Lily Cole, actor: the environment
When it comes to the environment, there’s not nearly enough decisive action being taken. We let parties off the hook and let them get away with lacklustre, unimaginative policies and pledges. There is not enough public will or media attention, and I think the Conservatives have taken advantage of this. Manifestos shouldn’t just focus on the next five years; this is about the next 50 years, the next 100 years, the world our children will live in.
The commitment the Conservative government has made to reducing carbon – and which their manifesto honours – only gives us a 67% chance of not going beyond the threshold of a 2C change, which scientists say will be essentially apocalyptic. Banking on a plan that is not 100% foolproof is not enough.
Liam Williams, comedian: the economy
About seven years ago, I learned the term “cognitive dissonance”, which means something like: “The mental distress one feels while simultaneously holding two mutually contradictory beliefs.” I often have to look up such concepts and then I forget them pretty quickly. But this one stuck. It describes very well the experience I’ve had trying to make sense of British politics this last near-decade.
Successive Tory governments have framed an era of rising homelessness and child poverty, buckling public services, regional underinvestment, stagnating wages and sickening inequality as a bunting-festooned mega-festival of mythic togetherness, economic triumph and just bloody keeping calm and carrying on.
The slogans (“All in this together”; “Strong and stable”) don’t hold up, and nobody really believes that they do. The subtext of the current party cry is: “Stronger and stabler than Labour” or “The global economy is confusing and capricious, and only the Conservatives are capable of protecting Britain from its vicissitudes.”
But all the evidence is that they’re not: the £350m a week to the NHS lie, the ever-changing deficit reduction target, the U-turns on national insurance and social care, the un-costed manifesto – all that’s neither strong nor stable.
A Labour government would come with its problems. It might even pose new forms of nightmarishness as it sets about implementing a fairly economically progressive manifesto in a nation firmly under the sway of a restive billionaire establishment. But you can be very sure of one thing: it would not bid you to feel a vainglorious pride in Britain, even as it neglects, stigmatises and actively damages whole swaths of its citizenry.
Cush Jumbo, actor: support for the arts
I mentor young actors and talk to students. At the moment, they seem distressed by uncertainty about their opportunities. What bothered me under David Cameron’s government was an attitude of the arts being soft subjects. From 14 to 18, I went to the Brit school. People mistake it as some kind of Sylvia Young-style Fame school, but it’s a free performing arts school – and it is the most extraordinary place in the middle of a crap area of Croydon. It saved my life. I had no money to go anywhere special or to be supported.
Only three or four of us from my whole year became professional actors, but every person in that class is now incredibly successful. Whether they’re teachers or run their own companies, they’ve all become contributing members of society. A lot of that is down to the fact that they were allowed to express themselves via the arts. We all learned to communicate, grow confident and accept ourselves for who we were before we went out into the big world. We went out there thinking: “I can take this on.”
Those are the skills you develop when the arts are part of your education. At a time of cuts, when schools are struggling, it is the first thing they get rid of. That is really worrying to me. The arts always get treated as a side dish. British actors and performers are taking over the rest of the global entertainment industry – why wouldn’t we want to invest in that?
Girli, musician: homelessness
Housing is super-important to me. Young people cannot afford their own homes any more. Our parents’ generation was the last who could. I have so many friends who are so clever and working their arses off and they still can’t afford to move out of their parents’ homes. Our generation is staying at home for longer and there is nothing being done to cap rent or make sure landlords are fair.
I rented a flat with a friend last year, and was completely screwed over. The landlord took me for a lot of money because they knew I was young and naive and didn’t understand what the contracts meant. There was no help or support for me.
There’s also not enough affordable housing being built. Housebuilding is at its lowest since the 1920s. In big cities like London, you see a lot of luxury flats and buildings bought by private developers. They are pushing up prices and forcing out families, people who have lived there for ages.
I have lots of friends who are homeless and sofa-surfing, having been forced out of home, unable to live there any more. Housing benefits were recently cut for thousands of 18- to 21-year-olds by the Tories. But even before that happened, the process people had to go through to reach a point at whichthey were eligible for housing was impossible.
There are people being abused at home, or have parents who don’t believe they are going through mental health issues, but to be eligible [for help] you need to have a signed letter from your parents. It’s such a Catch-22. As a result there are so many young people on the street. Shelters are getting more expensive and there’s not the staff to keep them running.
Theresa May said: “Work is the route out of poverty.” But almost 50% of people below the poverty line are already in employment. The minimum wage continues to be so low that you can be working full-time and still be unable to afford somewhere to live.
Ella Hickson, playwright: civic pride
According to Instagram, we are in an era of “goal-smashing”. We can get anywhere we want to go if we work hard enough. This high-control, hyper-individualistic belief in the self makes sense. Older ideological systems, such as religion or patriotism, have been co-opted by fundamentalism and made toxic. Even the social systems – the NHS, the welfare state, education – are only ever discussed in various shades of failure. It feels as if the architecture of any belief system beyond “the self” has dissolved.
So where does this leave voting? New mums vote for the best childcare policies, students vote for no tuition fees, millionaires vote against taxing the rich. The problem with this “what suits me best” approach is that it’s not really voting, it’s shopping.
