Terence Blacker: The futility of chasing first-time voters

It was a worthy idea for BBC3 to broadcast a Question Time specifically aimed at first-time voters – or, as is more often the case, non-voters. In a colourful hangar of a studio, a panel consisting of three moderately young politicians, a reality-show winner, a satirist and a pop star, under the chairmanship of the man who presents The X Factor, made a game attempt to make the forthcoming election something for Generation X-Box to care about.

It was a profoundly depressing experience. The MPs did their uneasy best, allowing a little street swagger to enter their presentation and occasionally addressing the audience as "you guys". The chair, Dermot O'Leary, introduced celebrity whenever possible and suggested that politicians should be locked into the Big Brother house to sort things out.

One of the guests, Rory Bremner, trotted out the now-familiar argument about the commitment of young people to non-mainstream activism – Geldofism, climate change and so on. Another, the singer Jamelia, bemoaned the lack of personality in politics. When she was growing up, she said, she really remembered how Mrs Thatcher stood up for the working class.

This, perhaps, is what happens when the establishment tries to get down with the kids. It is deeply embarrassing, like a daddy singing a rap song. The more those on the platform sucked up to the moody first-time voters in front of them, the less impressed the audience was. Jamelia, the voice of the people on the panel, actually boasted that she had never voted. The reason, she said cheerfully, was that politicians had never explained what they could do for her and her friends. They were not speaking to her generation. David Lammy pointed out he was trying to do that now. Jamelia said that he should try harder.

That was the level of the debate. The extraordinary achievement of First Time Voters' Question Time was not just that it patronised its intended audience (what on earth was Jamelia doing there?) but that it made one despair of the young non-voters themselves. In most areas, the voice of youth tends to be less hidebound and compromised, and sometimes a lot more interesting, than that of the middle-aged and old but, when it comes to politics, it seems there is only one question of interest to the young voter: what's in it for me?

How dispiriting it is that a generation steeped in cynicism and defeatism has come of age under New Labour. Its perspective on the political scene is simple: blame, whine and do absolutely nothing to change the situation.

Thanks to a jaded media, MPs are routinely subjected to sneers for being self-interested. No one apparently has had the nerve to point out that at least they are trying, in their imperfect ways, to contribute to society and the future, unlike many first-time voters, about half of whom have not even had the energy or gumption to register on the electoral roll.

Perhaps the time has come when grown-ups in public life should stop cringing before the young and treating them like children who need to be bribed with sweets to do their homework. If politics fails to satisfy them, they should be invited to do something about it. If they feel they are being ignored, they should be reminded that the best way to attract a politician's attention is to vote.

They are too young to be so defeatist and supine when it comes to their own future.

terblacker@aol.com