As they queued up in the canteen on Monday, rucksacks flung over their shoulders, several of the new MPs had brought their mums for their induction day in Westminster. More than half of the Commons are newcomers, struggling to find their way around the 100 staircases, three miles of passages and 1,000 rooms. Google maps won’t help in the Houses of Parliament. It was like the first day at school as they were given their passes and handed the keys to their lockers. But they also need to hire staff and have been issued a booklet about pay, pensions and expenses, and offered panic alarms.
As the old timers shuffled out of the revolving doors with their wilting pot plants, the new intake were being told not to clap in the chamber. This is the youngest cohort ever to take their seats in the Commons with an average age of 46, and just 43 on the Labour benches, with 17 under 30.
Sam Carling, the new MP for North West Cambridgeshire, was born this century. At 22, he is the baby of the House. Journalists and grandees did their best to disparage him, suggesting a haircut and worrying he didn’t have enough real-world experience. But he soon made it clear he wasn’t going to be patronised and explained that his cohort knows exactly how tough life is. The majority of his university friends are struggling to find rented accommodation while looking for non-existent graduate jobs and worrying about paying off vast student debts.
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Keir Starmer, at 61, is the oldest prime minister to arrive in Downing Street for 48 years. But he needs to focus some energy on the young who feel more alienated and detached from the mainstream than at any time since the 1970s.
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If the new prime minister doesn’t politically engage with his teenage children’s generation, Nigel Farage may take these votes. He was all over TikTok during the election campaign and a poll by JL Partners last month had Reform tied with Labour among 16 and 17-year-old boys who seem to love this pink-tied public school boy. Thirty-five per cent said they would vote for Reform. Farage’s video content has been viewed almost 40 billion times on Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, where he has a following of more than 850,000.
“Maybe I’m part of a similar phenomenon” to Andrew Tate, [the influencer charged with rape and human trafficking], he said, while on the campaign trail in Clacton last week, as he whipped up dissatisfaction among young men who think they are being left behind. Meanwhile, young women were the most likely group to go to the left of Labour: 23 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds voted Green.
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The young are always more volatile and likely to rebel, but the three main parties have done little to target them since the pandemic, except to bemoan their lack of work ethic, worry about their mental resilience, or in the case of the Tories, call for a return to national service. But these parties fell over themselves trying to attract the elderly with promises to keep the triple-lock pension.
Age has become divisive, and pitching young against old has pushed Gen Z towards the fringes. While the elderly are now better off than the average working family, their children are often floundering. Many have had to rely on the hospitality of Mum and Dad, with nearly 30 per cent of 25 to 29-year-olds still living with their parents, according to the ONS. Starmer should use his new young intake to look at issues they care about and ways to encourage their generation back to mainstream politics before they become marginalised and radicalised.
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From France to Portugal, Finland to Germany and Belgium, young men have been tilting towards the right. The same is happening in New Zealand and South Korea. In the US, Donald Trump is doing better than Joe Biden among young millennials and Gen Z. But Britain can be different. In 1983, Margaret Thatcher won more of the under-35s than Labour by being aspirational. The young want to know they have a chance of being better off than their parents, that they will be helped on to the housing ladder; rather than being looked down on, that they can feel optimistic about their future.
Labour’s priority for this generation should be to sort out further education. Both universities and apprenticeships have been degraded in the last decade by the previous government which belittled “Mickey Mouse” degrees while offering few alternatives. The UK spends 0.4 per cent of GDP on higher education, compared with 1.5 and 1.6 per cent in France and Germany. The new education secretary needs to find more money for universities and a new way for students to repay the state. Almost 1.8 million graduates are at least £50,000 in the red and will still be paying off this debt in their fifties, thanks to the exorbitant 7.9 per cent interest. Replacing student loans with a graduate tax, (Gordon Brown, in 2002, suggested a 3 per cent levy on earnings above £30,000) would still make graduates financially responsible for their education, but without bearing the psychological weight of debt.
Generation Rent also requires more affordable housing, but there is no point building new homes on the green belt if young people can’t afford them. The new government should look at encouraging and expanding shared-ownership schemes, under which first-time buyers with a household income of less than £80,000 can buy a share of a property with a housing association.
Starmer’s new ministers should also grab the recent offer of a youth mobility scheme from the European Union, which would give under-30s the right to work on the continent for up to four years. Young MPs taking selfies in front of Big Ben is only a start, now they must encourage the new PM to deliver for their generation.
