They call them the sticky iPad kids. Raised on Fortnite, Subway Surfers and MrBeast, Labour’s new revisions to the suffrage mean that current pre-teens born in 2013 will be eligible to vote by the next election. The oldest members of Gen Z got their latest taste of political independence in 2024, turning out (with some post-adolescent reluctance) for Keir Starmer. But as the Gen Z curtain closed in 2012, the Gen Alpha era began. Very soon, they’ll be participating in our democracy.
The assumption might be that this extension of the vote to 16 and 17-year olds will bolster Labour’s vote at the next election. The 2024 election saw a large majority of the 18-24 demographic turn out for Starmer, with 41 per cent doing so. A further 19 per cent voted for the Green Party and just 5 per cent bothered to fly the Conservative flag, indicative of the (already) well-known trend that younger voters are more likely to lean left.
But for those trembling at the prospect of having voters younger than “Gangnam Style”, The Avengers and the London Olympics, never fear. After a turnout fall from 47 per cent to 37 per cent amongst 18-24 year olds at the last election, it seems incredibly unlikely that this will push the needle much in regard to electoral outcomes. Angela Rayner’s supporting piece for this policy published in the Times quotes a figure of “1.6 million” potential new voters. If that same 37 per cent turnout figure is applied, that leaves 592,000, slightly more than 2 per cent of the 2024 vote total. And this is still significantly dwarfed by the roughly 9.5 million pensioners who took part. Britain remains substantially a gerontocracy.
However, young people are also not homogenous. Even if Labour are expecting a boost, this demographic could surprise them. As stereotypes dictates, this is genuinely a generation that gets its news from TikTok and Instagram. And while the word “youthquake” originally referred to the millennial surge for Corbyn in 2017, these days it’s the far-right populism that dominates much of social media. Nigel Farage has more TikTok followers than all other MPs combined. The biggest news source on the platform is the Daily Mail at 23.2 million followers.
And if some young people are drifting right – even far-right – Labour could also have the opposite problem on their hands. As Oli Dugmore writes for the New Statesman, among young people “Palestine is the governing moral question of conversation”, with the Labour party seen as complicit in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Dugmore likens the radicalisation currently taking place to the feelings around the Vietnam War during the 1960s. It’s hard to see that these young people, watching war crimes unfold on their sticky iPads, will spontaneously come to Keir Starmer’s aid at the next election. More likely, they’ll rally to Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s new party (the latter is the second-most popular MP on TikTok).
“This is democracy in action,” writes Angela Rayner in the Times. But as democracy has proved so many times in the past decade, sometimes people don’t vote the way you expect them to.
[Further reading: Gaza will radicalise a generation]
Content from our partners
Related
