Let’s be honest, you can’t have missed the fact we’re in the middle of a super important election cycle. We know, we know, it’s Christmas and nobody wants to think about politics, everyone just wants to get pissed and eat their weight in Quality Street and listen to Mariah Carey. But this is a PSA from us to you: before you crack open the tin and complain about someone eating all the big purple ones, there’s something important you need to do first.
Go out on Thursday and vote for Labour.
It’s never been more important to get the Tories out. In the nine years since the Conservatives have been in power, the UK has become a cold house for anyone except the old, white and rich. In this election especially, we have a chance to make our voices heard as young voters. We have an opportunity — make that a responsibility — to demand better.
We have a chance to tell Boris Johnson and the Conservative party that we haven’t forgotten how they tripled university fees. That we haven’t missed their inactivity on climate justice, nor the fact that while we teeter towards ecological collapse, the Prime Minister took a p r i v a t e j e t from Doncaster to Darlington.
We understand that it might be tempting to back the lovely Greens but honestly, they’re polling so far behind Labour at this point that it’s likely to be a wasted vote (unless you live in Brighton). Besides, Labour just topped the Friends of the Earth environmental assessment — judging their environmental policies to be even greener than, well, the Greens themselves. You can ignore your friend who’s telling you that a vote for the Lib Dems would be ‘tactical’ too — as Gal Dem spelled out recently, this is untrue and they are not a progressive party.
Labour have promised in their manifesto to get rid of university fees and offer free bus transport for young people. They’ve promised to properly fund our schools, our libraries, our NHS. They’ve promised to deliver free broadband for the entire country, raise the minimum wage to £10 and reduce the UK’s net carbon emissions to zero by 2030. They want to scrap the Immigration Act, end the hostile environment the Tories have engineered for disabled people and tackle the current housing and homelessness crisis. They promise to develop a LGBTQ+ action plan to increase inclusivity and provide mandatory LGBTQ+ inclusive sex education, as well as fully funding sexual health services and rolling out the HIV-preventing PrEP medication. While they’re at it, they’re also going to set new standards for dealing with sexual violence and establish an independent review of the UK’s shamefully low rape prosecution rates.
What that all means, basically, is that Labour want to make our society more accessible, more fair, more equal. Which can only make things better in our dumpster fire of a world!
¯_(ツ)_/¯
And look, you’ve probably seen some pretty depressing polling pointing to a Tory win this week. One analysis this morning suggests that the Tories are on course to get their biggest majority since Thatcher was in power. But these stories don’t tell the full picture. Almost all the polling is playing down young people’s responses because they think they’re less likely to actually vote. And of course the polls have, famously, been wrong before. If they were accurate we’d have a Hillary Clinton presidency right now, and they were so incorrect in the last British election that someone almost ate their own hat live on TV in disbelief.
Rather than let those predictions make us miserable and apathetic, we want you to instead use them as inspiration to get out and vote. We all remember what happened in 2016 when the Brexit result rolled in — a result, it’s worth noting, that 71% of 18-24 year olds voted Remain in. The older generation might have fucked that one up, but don’t let them do the same in this election.
Basically what we’re saying is: we can only complain about systemic prejudice and inequality in the world if we participate in trying to eliminate that inequality and hold our leaders to account. So we’ll see you all at the polls!