Youth vote in the U.K.: Young voters moving away from major parties

LONDON – Shaniya Odulawa, a recent university graduate in politics from the London suburb of Bexleyheath, is unable to move out of her childhood bedroom which she shares with her sister.

While she is pursuing a master’s degree, she fears her salary afterward won’t be enough to move out on her own in London.

“It just feels like nothing is enough, and the ceiling keeps rising,” she said.

Despite Odulawa’s undergraduate degree in politics, she decided not to vote when the United Kingdom’s general election was called on July 4.

“I’ve always been one of these ‘go out and vote or you’re lazy’ kind of people,” she said.

But for Odulawa, and many other young voters, the choice between Labour and Conservative was difficult. Big ticket issues for the youth in the U.K. were housing, the economy and the Israel-Hamas war, but many young voters felt their concerns were ignored by the two major parties, Labour on the left and the Conservative party on the right.

Some decided to either refrain from voting altogether or turned to independent parties.

“My friend said something which stuck with me, ‘You can’t force people to participate in a system allegedly based on choice,’ and it really felt like there was no choice in this election,” she said.

Attracting the Youth Vote

Earlier this month, a small team of student journalists and faculty from Penn State visited England and Scotland to compare and contrast the political landscape of the two countries, focusing in part on young voters.

Sir John Curtice, one of Britain’s leading pollsters and a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, provided statistics that showed voters ages 18 to 24 turning away from the major parties.

Smaller parties were the beneficiaries. For example, on the political right, 9% of young voters cast ballots for Reform UK candidates, which jumped 8 percentage points compared to the last election in 2019. The environmentalist Green Party, meanwhile, took 18% of this demographic, which increased by 14 percentage points.

Noticing the uptick in youth interest, independent parties capitalized on this largely forgotten demographic and employed new strategies to gain support.

“The leader [Ed Davey] of the Liberal Democrats, which is not a hip, fun, cool party, in the recent election did a bunch of goofy stunts. He took a kayak out, went parasailing, and went bungee jumping which was all on social media,” said Mark Landler, the London bureau chief for The New York Times. “The Lib Dems did well in the election, and there has been discussion about whether Ed Davey actually improved the appeal of the party to younger voters.”

After 14 years under the Conservatives, and a run of scandals, the unpopularity of the party made it clear that Labour was going to win.

But for Rachel Henderson, a second-year at the University of Strathclyde studying journalism and politics, voting for an independent party wasn’t about expecting them to win.

“I went in with the intention of voting for not who I knew was going to win, but who I felt most comfortable having my name next to,” she said. “So I decided to vote for the Green Party.”

A Vote for Independent Parties

The Green Party, with its progressive positions on the environment and LGBTQ+ rights, garnered the youth vote, which helped increase its seats in Parliament from one to four.

“It was fresh, it was new, it was people who actually listened to not just young people's beliefs about the environment, but environmentalists everywhere,” said Amy Kettyles, a 20-year-old who stood as a candidate for the Green Party in Glasgow East.

Another party that appealed to younger voters was Reform UK, which originally emerged as the Brexit Party. Reform UK is a political party that is generally regarded as further right than the Conservatives, led by Nigel Farage, a politician who was an avid supporter of Brexit.

With their focus on issues such as immigration, which the party thought would have been resolved by Brexit, Reform UK strategically campaigned toward younger voters.

“He used TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram very effectively,” Harry Yorke, the deputy political editor for The Sunday Times who covered Reform UK, said of Farage. “And actually, whilst Reform UK ended up not winning a huge number of votes among the under 30s demographic, they actually succeeded in becoming very popular with teenage boys in this country.”

While these independent parties are still far from having the strength to govern Parliament, the parliamentary system allowed them to gain seats and have at least a small voice.

The Lack of Options

In the United States, third-party influence is not as easily achievable. Youth vote could be decisive in the upcoming presidential election in the United States, but there is no indication of increased support for third parties.

“You do have fundamentally a two-party system in each country, Conservatives and Labour and Republicans and Democrats,” Landler said. “But because the U.K. is a parliamentary system, you do have significant third and fourth parties which don't exist in the United States.”

Unless and until that changes, political experts say, young American voters have the choice between the major-party candidates or staying home.