Politics needs young people
by Charlie Tims
Who are these young people? I won’t tell you. I won’t tell you because (a) you can find out for yourself in An Anatomy of Youth which is published today and (b) because in public debate we spend too much time fixating on who young people are and not enough on the future challenges they will face. We are bombarded daily with competing generalisations about who young people are - most of which are based on the short term concerns of what will make for a good story, or what makes for a good marketing insight. This has pretty much been the way of the world since young people attained disposable income and broke from the family in the 60s.
When it comes to politics the start and end-point of any conversation about young people should be about their future. The reasons for young people’s well-documented disconnection from formal politics are deep rooted, but when politicians loose the capacity to articulate a vision of the future, it is those whose futures reach furthest into the unknown who stand to lose the most. The starting point for An Anatomy of Youth was not to paint an all encompassing portrait of a generation but to try to stitch together what we know about how young people think and feel now, with what we know about the socio-political challenges that will shape their future lives.
Supposedly the election to come is to be one of real choices, but if the differences are so acute why do they have to be decoded for us by Nick Robinson - shouldn’t they just be obvious? Young people will have to live through an epic transition to a decarbonised society - but will the transition be possible without personal carbon budgets or carbon based taxes on consumption? Who will these measures favour? Would they make for a more equal society? Young people face a future inextricably intertwined with digital technologies that challenge established boundaries of ownership, identity and their private lives. But what are the rights of young people in these new domains?
Politics needs young people more than ever. And young people really need politics. But what hope is there if politics continues to duck the questions that will shape their future lives?
Stephen Johnson
Votes or Fair Votes?
Politics needs young people. But why do we think young people will engage with politics when clearly politics does not engage most people. When millions of votes don’t count, why are young people going to bother to vote? The problem is at the very heart of our electoral system. Wasted votes, safe seats, corrupt, lazy, ineffective politicians, a perception of powerlessness – just the recipe to breed apathy. That many people don’t vote is a consequence of the failure of our democratic system, not the cause.
The cause of the failure is in part because the electoral system asks us to do two things with one vote.
1 Vote for the best party to form the Government of the country - a national issue.
2 Vote for the best person to represent the constituency and to speak for its people, and that is a local and even personal matter.
Faced with this dilemma, people tend to vote on question 1.
Unfortunately, because of the way the FPTP system works, many millions of these votes make no difference to the result – they are wasted. If you are asked to vote for the best party to form the Government, every vote should count, regardless of where or in which constituency you live.
Another consequence is that question 2 is generally sacrificed. As a result, we have safe seats and party-appointed MPs.
Furthermore, because the choice of MP is not based on the merit of the individual, you can end up with all sorts of bad apples, from the lazy, to the ineffective, to the corrupt.
Let’s get rid of safe seats by separating these two questions. One trip to the polling booth, but one vote for the party to form the Government, where every vote counts, and a separate vote to choose the best individual to represent the constituency, when merit rather than the party label is the key to becoming an MP.
Clearly we need a fresh look at the voting system.
To engage the community in the vote for an MP, an election constituency should be small. Large multimember constituencies or party list systems may be more or less successful as techniques for arriving at Government by PR, but ignore communities.
Such techniques may also not be necessary.
How each party in the Commons votes is determined by its MPs, but the total voting power of the party must be proportional to the total number of votes cast for it, not their total number of MPs. All that is necessary to achieve this is to share out the total voting power of each party amongst its MPs.
Such a reform would require very little change to the public voting process, and the associated structure of constituencies. It retains the simplicity both in concept and in execution of the existing system. These factors should make it straightforward to implement, and may be attractive to Members of Parliament when considering the implications for any change of system.
Unless we have a voting system that allows us to vote both for the party we want to form the Government, but also for the individual we want to represent the Constituency, it cannot be considered a fair system, and it will not engage the electorate.