Youth engagement is a major focus of the government’s strategy to improve political participation at a time when parliamentarians fear for their mandate. Initiatives like the youth parliament, citizenship classes and the proposed lowering of the voting age to 16 are based on the idea that engaging youth in politics will solve the wider problem of political disengagement and lack of participation.

But will it work? Why would young people vote when politics appears superficial, alien and ineffectual? And does the focus on youth reveal the end of ‘adult’ political engagement, whereby ‘getting them young’ is the only meaningful option left? Is this yet another cynical attempt to raise voter turnout—by any means necessary? Increasingly, young people are taught that voting is a kind of a duty they have to the state, rather than a means by which people can take control of the direction of society. As Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman recently said, she wants to see teenagers ‘coming straight out of the citizenship class into the polling station’. Is this simply about harnessing youthful idealism? The tendency for citizenship classes to promote a prescribed set of values, as opposed to free thinking, suggests room for doubt.

Will this transformation of democracy lead to greater engagement or just greater participation in a meaningless process, and what effects will this have on our relationship with politics? Is our focus on youth an attempt to hide the real problem; a shortage of ideas on how to solve the very adult problem of engaging all of us in a meaningful politics?