Lots of people will cry: “I don’t vote like that – I think about the whole country.” This is like people (myself included) saying they are opposed to child labour. But when it comes to buying a new pair of trainers, well, we sort of want them and it’s only one pair and not buying them isn’t going to make any difference. And, of course, the useful thing about voting is that it’s secret, so we can be self-interested and no one will know.
Voting, surely, should have breadth, should take in the concerns of as broad a range of people as possible. It can’t just be about us. We should imagine voting on behalf of our grandmothers, the guy sitting opposite us on the bus, our unborn children. Perhaps we can recultivate “civic pride”: remember schools, nurseries, libraries, clean streets? These things exist not to turn a profit but to create a society.
Doesn’t that seem oddly novel? A friend pointed out that ours is the first generation to have no living memory of what life was like without the NHS or the welfare state. Imagine being told for the first time that your country will catch you if you break your leg or lose your job or find yourself without somewhere to live. It must have sounded like a miracle.
These acts of imagination, this civic daydreaming, works to train our brains away from individualism and towards citizenship. Fear is exhausting. Trying not to retreat and retract and put up walls is hard. Imagination, creative hope and walking in someone else’s shoes can be an antidote. I think it can help us vote better.
Kojey Radical, poet-musician: housing
If young people ever want to own a house, they should vote. Naturally, as a city starts to grow and become more of a metropolis, gentrification happens. People move out, people move in, other things evolve. I know a lot of people who aren’t able to keep up, especially when it comes to rent. Take a little two-bedroom flat in Hackney, where I’ve lived all my life. It isn’t possible to buy something like that any more.
A conversation needs to happen around this. The matters that affect everyone trickle down to how people think things affect them personally. It wasn’t until the issue with student fees came up that the younger generation felt part of politics. That was a direct promise that was broken.
Politics isn’t very user-friendly. You feel as if you’re not really sure who you’re voting for, or why you’re voting. There’s never been a direct effort to connect to the youth vote, but now you can see a lot more young people campaigning for other young people to vote. And when it feels as if your peers are involved, it makes more people want to be involved. We definitely have influence. It’s important for more creatives, for artists, to take a stand.
Joel Dommett, comedian: apathy
Newsnight was recently on my TV. The Katy Perry documentary was on the other side. This statement comes from a person who picked the latter.
Hating politics in 2017 is like hating football during the World Cup, or disliking selfies in 2016. So why do I feel this way? I just don’t like the people involved, the way it’s handled differently by each media outlet so it’s hard to understand. Most of all, I hate that it allows millions of people to pretend they know what they are talking about. We all know so little but think if you say “cabinet reshuffle” or “Paul Nuttall” you have an opinion worth listening to. Can we all just stop pretending to know, please?
During the hell that was Brexit, everyone always said: “Vote with your heart.” It’s a terrible idea. You should vote based on logic and facts. I have been subject to a vote myself. I was a relatively unknown contestant on a show called I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! When voting for your favourite “celebrity” in a jungle, you can vote with your heart because it’s a popularity contest, not a job interview. It certainly won’t change the course of a country.
In her beautifully profound lyrics, Katy Perry says: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag, floating through the wind, wanting to start again?” So many of us young voters are like that plastic bag. Don’t just let your bag be blown around by others’ decisions and land on a pile of stagnant dung for the next four years and blame the wind. Be a bag for life. They are too heavy to be blown around and are not discarded into the wind but kept under the sink to be used again.
But you don’t have to listen to me. I’m proud to say I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m just a guy who ate a goat’s dick on telly.
Declan McKenna, musician: school funding
As I have just come out of full-time education, this is my first general election and it’s pretty exciting. My friends and I are all very happy to finally have the opportunity to vote – especially after Brexit.
The outcome will have a huge effect on education. Schooling definitely gets overshadowed. I want people to feel as if they have equal opportunities, no matter what their background. Education is for everyone.
The Labour manifesto has some things that could help a lot of people: abolishing tuition fees for universities will appeal to the younger generation. Free school lunches – and the Tories’ plan to scrap them – is another crucial topic. For a lot of kids who don’t get the bare essentials in the morning, because their parents don’t have the time or money, having free school meals is a big deal. I think it’s a massive reason to vote.
Hannah Witton, YouTuber and sex expert: sex education
I am an ambassador for the sexual health charity Brook and run a YouTube channel that covers topics I believe should be taught in schools. I received sex education, but it was basic: we were told how to avoid pregnancy and STIs, but there wasn’t much about consent, LGBTQ+ issues, the impact of pornography, masturbation, healthy relationships or pleasure.
Back in January, the Conservatives planned to block sex and relationship education (SRE). Since then they have made it compulsory again. I am not entirely sure why they have changed their minds, but they clearly have their own SRE strategy. Maybe they want to make their mark with an entirely new curriculum.
The Labour manifesto says that they will make SRE compulsory. This will also include LGBT education, which is great. The Greens have for years now been championing compulsory SRE in schools: Caroline Lucas has put it forward to the Commons many times.
Blocking it is detrimental. Young people self-censor a lot. We’re protecting them more by giving them the correct information, building their confidence, giving them tools to talk about sex and relationships and navigate that whole world when they are ready. People who are reluctant [about SRE] assume that sex education means corruption and is over-sexualising children. That isn’t the case at all.
Election day 8 June: please note
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