>Why young people are detaching from democracy and social norms – and what to do about it
>% support for running the UK with "a strong leader who doesn't have to bother with parliament/elections"
>All: 46%
>18-34s: 61%
>35-54s: 49%
>Over-55s: 29%
A lot of young people don't remember a time before austerity. They can't afford a house, have no expectation of being able to retire, they're saddled with student debt and they've never known anything different. They've only ever seen public services get worse, they've only ever seen living standards decline. It's understandable that they might feel that "democracy" is simply a euphemism for "everything will get worse, boomers will rob your future and we'll pretend that it's your choice".
The authors of this report make the assumption that democracy is obviously a good thing and if young people can't see that then there must be something wrong with them. They entirely overlook the possibility that young people have seen what our democratic system has to offer and decided that they don't want it. It seems absurd to come to the conclusion that a loss of faith in democratic institutions can be solved by creating play schemes for children and trying to get young people off social media.
I think that absurdity is perfectly well explained if you look at who runs Onward. Qu'ils mangent de la brioche.
Democracy is having a pretty bad time of things, PR-wise, lately. I'd say it's down to social media polarising everything: I follow politics pretty closely and it honestly looks like a rigged system. The more I learn, the more our system of government clearly isn't designed to actually give people whatever they want. We've got a two-party system due to Duverger's Law, and third parties are kept out of the discussion. The BBC generally just asks the government what they think about themselves, and they rarely bother asking the opposition because who cares what the people who lost the election think? During the recent Conservative leadership election, Steve Baker (or possibly Steve Barclay since I get them mixed up constantly, but I think it was Baker) promised on behalf of Liz Truss to "let people stop caring about politics". He doesn't want scrutiny of himself and his colleagues, and he's allowed to say this because he knows a lot of the people who vote Conservative feel the same way.
Remember that annoying clip that got played to death of the woman in the street saying "Another one?" when told about the latest general election? That was popular because it was relatable. Most people don't like politics.
As for what we're going to do about it, obviously nothing because the status quo benefits the current leadership. They pander to old people and old people constantly re-elect them; why on Earth would you try to re-enfranchise the people who will make your job harder and ultimately sack you? Better to keep the current system, which is rigged in your favour.
Maybe the young folk would feel less disillusioned if we had True Democracy instead of this representative sham that inexorably leads to oligarchy. Bring back sortition. Them ancient Athenians and the Republic of Venice had the right idea.
Somebody once said something like, democracy is a shit way of running a country, but all things considered, it's the least shit way. In the end, political decisions are never directly up to the individual, not in a dictatorship and not in most modern democracies. But you can't just let 68 million people decide every single political issue all the time. It would be impossible, although probably less so with modern smartphone apps than in the past.
Even in the most progressive democracy, there's always going to be a distance between us and the ones that govern us. And even at the best of times, politicians will make some decisions that are out of touch with the people who are affected by them.
But social media nowadays isn't helping with that problem, and instead acts as an echo chamber for all the little gripes that people have with the government and which then get amplified into widespread disillusionment.
Not much you can do about it as a politician, except actually listen to the people now and then.
Old people aren't disillusioned, young people are. The problem isn't that politicians ignore the electorate, but that they ignore some parts of the electorate while pandering to every imaginable whim of other parts.
We had a baby boom followed by a baby bust, so the old substantially outnumber the young. First-past-the-post entrenches a two-party system in which the ruling party has something close to absolute power. If you want the government to build shitloads of houses so you can actually afford to buy one, it doesn't matter who you vote for - they might say that they want to make housing more affordable, but they can't risk house prices falling because homeowners outnumber renters.
We need electoral reform. We need a system in which The Millennial Party can get 20% of the seats in Parliament and force the blue Boomer Party or the red Boomer Party to compromise. Unless that happens, young people are just going to be increasingly frustrated by a system that is perfectly calibrated to make them politically powerless.
>>453876 I wonder if you could answer something that has been bugging me for a while, could you please explain what you mean by "austerity"?
I see the word bandied around here and other leftwing hangouts, generally along with phrase "Tory cuts", but it seems to mean something complexly different to what I understand by government austerity - a reduction in public spending.
For example the NHS has only ever had budget increases, except in the late 70s during the Labour years. From what I can see the increases are generally well above inflation, so its not just a case of a paper increase with a real terms decrease. Yet in some circles you never hear the end of complaints about how the NHS is struggling after years of austerity. I think the NHS is struggling, but lack of government spending would be way down on my list of reasons for that.
Does "austerity" just mean "we want potentially unlimited budgets for Good Things"?
Sorry I'm not trying to single you out, I pretty much agree with the rest of your post, its just the use of that word which often leaves me puzzled.
>>454141 Not that lad, but public spending doesn't have to fall for cuts to be made. If it takes - say - a 10% increase each year to maintain the same quality of public services and you're trying to keep public spending within certain limits, so you make a 5% increase, overall public spending increases yet services get cut to meet the budget.
The NHS is a good example of this: It gets piss all funding compared to practically any other first world healthcare system, while an aging population means demand is growing far faster than budgets, so things wind up being cut even though on paper budgets are going up all the time.
