Corbyn is cool; fiscal responsibility is not

Britain’s annual Glastonbury Festival of contemporary performing arts — a product of the counterculture movement — gave Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn a rock-star reception last weekend. Against all the odds, the white-haired 68 year old has managed to be portrayed as cool and anti-establishment. Had Teresa May turned up, she would no doubt have been booed off the stage.

Glastonbury is a young peoples’ event, and what happened there last weekend is consistent with recent election results not only in the UK (where Labour attracted an astonishing two-thirds of young voters) but also France (where far-left candidate Melenchon came out well ahead with young voters in the first round) and the US (where Bernie Sanders consistently outpolled Hillary Clinton among young voters in the primaries).

In none of these cases did the far-left win, but it came close enough to make everyone sit up and take notice of the choices young people are making at the ballot box. They have always been more inclined to the left or centre-left, but the demographic divide apparent in recent elections is much starker than anything seen before.

The reasons for this phenomenon are conjectural, complex and beyond the purpose of this article. Let us just observe here that whatever reasons young people have for flocking to far-left candidates, in voting for platforms of unaffordable fiscal benefits, re-nationalisation and other features of snake-oil economics, they are voting for a future of penury, higher taxation and higher public debt.

Young voters may not pay much tax now, but they will in the future, and some of them hope to join the ranks of high income earners that are the favourite targets of the Corbyns, Sanders and Melenchons. Even if they don’t care about that, they do need to worry more than any other age group about a future blighted by high public debt, as they will be the ones carrying the burden. But it seems that while Corbyn is cool in 2017, fiscal responsibility is not.

It remains to be seen how the politics of demography play out in Australia, but some of the ingredients for a similar upset are present here too.