Corbyn is not a game-changer - he’s more of the same, a middle-class career politician who is (belatedly) learning to play top-line politics.
Brexit will change
This general election was not a second Brexit referendum, though the result certainly does throw up important questions about Mrs. May’s particular vision of Brexit. Out will go any notions of a particularly hard Brexit. There will be far greater pressure on the incoming government to push for inclusion in the single market and even freedom of movement, both of which were touchstone issues for Europhobe Tory members.
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Millennials will be taken seriously
In the story of every generation, there comes a moment when its interests are first taken seriously by the ruling classes. For the baby boomer generation, at least in the US and Australia (my homeland), that moment arrived with the advent of the Vietnam war.
For the Millennial generation, the tipping point came post-Brexit. Many young adults, particularly in urban centres like London, felt disenfranchised by a vote they felt had been hijacked by self-interested older people. Meanwhile, politically engaged Millennials, realising that many of their peers had failed to vote in the Brexit poll, committed to getting their peers more involved in future elections.
In yesterday’s poll, it seems that younger voters welcomed with both arms the opportunity to cast a vote on issues which they saw as central to their collective future. Those issues extended well beyond Brexit. They featured questions relating education, taxation, social justice and more.
An often forgotten component when it comes to how Millennials view the political landscape is their expectation gap. Raised in mostly prosperous and peaceful times, where education has been of a relatively high standard, Millennials have grown up expecting to inherit a very different world to the one they encounter upon leaving school.
They emerge from formal education expecting to be in demand when it comes to employment. They expect to have a standard of living at least equal to that of their parents. They expect to be able to write a unique generational story, bringing to bear their distinctive skills in collaboration and innovation and their technological savvy.
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These expectations are not always the result of self-obsession; young people expect these things because their parents and teachers have encouraged them to.
In reality, young adult Millennials discover that housing costs are beyond their reach. They realise that steadily falling ratios of workers to pensioners - set to halve across Europe in the next 20 years - will eventually mean higher tax rates for them.
What’s more, they leave tertiary education with a bill previous modern generations were not expected to pay. And universities continue to charge them the maximum allowable fees, without necessarily providing value for money.
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