For anyone who has seen my Facebook timeline this is inherently obvious, young people aren't inherently left wing, and the portrayals by the media that the young are just a bunch of radicals is just wrong and idiotic. Commentators like Owen Jones often point to the young person's struggle to be heard and their distaste for tuition fees amongst other things. I'm here to say on a vast level; young people quite often simply don't care. I was at an interview yesterday for a job abroad I mentioned to the other people about what effect a Brexit might have on the job, of the five people I was talking to none of them cared; none of them were going to vote in the referendum and most of them didn't even know there was one in the first place. If that's not indicative of the fact that politicians are out of touch with young people then I don't know what is. There has been for sometime now an over emphasis on the views of students in youth issues, this ignores the fact that over 50% of the populace doesn't go to university and quite often have no plans to go to university. This group of people are quite often likely not to vote or even care about issues, for them life is about getting a job and getting on with their life; either not wanting to or not being able to afford to (tuition fees don't factor into this, what really matters is the maintenance loans).
Even in the student populace most don't care about politics, the vocal minority that has sit ins and goes on marches influence policy more often than the average student, who is most likely to be sitting in their room watching Netflix or streaming TV on their computer after doing their work. Politicians don't speak to these people, and as a result they aren't spoken to as it's presumed that all students are red flag waving Marxists or tweed wearing Tories. If politicians want to make a difference in getting the young to vote and actually be engaged, then we need to speak to the actual average students.It's unbelievable how many times at university I spoke about the election and people simply said, I'm not going to vote politicians are simply liars and there is no point in voting because it will just be enforcing this truth, no matter if it were Labour or the Tories or even the Lib Dems.
The Growth of Conservative clubs across campuses around the country should point to another truth, young people are quite often Conservative. The working class young Tory is a real thing in the south, people believe that the state should be small; all the people see about the government is that they take a large chunk out of their pay cheque and most people want to pay less taxes. Some say that people become more conservative as they get older because they end up paying tax; one of the reasons that older people may vote more is that people see that they are always going to have to pay taxes and want to see their taxes being spent more efficiently, this is especially true in Britain as we have the NHS and as we inevitably get older we end up spending more time in hospital.
The general election polling from Ipsos MORI shows that 43% of young people vote labour on a turnout of 48% (polling data here) over half of young people didn't vote and 27% voted Tory and 8% UKIP. This shows a lack of engagement with young people, and if any thing that the engaged ones are voting Labour because at this sort of age left wing people during a Tory government are more likely to vote against the so called establishment. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, I'm all for everyone voting Labour but at the end of the day we need to encourage young people to actually get out and vote. Support for Brexit amongst young people is is over 25 points greater but the problem is that people may not vote, and if people don't vote then the vocal minority of people that support Brexit will win the referendum. UKIP won the European elections with most seats because people didn't vote in their masses, the same can be said for the Republicans in America in 2014 where there was a historically low turnout in the mid-term elections.
In conclusion, young people needed to treated as the same as the rest of the populace as the engaged will already vote and there isn't this magic group of young people who will be suddenly vote Labour that just need to be coerced into the polling booth.
