It’s a warm August afternoon and I’m trailing a campaign team in terraced Cheshire for a nail-biter by-election in a less-than-affluent area. There’s a council contest going on in Northwich. It’s polling day, and it’s looking tight between Reform and Labour.
I overhear a conversation on the doorstep between a Labour canvasser and a young voter. The voter isn’t sure about coming out. He doesn’t normally vote. It might even be his first time. The canvasser makes clear it’s a tight fight between Labour and Nigel Farage.
“Oh, Nigel Farage?” the young lad says, perking up at a doorstep conversation he clearly hadn’t expected to have.
“Yes,” the canvasser responds, sounding more serious than he needed to be. “Northwich doesn’t need people like him winning here.”
“Oh really? How come?” the lad responds, sounding a little bemused. “He’s a bit of a meme, isn’t he?”
A meme. A character. Cuts a radical impression – that’s what young people think of Farage. And the young lad on that doorstep is not alone. To those only years out from having the right to vote, Nigel Farage is not a fringe figure. New Statesman commissioned polling from Merlin Strategies which finds that, of 1,000 nationally representative 13- to 17-year-olds, just one in three intend to vote when they have the right to. And of those planning on voting, 33 per cent would opt for Reform, 27 per cent for Labour, and 12 per cent for the Conservatives and Greens each.
If these preferences stay as they are, then it’s clear we’re hitting on the beginning of a social revolution of sorts. Britain’s incredibly apathetic young are as willing to vote right-wing just as much as the generation before them are willing to go left.
Farage is the figure most teens rate as fun (at least, between Keir Starmer and Jeremy Corbyn). And he is the British politician most people have an opinion on. Zack Polanski, meanwhile, has most teens going… “who?”
And that’s the thing: the mainstream are either unpopular or unknown to teens right now. Farage and Donald Trump, Andrew Tate and Jeremy Corbyn – these are figures a majority of teens know they have an opinion on. That’s the difference. Nigel Farage is as liked by teens as Jeremy Clarkson. And that’s not nothing.
Of the British politicians who elicit the most one-sided views, Andy Burnham comes top. Of those who know him and have an opinion on him, he has a net favourability score of +13. Whereas Farage, who more people know, has only a net score of +2.
As regards media figures, more teens know of Alastair Campbell (37 per cent) and Rory Stewart (26 per cent) than they do Owen Jones (24 per cent). Only Piers Morgan (at least of the options polled – 68 per cent) and Susanna Reid (53 per cent) are journalists at least known by a majority of teens.
It is not quite that teens are right-wing now. They’re not. More feel favourably towards Palestine than they do Israel. More say the cost of living is the most important issue to them than immigration. More teens today (34 per cent) think they will be worse off financially than their parents. Just 27 per cent think otherwise. Already a plurality of teens are writing off their future before their future has even begun.
The old convention was that the young went left and the old went right. Among this discontented cohort, not yet of voting age, style and aggression seem to be more important. The loudest and most radical voice wins.
Merlin Strategies interviewed 1,000 from 13 to 17 September, weighting by age, gender and region.
[Further reading: Labour vs the left]
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