(For a fun chart: look at the real terms wages of NHS workers, which were intermittently frozen or given below-inflation increases during the coalition years. The number on the budget stays the same or goes up, yet they got poorer...)
>Does "austerity" just mean "we want potentially unlimited budgets for Good Things"?
No, but this quickly leads into a separate argument about the nature of public spending, the relationship between deficits and growth, and all sorts of other things. It's perfectly possible for a cut in public spending to lead to higher borrowing in the long term, and for higher spending to lead to lower borrowing, and for all sorts of other things to happen. The very short version would be that the government had options and it broke for shrinking the state relative to the economy as a whole.
>I wonder if you could answer something that has been bugging me for a while, could you please explain what you mean by "austerity"?
Austerity was the name used by David Cameron and George Osborne to describe his economic strategy after the 2008 financial crisis, announced at the 2009 Conservative conference and implemented in the 2010 budget. It's a widely-used economic term to describe reductions in government spending with the intention of reducing government debt and deficit. It has a sound (but disputed) theoretical basis; when a government is heavily indebted, reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio increases the confidence of debtors that they will be repaid and reduces inflation.
This was, from the outset, coupled to an ideological argument that the government had grown too big, undermining personal responsibility. Cameron's 2009 conference speech makes the intent explicit:
If win this election, it is going to be tough. There will have to be cutbacks in public spending, and that will be painful. We will need to confront Britain's culture of irresponsibility and that will be hard to take for many people.
And here is the big argument in British politics today, put plainly and simply. Labour say that to solve the country's problems, we need more government.
Don't they see? It is more government that got us into this mess.
Why is our economy broken? Not just because Labour wrongly thought they'd abolished boom and bust. But because government got too big, spent too much and doubled the national debt.
Why is our society broken? Because government got too big, did too much and undermined responsibility.
Why are our politics broken? Because government got too big, promised too much and pretended it had all the answers.
There were substantial and real cuts to public spending, which persisted well beyond the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crisis; as the economic arguments faded from relevance, the ideological arguments became embedded into Conservative policymaking.
The NHS is ostensibly "protected" in that it doesn't experience absolute cuts in funding, but as >>454142 says, healthcare spending hasn't kept up with demand. With a rapidly ageing population, healthcare spending needs to substantially increase year-on-year just to maintain the same level of service.
Equally significant for the NHS were cuts to social care spending. The NHS has always had a problem with "bed blockers", patients who had no medical need to be in hospital but could not be discharged into the community due to a lack of social care. This is astronomically expensive, because caring for a patient in hospital costs several times more than providing appropriate home care. The social care budget fell in absolute terms every year from 2010 to 2015 and remained below 2009 levels in real (inflation-adjusted) terms until 2019.
The biggest problem in my opinion were cuts to local authority budgets. Council spending in England fell by 21% between 2010 and 2019. We tend to think of councils as having responsibility for roads and bins, but most of their budget goes on social care - the elderly, the disabled and vulnerable children.
Cuts to these core services had a substantial knock-on effect on the NHS and the criminal justice system. Elderly people who weren't getting decent social care got sicker in the community, had falls and ended up in hospital; those who subsequently required more costly residential care put further stress on local authority budgets. Vulnerable young people lost the services intended to keep them in education and away from crime, leading to substantial increases in school inclusion and youth criminality, including knife crime.
My argument against austerity comes from a dull, centrist and fundamentally managerial position. Cameron may have had a point in 2009 when he argued that parts of the public sector were bureaucratic and wasteful, but the government culture of austerity has created a new and insidious form of waste - the near abolition of preventative action. A large proportion of government spending is effectively an investment, delivering long-term savings by nipping problems in the bud. That kind of spending is the first thing that gets cut when budgets shrink; they're more politically palatable because the effects aren't seen immediately.
If you cut thousands of programmes that save money in the long run, eventually you end up in a situation where services keep getting worse even when you've started to increase spending. The government have been penny-wise and pound-foolish, delivering short-term deficit reductions and tax cuts at the expense of creating very expensive long-term social problems. A strategy originally intended to reduce dependency on the state has ultimately had the opposite effect. The NHS has seen dramatic increases in demand for emergency care, because patients who can't get the routine care that they need keep getting sicker until it's an emergency; this has been mirrored across all parts of society.
>We need a system in which The Millennial Party can get 20% of the seats in Parliament and force the blue Boomer Party or the red Boomer Party to compromise
Fine with me, just as long as they can agree to form a coalition to keep the Zoomer Party from ever having a say about anything.
>>454141 In addition to the other points that spending needs to go up by a lot just to stay still, and that there was much more expectation in 2008 that basic services like public toilets and libraries should be provided, lefty Maoist kneeling places also point to examples like Iceland where the government spent money and saw a massively better economic recovery compared to ours. So the claim that we couldn't spend our way out of recession was, with hindsight, never even true. The government policy of refusing to invest money it didn't already have was at least a moderate failure.
>>454145 >So the claim that we couldn't spend our way out of recession was, with hindsight, never even true. The government policy of refusing to invest money it didn't already have was at least a moderate failure.
IIRC the economy was starting to recover under Brown and then the Tories stamped that all out.
