‘We are close to the tipping point at which elections begin to lose legitimacy because the majority do not take part. That should be ringing more alarm bells than it is.’
Dr Parth Patel, IPPR associate director of democracy and politics
The UK Electoral Commission said in November that ‘significant improvements are necessary to support participation and trust in future elections’; on Tuesday 7th January its Chair and Chief Executive answer questions from Members of Parliament on its findings. Meanwhile the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) has published its research, which was summarised by a headline in last Friday's Times, ‘Populism will triumph because poor don't vote’.
The references in these reports to generational differences in voting turnout are clear, but modest: the inverse correlation between poverty and age deserves much more attention. The Labour Government’s stated intention to reduce the voting age to 16 is little more than window-dressing in seeking to address the issue.
The real problem is the lack of any coherent policy of inter-generational rebalancing, which means that poverty amongst the young places a disproportionate voting emphasis on the baby boomer generation; and that’s the heartland generation for populist appeal. Politicians such as Nigel Farage may claim that their links with social media via Elon Musk might increase appeal amongst the young (ref. his Laura Kuenssberg interview on Sunday), but their main support base is from reactionary older folk.
It may be easy for some to overlook the significance of voter absence among young people, but what society chooses to do today impacts their future more than any other generation. Also, if democracy is to hold on to its self-evident truths — that all are created equal with unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — we must be alert to the danger of sliding back towards another form of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, with the over-sized state sucking the dynamism out of individual citizens.
The political parties of western democracies have shown themselves to be particularly prone to the ‘low hanging fruit’ of short-termism, as we commented on 16th December. Because older people have a higher propensity to vote, they receive a disproportionately higher share of public spending. The middle ground of politics is the most populous, so there is no questioning of the socialist ideology on which universal welfare is based: they want their health and education services free of charge, no matter what their ability to pay may be. The poor are less likely to vote anyway, as the IPPR has confirmed — the politicians therefore see no need to pay more than lip service to breaking the cycle of deprivation. Meanwhile the better-off are few in number: so there's little to be lost by applying vindictive taxation to penalise them for making individual choices for their children's education (so long as they don't leave the country with their wealth).
It's all about sucking as much money as possible into the state monolith; addressing the challenge of disadvantaged young people is low in their order of priorities. The consequence is that democracy is distorted across the generations, focusing on the old and middle-aged at the expense of young people.
The sheer scale of governments has grown to the stage where these obese monopolies are running a serious risk of major financial collapse, not just in Europe but also in the United States. During the new year break, I came across a November 1987 editorial from Barclayshare (of which I was founder, and Chief Executive at that time) entitled, ‘The Crash of 87 — why did it happen?’. For those unfamiliar with this event of nearly forty years ago, worldwide stock markets suffered a massive collapse: 30% in the UK FTSE-100 Index. Here's what we wrote in that editorial:
‘At the heart of the trouble is the deterioration of the American economy and the current policies that control it. The United States has been running up a massive trade deficit since the early 1980s, financing its bills by selling large quantities of government bonds to overseas investors, particularly to the Japanese, who are now holding back from providing further funds. Recent sharp increases in US interest rates have driven home the seriousness of the situation to the American people who have reacted by selling their investments ..’
Sounds familiar, particularly if you substitute ‘Chinese’ for ‘Japanese’? But in fact the situation is much more serious today due to the stratospheric levels of public sector debt and deficits: see our commentary on 11th November for more details.
You may ask, how does this relate to the problem of voting turnout amongst the young? The answer is to look carefully at the implications of populism, which is increasingly seen as the alternative — and for which we will have working evidence following Donald Trump's inauguration on 20th January.
The fact is that all of these economic problems derive from unbridled self-interest, which both populism and socialist-inspired big governments share in common. For the latter, the treasury departments of western governments are so heavily consumed by their gargantuan need for cash that they will tax anything that moves, and they are reluctant to look at anything strategic which might challenge their fiscal opportunism.
For example, inheritance levies should provide the basis for inter-generational rebalancing which would ensure that disadvantaged young people are empowered as citizens and not impoverished; but HM Treasury has consistently — under both Conservative and Labour governments — refused to ring-fence IHT receipts for this purpose.
So, whether you look at Trump’s proposed tax cuts and tariff increases or this denial of ring-fencing for the young, we are left with short-sighted politicians who appear unwilling to contemplate the very different world into which young people will grow: a world which will require less national and ethnic divisiveness, more ecological responsibility, and a more egalitarian form of capitalism in which people can share a sense of individual ownership and responsibility.
This is the task ahead for 2025, and we start from a very low point which the IPPR and the Electoral Commission have only started to describe. Our commentary on 16th December, ‘Short-termism is Democracy's Achilles’ Heel’, spelt out the challenge: during 2025 we must take material steps forward to stop discounting the future by empowering, not impoverishing, the young.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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