Behold, Young Idiots: Another Crappy Advert for Voting In the Referendum

A weekly column about how young people are fucked lol.

In politics, to tell someone to "wake up" is to call them stupid. While all this important politics has been going on, you've been asleep, dummy. That's why conspiracy theorists say it, as they revel in being more woke than the idiot sheeple that surround them.

So, it's refreshing that one of those campaigns to get young people to vote has at last fessed up to its own smuggery by calling itself simply "Wake Up And Vote". It stops short of actually saying "duh", but it might as well.

I've noticed campaigns like this pop up every time there's been a major vote over the last few years. They tend to come from a small-c conservative position yet use the language and iconography of youth radicalism. That, or they try to drum up civic engagement with an appeal to bratty self interest. They always manage to combine political illiteracy with self-righteous condescension as they try to educate supposedly apathetic young people about democracy.

This latest example, from the Bite the Ballot campaign group, is a case in point. It starts by asking "Who are the VIPs in this referendum?" before we see a red carpet event being rolled out. The twist is that the VIPs are random young people who get hassled in the street to sign up to vote in the EU referendum. If they agree to register, they get shown through to the red carpet room and handed a glass of prosecco. There a lot of actors are pretending to be fawning members of the public, or desperate celebrity journalists, chanting their name and jostling for autographs as they undergo the three-minute sign-up process.

It concludes: "In this referendum, no one is more important than you".

What a nice message. What bollocks. The last time a red carpet came near the referendum debate was for the launch of Brexit the Movie, where aristocrats posed, excited to see a film that told them that the country could be won back from the Brussels-crats for its home-grown elite. The only time a young person gets treated like a star is when they get hyped as the voice of youth on the Mail Online for saying something reactionary on a televised debate.

David Cameron, meanwhile, is banging the drum for the VIPs on the Remain side – the British businesses that would be screwed without access to cheap migrant labour and pro-privatisation trade deals, or the xenophobes who need to be reassured that our bigoted migration targets can be pursued from within the EU.

The referendum has been predetermined as a choice between two slightly different nightmare visions of a heavily corporate, disturbingly nationalist Britain. The idea that voting elevates you to the level of whichever set of VIPs will be in charge once the dust has settled is to hold people's intelligence in contempt. Bite the Ballot need to wake up to that.

@SimonChilds13

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