Jilted Generation?

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Unimpressed by the Cameron-Miliband cohort, Mel Zumrutel looked for inspiration from the grandfatherly figures of London politics, but remains uninspired by the general election.

Five weeks until the UK general election and we’re already in the middle of the TV debates. Don’t know about you but I wasn’t all that impressed by last week’s not-quite debate featuring David Cameron and Ed Miliband in a foursome with Jeremy Paxman and Kay Burley. Too much posturing, prevarication and first night nerves meant that the most important questions were left largely unaddressed.

I thought I might get more mileage from a seminar organised by the Centre for London on how to win the general election, featuring veteran politicians ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone (former Labour MP, erstwhile Labour rebel and ex-Mayor of London) and Steven Norris (former Tory cabinet minister and ex-Mayoral candidate), along with seasoned election-watcher Ben Page, chief executive of opinion pollsters Ipsos Mori.

These guys are either professionally disinterested like Ben, or old enough not to have to try too hard, i.e. Steve and Ken. With far less riding on it, I hoped that their debate would be much more informative.

They started with housing – the primary issue round here (according to the polls, nearly 30 per cent of Londoners think so, compared to 13 per cent across Britain as a whole).

So solve housing… get votes?

When Steven Norris was in his prime, London’s biggest issue was crime. Now, according to Steve, London’s ‘inescapable issue is that it is simply becoming unaffordable’. Crime is not it; and transport, even though many people do relentlessly complain about it (myself included), is not the issue.

If we can take drastic action to save the bankers, Ken wanted to know, why can’t we do it to save the housing situation?

When Right to Buy was introduced in the UK, Ken suggested that when you do sell your home, you should sell it back to the council. Since it was implemented in 1980, more than 1.5m homes have been sold under the terms of this scheme.

But selling it back to the council – was that even an option? Eight years ago my family benefitted by selling a tiny ex-council flat in Islington and trading it for a semi-detached house on the edge of North London. But surely giving back these flats (at prices the council could afford) would have done nothing to diminish the housing crisis, since it would only have meant even fewer properties on the open market.

Then Ben asked: ‘where are we going to put the houses?’ There wasn’t a clear answer, and the debate turned to electioneering. For Ken Livingstone, the way to get votes would be to ‘drop everything else and knock on doors.’ But with what policies?

The speakers agreed that party leaders are scared of being seen as London-centric. Yet the housing problem is London-centric, so if party leaders are preoccupied with appearing otherwise, the London-led housing crisis will never get the attention it deserves.

It is a most highly deserving case, given that building 80,000 homes would only start to address it, but this might explain why it isn’t so high on the general election agenda.

Next question. ‘How do we involve the youth?’ In the opinion polls, Labour is ahead because it seems a lot of young people take part in polls but do not actually vote in the one that counts. The panel agreed that if the youth did vote, we might have a completely different picture. But Ben also pointed out that people, especially younger people, only vote when ‘they think their votes might actually matter’ – for instance, in the Scottish referendum.

The veterans’ panel didn’t have much of an idea about how to engage with young people. And there I felt I had to leave them to stew in their own juices – knowing what the biggest problem is for the largest number of Londoners, but not knowing how to make connections with the only cohort – the young – which still has the time and energy to do something about it.

Personally, I think politicians seriously underestimate the youth. More policies should be considered which actually benefit younger voters. When young Londoners biggest fear is never being able to afford a home of their own, more needs to be offered than a help-to-buy ISA. And if that sounds ungrateful, let’s face it, my generation has not had much luck. I will forever resent a government that charges undergraduates £9,000 a year plus maintenance.

(I once heard this story; perhaps it was a myth but apparently there was a time many, many years ago where it only cost £1,000 to go to university. Charging today’s students nine times that amount is what I call a bit unfair.)

You can’t please everyone. The Conservatives just can’t shake the image of being a party for the one per cent and Labour isn’t appealing to Londoners seeking upward social mobility. Meanwhile the Greens seem to have moved away from the idea of ‘just greenery’ with the aim of representing all ‘the under 30s who are pissed off.’ It all seems sort of empty.

It just might be a generational problem: the oldies are still out there but they don’t know how to reach us; the middle generation (Cameron and Co) are too self-interested to be taken seriously; and my generation has the potential to surprise all the rest by showing a genuine generosity of spirit – but they’ve got to give us something to go on.

Happy Voting.

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