An open letter to first time voters (from jaded Generation X)
Dear Gen Z
As you’ll have twigged, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s general election announcement on the steps of Number 10 was manna from heaven, meme-wise. Who could have predicted that he’d do it in the pouring rain while an unseen scallywag loudly played Tony Blair’s 1997 campaign anthem Things Can Only Get Better? LOL. So far, so funny.
Thing is, I am a democracy superfan. The principle is excellent compared to the alternative but what really gets my vote is the process, in all its arcane, polystyrene-cup-of-tea-and-a-funny-little-pencil-on-a-string glory. It might not seem that cool when you’re watching a sub-GCSE-drama quality party political broadcast or chewing your way through a podcast on the viability of a wealth tax, but I promise you, come polling day you’ll be buzzing. And I’m especially psyched for this one because we’ve not had one since before the pandemic! I am SO READY.
If you do nothing else, vote.
My Mum was a God-fearing, staunch Thatcherite. She taught me that clever girls can and should beat the boys at their own game. “One day you’ll be Prime Minister” she would tease. At the 1983 general election, when I was seven, Mum took me and my brother out canvassing for the Conservative party. I was delighted with my impossibly glamorous, blue rosette with satin ribbons. We had stickers on our car. It was some years before I realised that the general election wasn’t just another national jolly like the royal wedding and the World Cup.
The polling station was in the hall next to the Catholic church at the bottom of our road. It had that musty, municipal smell of old teabags and bleach, and a scuffed up, parquet floor. Mum made a point of taking me with her. “Women died so we get to vote” she said, parking the car. Cripes. I remember feeling my hand in hers, standing by the trestle table in the hall’s stone porch watching an old man neatly cross names off his list with a pencil and wooden ruler. In the middle of the hall stood four booths, all facing one another in a wobbly, hardboard criss-cross structure like the scenery in the village pantomime.
“Can I write the cross?” I asked.
“No, it’s not allowed”, Mum said.
“But we can rub it out if I make a mistake?”
“If you make a mistake, you don’t get a second chance”, she said gravely. No, indeed.
Do you remember the first time?
All you people born between about Christmas 2001 to July 4th 2006 will be marking your pencil cross of power for the first time this July. So long as you’re on the electoral roll and remember your valid voter ID, that is.
So how come so many fortysomethings are nostalgic about this election? The historical comparisons are tempting, it’s true. And, post Covid, we’re all feeling rather jaded and old. My first GE was Tony Blair’s 1997 New Labour landslide, you see. Titanic, The Full Monty and Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet were in the cinema in 1997. It was the year of Radiohead’s OK Computer and Oasis’ Be Here Now. Never Ever by All Saints played on repeat in every Topshop on every high street because there wasn’t any ASOS or Depop yet. Diana and Dodi Fayed’s blossoming romance filled the papers. It was the spring that I turned 21.
I was about to sit my university finals. The morning after the election, May 2nd, it was unusually quiet on my walk to the English department. I sat with a bookish, serious boy called Matt. He hadn’t been to bed. With real tears in his eyes – from the emotion or the hangover or both - he pronounced out loud to me, and the almost empty auditorium with its defiantly blue fabric seats, “Everything changes today. We’ve woken up to a Labour government.” We spent the day in the pub, splashing the last of our student grants on Belgian beer and crisps, blissfully unaware that we were some of the last undergraduates to enjoy free University tuition.
Just because you didn’t win, doesn’t mean it didn’t count
You need to brace yourself for election night. Imagine Eurovision without any sequins, but so, so much longer. You’re looking at an all-nighter. You will need provisions: an epic girl dinner style platter and a four pack of energy drinks. Only lightweights hit the sack when the “exit poll” – the early indication of who’s going to win - comes in just before midnight. Consider building your resilience by watching all 472 minutes of David Dimbleby’s 1997 Election Night Speciai on iPlayer. Tempting? Maybe not.
The famous swing-o-meter – which shows who’s winning what seat as the results come in through the night - does take a bit of understanding. Since 1997, I’ve voted in eight general elections and none of my Xs have ever contributed positively to the result. I’ve never lived in a parliamentary constituency represented by the candidate I voted for. Slightly irritating, tbh. How so? The weirdness of the British electoral system, with its wiggly boundaries and “first-past-the-post” rule, means that lots of Xs just end up in the giant democracy bin. But that is not to say that they don’t count.
Being invited to vote is a profound privilege. It’s OK if you can’t muster the same enthusiasm for a political manifesto that you can for a new Taylor Swift album. Fair enough, the clothes are awful and there’s no good tunes. Huge swathes of the electorate struggle to find a mainstream political party that represents them these days. But putting your X in the box is your chance to bring about positive change, and to have your say about what, and who, we stand for as a country. Voting - or spoiling your ballot if that’s the way you roll – also earns you the right to whinge and moan about the whoever runs the country for the next four to five years, whether you picked them or not. And if the wind blows your way on the day, don’t forget the golden rule: if you didn’t vote, you can’t gloat.
See you down the polling station.
Love,
Gen X xx
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