By Sarah Newton
As you may or may not know, as I write this the UK is going through a political stalemate, with no stable government and all the parties trying to decide if and how they will form a government. The UK look on in disbelief, not quite knowing what to do. (We now know they have formed a coalition government)
This election was unprecedented in most of our lifetimes and has ended with a hung parliament, meaning that no party has an overall majority to run a stable government.
For the first time in UK politics we had televised debates, which did really shake up politics and really woke the youth up when it came to political reform.
However what happened on Election Day was a real blow for Generation Y and may have been the first time they felt massively let down. After seeing the impact of the youth on the Obama election, they must have felt they had a chance to change things. And as they all rallied around the party that normally came third, they were devastated when an exit poll revealed that this party would lose seats and the party they despised the most would get the most seats. Furthermore, when the exit poll became true, twitter came alive with their displeasure.
Firstly, the fiasco of polling stations having to be shut with queues of people outside and some places running out of ballot papers put them up in arms. Was this really democracy? The challenge for them was that since most of them had gone to vote late, this mainly affected them.
A generation used to having a say, encouraged to have a say and used to being heard were suddenly helpless. And as the dust settled and they looked at the figures, they began to shout very loudly for political reform. How could a party that 64% of the public voted against and had no representation in Scotland and only a bit in Wales be representative of the United Kingdom? How could a party that only had 8% more of the vote have 200 more seats and how could people voting for a party go up yet their seats go down? How could this be fair?
And they were right, it is not fair. They quickly got the figures together and sent them around Twitter and Facebook.
Party Votes per seat – Conservative 34,989. Labour 33,350. Liberal Democrat 119,788
Seeing how unfair this was, they demonstrated and pleaded with the leader of the party they had adopted to push for electoral reform.
Way this election has empowered the youth is so evident. It has empowered them around fairness and equal rights and they are not staying quiet.
So, the message to businesses and people dealing with Gen Y is this.
Ensure your dealings, policies and rules are fair. Ensure that they are not based on outdated tradition and ensure they give the youth as much of a say as anyone else.
