Tory voter ID rule is a clear message to the young - you’re worthless to us
Polling cards dropped through our letterbox this week leading to an interesting conversation.
“You know when you vote now you’ll need your passport to prove your ID?” I told my 19-year-old daughter.
“Can’t I just show them my student card or under-25 railcard?” she replied.
“No. I can show them my over-60 bus pass though, or, if I had one, an over-60 Oyster card,” I told her.
“Why?” she asked. “Because the Tories know most young people hate them, so they don’t want you to vote.”
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She just shrugged and muttered “great” in an ironic tone.
It’s not great though, is it? It’s another shameful insight into a shameless government which has nothing to offer people they feel won’t vote for them yet gives juicy bribes to those they think will.
You only have to look at the blatant bias towards Tory seats in the Levelling-Up funding, how Labour councils are forced to house eight times as many asylum-seekers as blue ones, and the recent pension tax giveaway to the rich.
Voter ID is another shameful insight into a shameless government (Alamy Live News.)But it is the appalling effects of their policies on young people that is the most worrying.
My other daughter is 29 and, despite having a professional job, due to her relatively low pay and the scarcity of housing, she’s finding it impossible to get on the property ladder.
While over-60s get free prescriptions and over-66s have their pensions triple-locked, younger workers, partly down to being saddled with student debt, suffer the most crippling of tax burdens.
And it doesn’t stop there. A teacher who was part of a school trip to France contacted me last weekend to say their coach had to turn back after being stuck in a 20-hour queue at Dover. The kids were heartbroken, she said, before pointing the finger at the Brexit-induced chaos and asking: “How many of those teenagers were given a say in THEIR futures?”
Answer: None.
Staying with teachers, the Mirror reported a poll this week showing that staff at the majority of UK schools are feeding and clothing hard-up pupils, some of whom are turning up without a coat in sub-zero temperatures or falling asleep in class due to hunger.
More than half of teachers polled said their schools were providing free breakfasts, 31% toiletries and 68% period products.
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A recent report by the charity Intergenerational Foundation found that the gap in the amount of money the Government spends on an older person (£20,800) compared to what it spends on a child (£14,700) has doubled over the past 19 years.
How did we end up like this? The kids in my inner-city school didn’t have much but I don’t remember any of us needing teachers to feed or clothe us. We also didn’t leave that school to discover that we’d have to pay for higher education, there was no social housing available, and we would be the first generation to end up poorer than our parents, earning less money and working longer for worse pensions as today’s will.
And now they are being discouraged from voting in case they want to change the dreadful hand they’ve been dealt.
If this was France there would be riots. And they would be justified.
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