Opinion: Surge of young voters increases prospect of Labour win in UK election

The deadline for new voters to register for the forthcoming election was last Monday, May 22. And on that day, more than 453,000 signed up to do so. Nearly 3 in 4 were aged 18-24. In that age bracket, many are likely to be Labour supporters, especially students who have been promised by Labour that tuition fees will be scrapped.

Young people and politics 

For a long time it’s been the case that young people are less likely to vote, mostly because of a lack of interest in politics. That’s changing, and particularly for the generation of young people now, many of who will vote for the first time on June 8.

Many of those new voters are paying tens of thousands of pounds for the courses that they’re doing. And there’s little chance of them getting the sort of jobs they’ve studied and trained for when they finish their courses. Those jobs that they do get are paying poorly for the most part, which makes it tough to have any kind of life beyond repaying debts. And house prices make them unlikely to ever be able to afford to buy a place of their own.

The future looks grim for young people 

Those financial realities mean young people are living with their parents for longer than anyone expected that to be the case. And under new Tory plans, if their parents become ill and require long term medical care – say for cancer or dementia – then the homes they’ve lived in are liable to be sold to cover costs that the NHS will no longer meet because of cuts the government has made in the name of savings.

Brexit has also made a big impact on young people. They’ve grown up believing they’re European in a way that their parents have never experienced. The EU is what they’ve grown up with. It’s associated with easy foreign travel, educational and cultural projects involving other countries and the prospect of spending time in them. All of that and more disappeared for them thanks to the decisions of older people who won’t have to live with the consequences of their choices to leave Europe.

Young voters are more likely to vote Labour 

A new YouGov poll puts Labour 19% ahead with voters under 25. And many of those voters are students. What makes students particularly interesting is they can choose to vote either where they are living in term time, or in their home constituency. Which means they have the ability to use that vote in the seat where it will be most useful: adding another Labour vote in a safe seat has little value, choosing to vote Labour in a seat where the incumbent Tory MP has a slender majority counts for more. And the same applies for those who want to vote Tory of course…but there are less of them.

It will be interesting to see how Theresa May and her team attempt to win round young voters to their cause in the short time left before the June 8 election. May has made a point of stressing the importance of financial responsibility and the need to reduce spending, so she may be reduced to promises – and it will be interesting to see how young people react to being sweet-talked by a leader who has shown zero interest in them to date.