Almost all of my political memories are bad ones. When it comes to picking winners, my reverse-Midas touch has been working overtime for nearly 15 years.
In 2010, after I voted for Labour – look, I lived in a swing seat, OK? – I watched Nick “Charisma” Clegg become Deputy Prime Minister. In 2011, I buttonholed mates in beer gardens to tell them – if they’d actually just listen, yeah, for one second – that the Alternative Vote referendum to get rid of the first-past-the-post system was going to be a bright new dawn for democracy. So, obviously, we lost that one too.
I witnessed the rise, fall and rapid decomposition of Ed Miliband’s #Milifandom in 2015, and David Cameron’s return as PM. I practically skipped to the polling station on the day of the Brexit vote in 2016, and we all know how that turned out. I thought the “youthquake” in 2017 meant Theresa May was done for; as it turned out, it basically just meant Jeremy Corbyn got a Glastonbury slot between Run the Jewels and Craig David.
Every time there was a choice between what me and most of the 20-something, city-living, room-renting, uni-going people I knew wanted, and a bad thing which we spent a lot of time slagging off, the bad thing won.
My sense of being a democratic Jonah is deeply ingrained. There’s a whole tranche of voters like me out there too: millennials who came of age after the 2008 financial crisis, and have watched the exact thing they didn’t want to happen come true on every single national vote.
In 2011, 53 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds voted yes on AV. In 2016, 73 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds voted to Remain. In 2015, only 32 per cent of under-30s voted Conservative; that vote share went down to the low twenties in 2017, and stayed there in 2019.
And, to be honest, having something to push against and gripe about felt kind of good. We didn’t vote for Cameron/May/Johnson/Brexit/the raw thrill of the first-past-the-post system, but – hoo boy! – could we get pumped up by slagging them off.
Over the years you realise that part of your personality is being defined against those things. I think that’s true of a whole load of people who came of age since the Cameron age dawned. We’re used to things being crap, but also being able to say it’s not our fault.
Now, though, we’re a maximum of eight months away from an election, and every poll which shows the Conservatives on course for a shoeing is met with a feverish, almost indecent excitement. If that happens, everything will change.
Not politically: Labour seems to be taking the Ming vase strategy and placing several Faberge eggs and a late Caravaggio on top. Starmer’s likely to do some fairly mild stuff.
No, the difference is that for the first time, the thing people who have been railing against the Tories for the last 14 years want to happen will actually have happened. And that means we’ll finally have to take some kind of ownership of whatever it is that the Government ends up doing, because most of us will have voted for it.
YouGov’s breakdown of voting intentions from January this year said that 73 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds would vote for Labour, the SNP or the Greens, a figure that goes up to 75 per cent of 25 to 29 year olds. In March, Statista put support for Labour alone at 68 per cent among 18 to 24 year olds.
And if the UK’s problems continue to be as thoroughly chronic as they have been – crap wages, crap trains, crap buses, rents through the roof so you can’t afford a deposit, mortgage interest rates to the moon even if you can, climate breakdown, the looming spectre of the £8 pint – then that will be a different psychic burden to bear. We will have got what we wanted, and it will be almost exactly as bad as it was before, and it will also be basically our own fault.
That isn’t going to feel terrific. And if we just trundle along the same path, and without something tangible to point to – libraries opening, hospitals not being clogged up, schools not literally falling apart – I worry that the disillusionment which could follow could turn into something darker.
Last autumn an Open Democracy Foundations report found that, globally, 42 per cent of people between 18 and 35 thought an Army-run government would be a good thing, and 35 per cent liked the sound of a leader who doesn’t bother with parliament or elections. While 22 per cent and 17 per cent of people of all age groups in the UK agreed with those statements respectively, there was another alarming takeaway: only 52 per cent of 18 to 35 year olds in the UK said democracy was a force for good. Trust in politicians in this country is 10 percentage points lower than the global average too.
I’m not saying that Gen Z will suddenly flip from their broadly progressive ways, and that we’ll see a TikTok dance craze combining doing the Dougie with demands for a military junta. Something weird is happening, though.
If they end up disillusioned, what are those voters under 35 going to do? Stomp off in a huff? Try to make the Greens happen? Take to the Lib Dem barricades, roaring to their comrades that true centrism hasn’t been tried yet? Or are they more likely to get sick of the mainstream parties and wander to the more esoteric ends of the political horseshoe?
Hey, maybe I’m catastrophising. Maybe the general election will turn out to be everything voters hope it will. Maybe there’ll be rejoicing in the streets among the under-35s, the millennials and Gen Z dancing arm in arm to the only thing which both generations agree on: Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten”. But given the queasy state of the UK right now I’d not bet on it.