“I think there’s going to be a generation of under-twenty-fives that are newly politicised. And that’s because essentially a lot more of them are going to be long-term out of work. That will continue to contribute to the explosion in, dare I say, agit-prop-style music. I think music overall will be harder, lyrics will be harsher.
There will be an even greater challenge to big public institutions. I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the Occupy movement and similar movements that essentially have come together because the Internet allows groups to form really quickly, with low barriers to entry. So, if you talk about being in a new age of transparency, then they’ll expect their public institutions, from everyone like the BBC to the Metropolitan Police, to be accountable to the people that they are supposed to be there for.
I don’t think that people under the age of twenty-five see political parties as being particularly the vehicle to change anymore. And that’s one of the challenges that I have as a Labour MP. Most political parties, certainly in the UK, have got a century of history and they are very rigid in their rules and their constitution. Then contrast with that with movements that spring up over night. When I was a kid if I wanted to conduct a piece of political campaigning I would have to book the room, design the leaflet, find a printer, distribute it, set up the telephone tree, book a coach, get everyone to the town hall. Now you can just set up a Facebook group. It’s all one-click political organisations.
So it’s really hard for political parties to allow people with these ideas and energy to journey through them – there’s a sense in the political parties that you’ve got to earn your spurs and be around a while before you’ve earned the right to speak. That’s gone now. Social media has given everyone that platform. And you know parties can either respond to it or become irrelevant to that group of people. So that’s a big challenge.
As far as under-twenty-fives remaining patient during the possible double-dip recession, the only parallel I can draw is the consequences of the 1981 budget, because you know George Osborne’s budget is very similar to the 1981 budget. I’m of that generation, and it wasn’t unusual for a teenager to leave school in the early-’80s then not get a job for five years. Long-term youth unemployment doubled this year – “long-term” being people who’ve been unemployed for a year or more. You know, that goes in different directions. It can be just people giving up and losing hope and withdrawing, but all that does to your community is it fuels anger and expresses itself in all sorts of different ways. And you’re seeing a bit of that with the sort of ‘99/1% Movement’.
Now a whole group of young people have decided they think the system isn’t fair, but they themselves are not providing an ideological or policy remedy that’s coherent. They’ve all got different views about it. They know the system isn’t working for them and they expect the people that are elected to do something about it. This is the job of politicians: to try and capture that energy for the good. And so how do we deal with that in 2012? My guess is we’ll still be scratching our heads at the end of the year, but it’s not going to go away. The gaping divide between the expectation of normal people losing their lives and the so-called ‘political classes’ could go greater in 2012.”
