“Go to a public meeting [in Scotland] and you'll get hundreds of people,” says Willie Sullivan, Director of the Electoral Reform Society's Scottish branch. That wasn't always true, he says: go back a couple of years and you'd be rubbing shoulders with “a few people who [were] weirdly interested in politics.”
Such anecdotes are common among Scotland's politicos, but a major study published today by Edinburgh University goes some way towards confirming what many have long suspected. Last year's independence referendum has made Scots want to involve themselves in the political process like nothing in recent memory. This is particularly true among the young. The problem is that we're unlikely to see such a boost repeated anywhere else in the near future.
Scottish teens (18-19 year olds) are now nearly twice as likely to say they will vote in the next election as their contemporaries in England (65 per cent of them say they will, compared to 34 per cent in England), and about 20 per cent more of them have taken part in some kind of political action. That compares with a 30 per cent turnout for the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, as Jan Eichhorn, one of the study's authors, points out to me. Scottish people of all ages were more likely to tell the Edinburgh academics they would vote in May than other Brits, though the differences were less stark in other age groups.
This change comes despite the fact that Scottish teens are no less furious about the state of our politics than any other Brits—more so, in fact, with just 21 per cent saying they're satisfied with democracy in Britain, compared to 26 per cent of English 18-19 year olds. The fact that they're planning to vote anyway is cause for hope. “Young people are trapped in a downward spiral,” wrote the Labour Councillor Georgia Gould in Wasted, her new book on youth disengagement, “they don't vote because they feel alienated from politics, politicians don't take their concerns seriously, thus entrenching their alienation.” It seems that, thanks to the referendum, Scotland's teens have managed to break this cycle—for now at least.
But there's the rub: this is thanks to the referendum, the most remarkable political event to hit the UK in decades. It was, says Sullivan, a “catalyst” for all sorts of conversations that went beyond party politics and touched on deep ideas about the kind of country people wanted to see—the kind of conversations that most ordinary voters aren't often encouraged to have. “How do you create that without a referendum?” he asks, “I wish I knew.”
One possible catalyst that might engage the whole of the UK in the way the referendum did Scotland, says Sullivan, would be a “constitutional convention” on how Britain should be governed. Ed Miliband has called for one, but unfortunately the Edinburgh study shows how unlikely a proper, long term debate on these issues is to happen.
As well as interviewing members of the public, the Edinburgh researchers also spoke to a panel of “elites:” politicians, civil servants and members of civil society and third sector bodies. These sections of the report make dispiriting reading. The report says that senior figures connected to the Smith Commission, a government panel set up to organise devolution to Scotland “took the view that whilst Scotland might have had a catalysing effect on the devolution debate across the UK, Scotland could not afford to stall its momentum to allow that wider debate to take place.” These interviews were “somewhat disappointing” in their lack of engagement with popular demand for constitutional change, Daniel Kenealy, another of the report's authors, told me.
Still, there is one glimmer of hope. Eichhorn tells me that, while he wants to look further into the data to confirm this, he suspects that a big reason for this newfound engagement is likely to be political discussions in schools during the referendum debate. The report finds that 18-19 year olds are more likely to say they will vote than 20-24 year olds. Many of that younger cohort were at school as Scotland was deciding its future. If teachers could find ways to conduct genuinely interesting political discussions, we might have a chance at overturning some cyncicism.
“The referendum amplified things that are going on everywhere,” says Sullivan—the breakdown of traditional hierarchies, the emergence of new media, the growth of political movements outside of traditional party systems. The legacy of last September offers a glimpse into how to take these nebulous concepts and turn them into real change.
