A Marling Sixth Form student has examined why young people are becoming increasingly disconnected from politics, arguing that the issue is not apathy but a lack of opportunities to participate.
Atticus Lynham, a Year 12 student, has written an in-depth feature exploring the decline in youth political engagement, combining national election data with interviews and personal experiences to investigate how young people can be reconnected with democracy.
By Atticus Lynham
In an era where populism and divisive politics are on a drastic rise, why is it that we’re seeing fewer and fewer young people engaging with the political system? Is it a case that people are simply fed up with the system and how it works, or perhaps is it the fact that young people are engaging with politics in increasingly unconventional and untraditional ways? And if young people do feel so detached from politics how can we re-engage them?
The 2024 general election saw Labour win the largest majority government of the century so far, coming just 5 seats short of Blair’s largest ever win. Yet they did this with just 33.7% of the vote share, the lowest share of the vote by any governing party ever in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, this election saw the lowest overall turnout since 2001 with only 59.7% of the registered electorate turning out to vote. To put that into perspective it means that of approximately 48 million registered voters only 1 in 5 actually voted for the Labour party.
Amongst all these numbers, what stood out to me most was the fact that compared with national electoral turnout across all age groups, those aged between 18 and 25 had by far the lowest turnout. However, I would argue this is not because young people are apathetic towards the electoral system, but rather they feel that they are alienated. When speaking to Lennie, a year 12 student at Marling and founder of the Debating Society, he pointed out that many young people feel that ‘the current political system favours people of the older generation, because the older vote is more reliable’, a simple statement which clearly points to the wider problem at the heart of youth disengagement. Young people feel that politics is being done to them rather than with them, they feel that the system is outdated, unresponsive to their issues and is dominated by older voters.
In addition to this, both the general election and local elections saw a sharp rise in populist parties such as Reform UK and the Green Party, both of whom had record-breaking nights for the number of seats they won for their respective parties locally. Furthermore, at a national level the Green Party gained 16% of the vote share among voters aged 18-25, the largest gain of a vote share by any party, with Reform UK behind them with a 7% gain amongst 18-25 year olds. This means two things: firstly that the younger generation are fed up with the traditional two-party system, and secondly that young people want charismatic leaders who promise short term radical change, over those who speak at length about all the ins and outs of their policies.
Locally, in Stroud we ranked 20th for overall turnout, with 70.9% of the electorate turning out to vote, 11.2% above the national average. However this doesn’t paint the whole picture. Stroud has an aging population and a particularly politically active adult demographic, so the overall turnout masks the lack of participation from the younger members of the constituency, who still ranked the lowest by age category. And this problem isn’t just found on paper, but is equally translated into the real world, as I can attest to through personal experience.
As the President of the Debating Society at Marling School, I regularly have the honour of welcoming local politicians to give talks to our Debating Society and the wider school community, and it was through the organisation of one of these events that I experienced firsthand the level to which young people feel detached from politics.
While organising our marquee event, a Q&A session with Stroud MP Dr Simon Opher MBE, it became clear to me that being able to fill a venue seating 250 to even half capacity would be a challenge. Beforehand, if you had asked me whether we would’ve been able to fill a hall with 250 people to hear a local MP speak I would have been confident we could. After all, politics is hardly boring in the world we live in.
However, while organising the event I came to realise first hand just how disengaged and uninterested young people have become in politics. Having secured the event back in March, we quickly began promoting it in April with the hope of having the hall as full as possible. I quickly realised that there was every possibility that the event could fall flat on its face, with a crowd of under 50 seeming a real possibility.
When attempting to promote the event we faced a number of challenges. Everyone we spoke to about it seemed to describe politics with one of two words: ‘boring’ or ‘complicated’, and this is fundamentally where young people start to become detached from the political world. It gave me a true sense of just how distant and irrelevant young people feel politics has become for them. Thankfully, as a result of an incredible amount of hard work from the entire Debating Society and our teachers we managed to pack out the hall and make the session a really great opportunity for students to engage with politics. But still I was left wondering what is it that we can do to better engage young people in politics?
