Patrick Leigh-Pemberton

Are you excited? I am not at all. That’s right, the year’s most anticlimactic season is almost upon us, and already the buzz of not caring is setting the usually calm arenas of student discussion completely ablaze. No, I am not talking about the complete non event that is St. Andrews’ “let’s objectify our colleagues and not feel bad about it because it is for charity, and some people are wearing suits so it is classy and acceptable right, even if they decide to pour champagne substitute on the floor” fashion season . I am talking about the upcoming elections. And this time, it isn’t just the election for sabbatical offices that students can ignore, but the election of an entire government for Britain. Hurrah.

I can’t really be bothered to sum up what is happening, because we are all students, and broadly belong to the 16-24 age group. We are, therefore, notoriously apathetic, and couldn’t care less what a bunch of old people are promising to do to us. The last time someone actually promised to do something that might directly have improved our current situation, it turned out that they were lying, and they weren’t going to do a single thing to stop fees going up. People cite this as a turning point in our generation’s relationship with politics, turning us off from the bunch of lying hucksters that want to be in charge.  Which makes limited sense to me. This was the point at which we, as a generation, were most powerfully introduced to the duplicity of these people, and that should have made us more aware.

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We shouldn’t turn off, as today’s generation of politicians (including Nigel Farage) are the people that the next generation of Nigel Farage’s are going to be condemning for their lack of foresight. And that lack of foresight will harm us all directly. The environment has so far not figured prominently in the election debate. Within 100 years, the temperature of this planet will have risen, on average, 2°C and people are concentrating more on what is the best way to stop people trying to sneak into this country. Mr. Farage’s party’s meteoric rise has twisted the political conversation to the point where very few people want to defend the benefits that immigration can provide. You know all those lovely American friends you have made and continue to make in St Andrews? Did you also know that thanks to Mr. Farage’s effect on politics they can no longer carry on working directly after university, helping this economy with the skills that they learnt here? No. Mrs. May got scared that she wasn’t looking tough enough, so changed the visa rules.

Mr. Cameron got so scared that he even promised to hold an In/Out European Referendum, because the worst thing that is happening to Britain right now is belonging to one of the larger trading blocs in the world.  This is the generation of politicians that have done nothing to remove the blight of Private Finance initiatives, which allow public debt to be offset into private contracts, creating a timebomb of debt the size of which is impossible to fathom, whilst private sector entities make a profit, perform badly, and leave. The generation of people that have saddled us with debt for years and years. The generation that have accepted the shoddy outsourcing of services that means the prisons, hospitals and passport offices can be someone else’s profit centre rather than a centre for public service, is now the generation that, content with their profits from all of this, wants to remove our freedom of movement, so that we can only get jobs in Britain. It doesn’t matter what side of this argument you are, but it is vitally important that our generation doesn’t just let one of the most significant decisions of our life time be taken by people whom it won’t affect.