Why You Should Give a Shit About the EU Referendum

Today is the last day to register to vote for the EU referendum, and you should register to vote in the EU referendum. If it was an option, a large part of me would vote to never read, hear, speak or think about it ever again. Between the racist belches of the Leave cohort, the sanctimonious snickering of Remain and the deafening, masturbatory wittering of the commentariat, I'd had enough of the whole sorry affair within minutes of it kicking off.

For someone my age, this is hardly unusual. Barely half of 18- to 34-year-olds are certain to be participating in the referendum. Old people, on the other hand, love it. They love the gaffes and the debating society put-downs and the sectarian warfare. Left and right, their opinions have hardened with age, often to the point of malice. To them, the whole affair has been a glorious collision between a months-long episode of Have I Got News For You and a boozy Christmas lunch spent needling the in-laws. Four out of five over-55s will be casting a vote.

But just because I find it hard to care doesn't mean I don't care. The assertion that young people are idly apolitical is intended to neutralise our engagement and to reduce our worth to a single vote every few years.

Why are so many young people bored by Brexit? Because it's boring. That much is painfully obvious. So perhaps a better question is: why is Brexit so boring? Brexit is boring because it is supposed to be boring, because it is in the interests of the neoliberal voices dominating the debate to make it boring. More precisely, it is in their interests to abstract the debate from a discussion about human lives into an interminable shitfest for policy wonks to frot themselves into a frenzy over. Capital will not be disrupted, and so the terms of the debate must be safely constrained.

Cameron and his cronies want your votes now that they realise they need them, but they do not want your anger. (This much becomes obvious when we take to the streets against them and they kettle and beat us.) Infantilising attempts to court the youth vote – Tinder's #TurnUp campaign, Votey McVoteFace – serve only as a tacit reminder that we are political children, allowed to sit at the grown-ups' table because daddy thinks we could be a useful pawn in a hissed spat about the alimony payments.

Three quarters of young people care about Brexit. But 68 percent of under-25s say their main concern about the whole campaign is a lack of "reliable" information about what will happen. We're not not voting because we don't care: we're not voting because both campaigns patronise us with turgid agitprop, then blame us for our "failure" to engage with it.

But here is the issue: old people are mostly terrible. Over-65s hover below the the half way mark for support for gay marriage, compared to about 80 percent of young people. In the last election, they were twice as likely to vote for UKIP as 18-24s, and half of over-65s voted for the Tories, way more than in any other age bracket. And one in three openly admit to being racist. Young people, on the other hand, are fucking great. When young people take themselves seriously, you get Paris 1968, or Egypt 2011, or Hong Kong 2014. When old people take themselves seriously, you get the guy who owns Wetherspoons influencing seismic pan-European political shifts.

In recent years, the major achievement of the left has been the wrenching open of the floodgates between the personal and the political. Radical acts of recognising different forms of oppression in every day life are drifting into the mainstream.

But as recent generations continue to politicise the personal, so we must also personalise the political. In response to the wilfully stultifying onslaught of drab Brexit commentary, we should strive to see the human suffering that will result from a referendum that is going to have an outcome, whether we participate in it or not.

Vote, but don't vote on the grasping, self-serving terms set out by either campaign. Vote as a fuck-you to campaigns which have treated young people as inane, gawping, social media addicts. As though we aren't gawping at the crass bisection of our possible futures into two insular life-support machines for investment banks, as though we aren't tweeting in rage rather than apathy.

We need the voices of young people to drown out the smug, self-serving rhetoric of both campaigns. The referendum has been conducted on terms that are intentionally removed from reality, and particularly from our reality as under-30s.0. But it must be wrenched out of this abstracted space and back into lethal focus.

Brexit is boring. The lives at stake are not.

@hashtagbroom

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