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Indeed. Very important to keep on driving this message home. I was really annoyed at 16 that I could not vote as I seemed to be more politically aware than most adults. Its a message we need to drive home on Progressive Pulse also.
I remember people at school who were 18 voting, whilst I was at the youngest end of the year (August) and I was unable to do so. I wasn’t particularly happy about it, albeit that I wasn’t in any sort of marginal and my vote would have made no difference.
Today the direction of travel is to infantilise 16 and 17 year olds rather than to empower them. This is evidenced by the requirement that those living in England must be in some form of education.
Hot tip not Hat tip?
Come on you kids! Speak up on Twitter & FB but get registered & VOTE! Some of us oldies are on your side, but it’s your future not ours (I first voted nearly 50 years ago).
Well, my generation ( I’m 57) was suckered by the neo-liberal phantasm it’s now up to the young to work towards something better and not let the over -65, asset rich, I’m-alright-Jackists dictate the future.
This is the only credible opening for a Labour victory in the election.
In short: if 30% more under-25’s get out and vote, the Conservatives will lose.
Even with the poll lead that they had on the day the election was called.
Richard. It’s well known in neuroscience that the brain is still in development into young adulthood. Because the prefrontal cortex is still developing, people up to age 25 rely on a part of the brain called the amygdala to make decisions and solve problems more than adults do. The amygdala is associated with emotions, impulses, aggression and instinctive behaviour. It is why young adults do things without thought for the future. Why the young seem sometimes irresponsible and not thinking of the future. I can see why a socialist might want as many aggressive impulsive inexperienced people as possible voting in an election. They quite simply lack the brain development to look long term. But that would not necessarily be best for the country.
This is not opinion this is accepted fact. It is why the young are less likely to vote. To them next year is forever away and five years is infinity. It is also of course why the young are more likely to vote for left wing policies. The mystery is not why most people grow wiser and more responsible as their brains fully develop, the mystery is why some people do not.
I laughed at that
So it’s wise to destroy education, health and the planet is it?
To risk war and to abandon care for the elderly?
i suggest you talk your nonsense elsewhere
“emotions, impulses, aggression and instinctive behaviour” You’ve just summed up the right’s whole modus operandi. Your beliefs have precious little to do with seeking evidence and reasoned thinking, but derive from the above.
And it’s also how you seek to fool enough people to vote for you. If the Conservatives are so reasonable, how is it their entire election strategy is based on attacking Corbyn’s personality, instead of discussing policies?
Play the man, not the ball.
At the 2015 election, the over 65 turnout was 78%. Would you say 78% was “virtually all”? If you lent me £1,000 and I gave you £780 back would you accept that I had given you “virtually all” of it back?
Why are you helping to spread false propaganda?
In electoral terms that is virtually all
Well some youngsters will vote tory.
TBH, I think the low turnout is perfectly understandable because the standard of candidate is rancid.
Had I been entitled to vote in the US I probably would’ve voted Hilary because Trump is such a ludicrous & malign figure but mainly, (nothing to do with the candidates) because of civi rights. Would you want me to endorse Hikary? Even apart from the email server relegations she offered nothing except the hope that “some day a little girl will grow up to know she can be president”. Sorry, whats that got to do with the price of fish? Could anyone find anything to say about Hilary more positive than she’s female & not Trump?
On R4 they interviewed a voter before the first stage of the French presidential election. As it was the radio I can’t be sure but I assume he gave a Gallic shrug & probably tossed his Gitane into the sewer as he announced “one is a fascist, one is a communist & one is a crook. I’m voting for the other one”. What a ringing endorsement!
When voting day comes you can only vote for the least worst alternative. Anything else is abrogating your responsibilities.
I am not in favour of polarising voters to the extent that one age group is set up against another. (As a long-time member of the SNP in Scotland, I most emphatically do not vote Tory. If the SNP didn’t exist, I’d be voting Green or Labour. Never Tory. I’ll be 68 years old next month.)
However, I am always surprised at the number of registered voters who do not bother to vote. Whoever you are, get off your ‘chairs’ and get out there. Even if you’re not enthusiastic about the choices on offer, you need to do some research and choose the lesser of two bad prospects–if that’s how you see it. An informed and intelligent electorate is the basis of workable and successful democracy.
I, too, would love to see 16-year-olds get the vote, across the board. It’s their future, and they are old enough to start participating in it. But if a large proportion of the 18-and-overs don’t bother to register or to vote, they will be contributing to the mess they’ll be inheriting.
A very important topic. According to the University of Warwick:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/wpl/projects/voting/
Britain has the worst youth voter turnout problem in the OECD. AT the last general election, there was a 37 percentage point gap between over-55 and under-35 turnout. This is the biggest gap in the OECD, and it is worse than the second-worst by a long way: British young adults appear to be unusually turned off by the democratic process. At a national and European level, younger generations of British citizens risk being short-changed by policy makers as a result of their absence from the ballot box, and there is no indication that their turnout will improve as they get older”.
That is extraordinary
I written a short piece on the Warwick study for Progressive Pulse which hopefully will go out later this week.
Good!
A number of studies have been undertaken over the years looking at why there’s apathy among younger UK voters. The conclusions seem pretty obvious. They don’t feel tney have a stake in society, they’re not inspired by political leaders, don’t relate to the ‘political class’ and “tend to be switched off by the negativity and cynicism of election campaigns targeting the unhappy old” (I particulalry like this last one!). Maybe one could add that they’re also living in a consumer-driven bubble that is all absorbing.
Having lived abroad for many years, and with on-going links to other European cultures, the UK strikes one as being possibly the most fragmented and divided society in Europe, on so many different levels: money – property – ethnicity – age – geography – class (incredibly still an issue) – education – ‘Brexit’ etc. It’s not surprising, therefore, that maybe younger people feel separate from any form of national ‘consensus’, further aggravated by the FPTP voting system which precludes minoriities from having a stake in the country as a whole, or even at local level.
Being completely subjective, I can fully appreciate that anyone under the age of 25 would find little or nothing in common culturally with most of the higher-profile politicians, who are as cringe-worthy as ‘daddy-dancing’! The fear is that the overall turn-out will be lower than average, thus further strengthening a Tory hegemony. The good news is that the old die sooner than the young, so the Tory Party will continue its steady decline into eventual oblivion. As always, hope springs eternal.