The Tories Are Trying to Stop Young People Voting. Don't Let Them Win

Boris Johnson loves democracy so much that he's trying to fast-track an election in order to stop young people from voting. The Prime Minister's campaign team have privately admitted they are pushing for an early election because the sooner it comes, the fewer students will have registered to vote.

"No 10 is said to have factored in term times in deciding to push for an early election as it would mean campaigns had less time to ensure that students registered to vote. Those on the electoral roll at their home address would be less likely to travel to vote," reports the Times.

Seventy-thousand young people have registered to vote in the last couple of days. That number will only increase as time goes on, and it's fair to assume that most of them are not too hyped about having their futures mortgaged in order to fulfil the dreams of Empire 2.0. To the people behind the scenes at Number 10, this presents a snag, and they plan to deal with the problem of young people engaging in democracy by cutting it off as much as possible.

Given that the government has a majority of minus 41, an election is certainly going to happen pretty soon. Boris Johnson wants it to happen as quickly as possible, around the 15th of October, under the threat of a no deal Brexit – that way, he can set it up as "Brexit with Johnson, or delay with Corbyn". For everyone else, it makes more sense to have an election when the immediate threat of no deal is lifted, so that Brexit can't happen before the public gets to have a say at the ballot box.

That's why Johnson – who only this week insisted he doesn't want an election – is calling Jeremy Corbyn a "chlorinated chicken" for not voting for an election. And it's why Jeremy Corbyn – who has been demanding an election for the last two years – is now saying that while he wants an election, he doesn't want it quite yet, and that Labour will vote against one on Monday.

And now we know another reason the Svengalis in Number 10 want to speed up an election: to stop young people from voting. In the same week we saw Jacob Rees-Mogg lounging on the benches of the House of Commons, this is up there for the most perfect summary of the government's contempt for democracy.

Boris Johnson mocks the leader of the opposition for running scared of a public vote while his advisors plot to ensure as few young people vote as possible. Brexiteers complain that anyone who opposes them is undemocratic, while their backroom strategists plot to disenfranchise young people in order to shit-house their unhinged project to its terrible conclusion.

It's not surprising that the Conservatives would want to do this. In 2017 young people gave the Tories a kicking; it's believed that a large turnout among young people helped lose Theresa May her majority. At the subsequent Conservative party conference, ageing men in suits discussed how they could recapture the hearts and minds of the youth, like the meeting of an immortality cult looking for young bodies to harvest. They came up with a mixture of a red-scare about the perils of Corbynism and some very mild concessions on social issues, such as freezing tuition fees rather than scrapping them.

Two years down the line, the Conservatives have come up with nothing to improve the lives of young people. What is on offer is the same uncertain future, only now this includes an act of blatant self-mutilation bandaged up in twee Union Jack bunting.

The crappy situation facing the young people of today has its roots in the 2008 financial crisis. That was a punch to the guts to young people at the time, who saw the assumption that every generation would have a better quality of life than their parents shattered. In 2010, the new Lib Dem/Tory coalition government took the opportunity to launch an all-out attack with a decade of damaging austerity. Young people were to be among those carrying the can for a broken economic system as tuition fees for university students were raised, despite Liberal Democrat promises to "resist, vote against and campaign against" the lifting of the cap, and to scrap tuition fees once and for all.

Things have only got worse, and a decade later Brexit is another momentous political event that will change the trajectory of a generation. Once again, young people are being mugged off. To the Conservatives, the charade of delivering Brexit for "democracy" is the mask for a turbo-Thatcherite economic revolution. And, like a Scooby-Doo bad guy, they don't want any meddling kids getting in the way.

This time, rather than even bothering with the niceties of trying to lay out an attractive programme, or even making promises that they could break later, the Tory plan is to obstruct young people's chances of voting entirely. For all his fine words about the will of the people, Johnson is a born-to-rule toff who can't take the lives of others seriously. His chief strategist Dominic Cummings is a cynical chancer for whom ordinary people are pawns to be manipulated.

Johnson came up through the sandbox student politics of the Oxford Union, where ruling-class students dress-rehearse their political careers. He is now trying to deny ordinary students a stake in the political events that will shape their lives. When politicians mess with even the minimal democratic oversight that our system allows, it's time to show that who gets to have a say is not up to them.

The first swing in retaliation to tuition fees came in the form of the trashing of the Conservative Party headquarters at Millbank, sparking a movement of resistance. Like the betrayal of students in 2010, this latest act of fuckery deserves to be a totemic moment of political contempt. If the Tories don't want to listen, let's continue taking to the streets and make some noise they can't ignore.

@SimonChilds13