Individual votes really do make a difference when you have small wards and low turn outs. I won my seat by a majority of only 8 votes and with only two candidates that meant that I got 51% of the poll. If only 5 people had changed their mind over who to vote for I would have lost and the Conservatives would have won the seat. That is not a rare situation. Where there are multiple candidates many local election seats are won with around 30% of the poll and sometimes that means the winning candidate who only secures two or three hundred votes.
The May local government elections are therefore a real opportunity for young people to make a difference. If young people turn out in force then the candidates they like will win. If they don’t bother it will be business as usual.
The Conservatives clearly know this. They are still badly rattled by last June’s General Election and know they are deeply unpopular with the young. They don’t want another defeat at the polls. They have therefore found billions under the sofa to try and stabilised wages in the NHS. They have let Gove champion a few easy win environmental causes. And they are furiously spinning themselves as the party that cares about young people’s home ownership and young people’s tenancy arrangements.
Nothing could be further from the truth than the idea that the current Conservative government is best placed to look after the interests of young people. The reverse is true. For the vast majority of young people their direct personal experiences of a Conservative government has been deeply negative. Not just because many of them are starting life with tens of thousands of pounds of student fee debts.
On a whole series of really important issue the Conservatives have let young people down by the ruthless application of clumsy policies. Just taking housing as an example. The government talks of creating a home owning democracy. Yet the dream of that has gone for most young people because the Conservatives have allowed building developers, who contribute heavily to their party funds, to build profitable executive homes on green field sites instead of building starter homes in major cities that young people might be able to afford to own. They have also made sure that there are desperately few council houses by forcing councils to sell them off cheap and by making it incredibly difficult for those councils to build any new homes for need. So many young people are either forced to live with their parents or to rent from private landlords who have been given the upper hand over private tenants via insecure temporary tenancies. The only thing the government is doing to ‘help’ is throwing money at a well-publicised scheme designed to help young people save the deposit money to buy a home. This wastes tax payers’ money on driving up the price of homes. It therefore helps no one and the same amount of money could have been much better used by giving it to councils to use as deposit funding to build for need. That would have genuinely increased supply not distorted demand.
So young people have got plenty of good cause to want to use every weapon they’ve got to communicate their dissatisfaction. It isn’t hard to be angry if you are on a zero hours contract or doing a dodgy internship without any meaningful rights at work. Nor is it hard to be frustrated by bad government if you are working as a nurse or a teacher on the sharp end and have seen your real terms pay go down for a decade whilst academy school bosses award themselves salaries that can go as high as £250,000 a year.
These experiences generated real anger in June 2017 and that anger was almost enough to get rid of the Conservative government. If Labour had been brave enough to do deals with other parties it would have been in power on the back of those young people’s votes. Yet only a month before, in May 2017, the Conservatives did well in the local elections because those same young people didn’t bother to vote.
If young people vote in May 2018 in anything like the numbers that they did in June 2017 then they will devastate the morale of the current government. The least that will happen is that the government will make even more U turns than it has done in the last month to try and respond to the voters’ concerns. Much more might be achieved. All those pompous self-important Conservative councillors who have lost their seats will be quick to turn on their leaders. I doubt whether Theresa May could survive a bad result. I doubt whether the Conservative Party could survive a fresh leadership election.
On the other hand, if the Conservative government sails though the May local elections without difficulty then there will be an immediate return to smug government and a conviction that they can get away with another lurch to the far right.
So the message of this blog is simple. The May 2018 local government elections are the most significant local elections in my lifetime. If young people want change then this is their big opportunity to change it. No amount of demonstrations will change this government’s minds. No social media campaign will stop them in their tracks. Turning out and voting in May will.
The country needs its young people to get out and vote.