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Young people urged to register to vote: “This is your super power – don’t let them take it away”

UK residents have until 11.59pm tonight to register to vote. Campaigners tell NME why this is "most important election of our lifetime" for young people

By Andrew Trendell
The crowd at Reading 2023. Credit: Andy Ford
The crowd at Reading 2023 CREDIT: Andy Ford

As the deadline draws close to people in the UK to register to vote today (June 18), a campaign that unites bodies from the music industry have spoken to NME about why getting young people engaged matters.

Just Vote recently launched their Crash The Party campaign, encouraging people aged 18-34 to step up and make their voices heard. They’ve also enlisted over “50 music industry” including artists, record labels and festivals to help spread the message – with the added opportunity of being able to win tickets to Glastonbury and Reading & Leeds.

Ahead of the UK’s General Election on July 4, people have until 11.59pm tonight to register to be eligible to vote. You can register to vote here.

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The campaign is the brainchild of entrepreneur and environmentalist Dale Vince OBE, who told NME about how important music was to politics as it had “changed the way he saw the world” when going to gigs and festivals a teenager.

“The idea was to reach out to people through festivals, through live music events, through musicians and artists to spread the word to young people that they actually have a superpower,” said Vince. “It only comes around once every four years, and it’s going to be the hardest it’s ever been to exercise it.

“This government is trying to stop young people from voting, so just don’t let them.”

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Vince also argued that through new voter ID legislation, the government was attempting to silence young people.

“The government brought in the need to have photographic ID there when you vote, and they did that off the back of six cases of voting fraud over the last five years – that’s in a country of over 60million people,” he said.

“The pre-text of it was bogus. There is no fraud worth even talking about. The first bi-election fought under this new legislation saw 3,000 people disenfranchised and turned away at the voting booth because they didn’t have the required photo ID.”

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Many believe that the legislation favours older people by allowing things like bus passes to count as ID, while student union cards won’t qualify. “It’s deliberately aimed at young people that don’t tend to vote Tory,” said Vince – who explained why this is the most high stakes election on record for the younger generations.

“This is the most important election of our lifetime,” he said. “There will be 3million first-time voters at this election aged post-18 at their first election, and they have the most skin in the game.

“The climate crisis is the big thing that we’re facing, we’re halfway through the last decade that the UN said we had in which to act, we’ve got five years left. Young people are going to live with the consequences of the climate crisis. It will define their lives more than any other generation, and they will find it the hardest to have their say in this election. There’s some kind of super-dark irony in that.”

Looking to the key areas that young people fear in terms of employment, social mobility and the cost of living, Vince argued that an onus on renewable energy would open up a myriad of financial avenues in all areas of life.

“We’re always hearing, ‘We don’t have money for this’ or ‘taxes will have to go up for that’ – but the answer to all of our economic problems is in the green economy,” he suggested. “Right now, we’ll spend £100billion bringing fossil fuels here just to burn them – it’s a single-use fuel. If we spent half that sum of money just once, we could build the infrastructure to power the country forever on renewable energy.”

He went on: “Our bills would half and we could keep them low – we could nail them to the floor. We could create hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs, and they’d be forever jobs because renewable energy is a forever-fuel. The economic boost for being energy-independent would be incredible for our economy.

“That’s how we’ll find the money for schools, hospitals, social care, the arts and young people. It’s not about the environment – this is about everything. The environment is the economic opportunity of the century.”

Scores of figures from the worlds of music and the arts have taken to social media today to encourage voter registration. “True democracy is dependent on everyone having a voice,” wrote Blur‘s Damon Albarn in a hand-written note, while rising queer punks The Menstrual Cramps shared the link the register while reminding followers that it takes less than five minutes.

Vince said that this activism was symptomatic of an “an industry that seems to take its social responsibility properly” He ended by saying that Just Vote would be campaign for a digital app-based system of voting after this election to get more young people involved, but for now the message was simply to remind them that they can make an era-defining difference.

“There’s a jadedness about the process of politics, the honesty of politicians, but decisions like Brexit effect us for a very long time,” he added. “A lot of people are disenfranchised with politics and I understand that. Now, 14 years of Tory rule have just drained the hope and positivity out of everyone.

“One third of under 24-year-olds aren’t registered to vote in our country. There are millions people who are not having a say. Now is their chance.”

Visit here to register to vote and here for more on Just Vote’s Crash The Party campaign.

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