, 19, from London, has just finished his A-levels and is newly eligible to vote. Unlike Sophie and Adam, he won’t be heading out on polling day. “I have no interest in politics,” he shrugs. “If I vote, it doesn’t really matter. It’s 50/50 among my friends.”
This lack of enthusiasm may have long-term consequences. Research suggests that your first election sets the tone for future voting behaviour, which is why compulsory first-time voting has been mooted as one way to reverse the turnout gap.
“Just skipping one election can have quite a substantial impact,” Hale explains. “People vote in their first election, then continue to vote. When they don’t, that becomes an embedded behaviour.”
You might ask yourself: so what? But you only need to look to Europe to see how taking the youth vote for granted, or ignoring their disaffection, can have alarming results. In Germany, 16 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds voted for the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) after it went all out targeting young voters on TikTok, where its representatives are some of the most-followed politicians on the platform. In France, it’s the young who are revitalising the fortunes of the extreme right, with Jordan Bardella, 28, and Marion Marechal, 34, now leading two populist parties.
In the UK, polling suggests that Reform is now attracting more young supporters than the Conservatives – a YouGov survey shows them picking up votes from 15 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds. “There are people on my course and people I used to live with who have been enthusiastic for people like Nigel Farage,” Adam says. “Mostly young men. I feel like there’s a Venn diagram overlap between Andrew Tate and Nigel Farage. If you like Tate content, you’re probably a young pro-Reform person.”
Like Tate, Farage positions himself as a maverick who challenges the status quo. He attracts a certain type of young male voter – fed up with the Westminster establishment and simmering with anger over the perceived infractions of woke culture. It’s the same combination of grievances propelling some young Americans – particularly men – to vote for Donald Trump.
Farage has talked up his following among 18-to-25-year-olds; boasting to a rally in Cheshire that support “is exploding” among young voters. “There’s an awakening in a younger generation who have had enough of being dictated to, have had enough of being lectured to and they’re seeing through the BS they’re getting in schools and universities”. However, Milburn is less convinced of his broad appeal. “[He’s an] elderly rich golf club bore and that’s designed to appeal to a very particular demographic”, he says. “There are some young people who will see ‘stop the boats’ and that’s what they want. But as far as building some sort of coalition beyond that, I think he’s probably a big hindrance.”
Michael also points out that having a large TikTok following doesn’t necessarily translate into real backing. “The people who say they support him are doing it to say something different – as a joke,” Michael says.
Still, you don’t have to look too far into the past to see that feeling rejected can create a powerful incentive to stick two fingers up to the establishment. In fact, one of the most potent ironies about the worsening fortunes of young people is that many of them weren’t old enough to have a say in the Brexit referendum that would so dramatically affect their economic prospects.
Both Milburn and Hale predict that youth turnout will remain low. “The problems facing young people are at the absolute bottom of the queue,” says Milburn. “It’s like a kettle of pressure building up with no means to express itself. Perhaps that pressure dissipates in depression and nihilism – perhaps it finds a new form of expression on the left or the right. Who knows?”
Or as 31-year-old comedian Munya Chawawa, known for his popular online sketches, says: “Politics can seem alienating to so many of us – a load of rich dudes aggressively barking ‘the right honourable gentleman’ at each other across an archaic room.”
Trying to address the problem, he has launched a weekly video series called Electile Dysfunction, which takes a nuts-and-bolts approach to voting, to show “the UK is a democracy and we are the main characters”.
But all indications are that, come polling day, the rest of his generation still won’t feel that way.