After the event, I took it upon myself to interview some of those who decided to attend the event to really understand why they came, what they learned, how they felt about the way young people are represented in politics and how we can engage them to an even greater extent in politics.
When interviewing Theo, a lower school student, he told me the reason he came to the event was because he thought it would be ‘interesting to see the local MP in the community, engaging with young people’. He described how he felt that politicians don’t often come face to face with young people in a setting where they can be scrutinised and held to account. Therefore, perhaps this indicates that young people feel disconnected from politics not out of a lack of interest, but rather a lack of involvement.
When later asked about what he took away from the event, Theo described to me how he thought that Dr Opher came across as an ‘open and honest man’, and how he felt that this allowed him to gain a greater understanding of Westminster politics and how it all works. Lennie in Y12 agreed. He described how he felt that being able to engage with him in the manner and format which we did allowed him to ‘speak his mind about what he really thought about Labour issues’. This yet again goes to show that young people perhaps aren’t so detached from politics but more so left out when it matters.
However, when both Theo and Lennie were asked whether they felt that young people were represented well enough by politicians at the highest level of government, they both responded ‘no’, citing issues such as the current voting system (FPTP) and the lack of young-person orientated policy coming up regularly. They both would go on to mention the social media ban describing how they felt ‘confused’ at the measures proposed and felt that the politicians in charge hadn’t properly consulted or been able to understand young people and their relationship with social media.
So that leaves the question of how do young people feel is the best way to re-engage them in politics? Lennie led with educating people on the ‘importance of their vote’, leaning into the idea that by voting and having your voice heard you force politicians to move away from anchoring their policies on the older generation to gain their vote, and push them towards tailoring policies to the needs of the next generation. Theo leant into the idea of politicians needing to make appearances more often in community spaces where they can engage with young people, such as youth clubs and schools. This yet again brings me back to my earlier point that the reason why young people feel disconnected from politics isn’t because they aren’t interested, but because they simply aren’t given the right opportunities to get involved and have their say.
These interviews gave me a snapshot into how young people felt about the state of politics at the moment. It also framed for me what can only be described as the root causes of a youth democratic participation crisis, where young people feel unheard. They feel that they lack accessible platforms to express their opinions, and so despite being politically aware, they lack the platform to become politically active in a way they feel will create real and meaningful change.
When I asked Lennie about whether or not he felt that there was a democratic participation crisis amongst young people, he said that he did feel there was a growing lack of hunger to participate in politics amongst young people and that ultimately this stems from years of ping-pong politics under a two-party system. So, when faced with a youth participation crisis, I am of the opinion that, as is the case with anything, you require a grass roots, bottom-up approach and one of the ways we are doing this is through the Marling Debating Society.
The Debating Society was founded at the start of the year by Lennie and meets every Tuesday debating a wide range of issues, whether this be niche political debates, such as our debate on Trump’s cuts to foreign aid in the DRC, to deep philosophical ideas, such as our debate on what serves a more important purpose – equality or liberty. These regular debates help to create a safe and structured environment for political expression amongst young people and goes to show that when young people are given the opportunity to engage in politics they will, as was the case with the Opher event. The existence of the debate club as a part of the Debating Society also helps to build core skills such as confidence and oracy, which are critical when articulating and expressing your political opinions. Therefore, I would argue that in order to begin to tackle the root causes of the youth democratic participation crisis schools must act as democratic incubators, encouraging and fostering the most important political conversations amongst their students, as we have tried to do at Marling.
To conclude, young people, at their core, are not politically disengaged but politically disconnected, lacking the correct medium to help them express their opinions and be heard by the local politicians who are meant to represent them. The solution to this is not to lecture them, but rather to listen to them, through institutions such as debate clubs, school events and youth-led political spaces that can be used to help rebuild trust between young people and the political system that is supposed to represent them. Ultimately, an effective democracy depends on participation and participation relies on people, and in particular young people, having their voices heard and most importantly acted upon. Therefore, I urge all schools, politicians and community leaders to provide young people with the opportunity to engage in politics because I can assure you that they will engage when given the chance to.
