Social Europe

politics, economy and employment & labour

  • Themes
    • Strategic autonomy
    • War in Ukraine
    • European digital sphere
    • Recovery and resilience
  • Publications
    • Books
    • Dossiers
    • Occasional Papers
    • Research Essays
    • Brexit Paper Series
  • Podcast
  • Videos
  • Newsletter

Young Brits Have Most At Stake In The Brexit Referendum But Know The Least About The EU

Anand Menon 26th April 2016

Anand Menon

Anand Menon

Never before have so many had to decide on something they knew or cared so little about.

The “London bubble” is obsessing about the EU referendum on June 23. The parts of Twitter I see are hyperventilating with excitement over designation, debates, purdah, net costs and benefits, and the like. But the majority of the country could not give a fig.

This matters. It matters because the decision is an important one. And it matters because young people in particular, who have more at stake than anyone else, have the least interest in, and least knowledge about, the EU.

On one level, this is normal. Let’s face it, as Peter Foster of The Telegraph pointed out some weeks ago, even when it comes to events that political aficionados think are capturing public attention, the reality is that long periods of profound uninterest are punctuated by very short spikes of attention. Using Google searches as a proxy to capture “interest”, his findings are depressing to all those who feel “the people” should be interested in politics.

Interest in the 2015 general election matched that in football for a couple of weeks before polling day but quickly dropped below searches for The X Factor – which was not even airing at the time. And even when it came to the Scottish referendum, held up by commentators as emblematic of the way popular enthusiasm can be aroused by politics, much the same occurred. Even during the week of September 14, as Foster showed, interest in football far outstripped (by a factor of two to one) that in the Scottish vote. Within a week, the Great British Bake Off and Strictly Come Dancing had reasserted themselves as the main focus of public attention.


Our job is keeping you informed!


Subscribe to our free newsletter and stay up to date with the latest Social Europe content. We will never send you spam and you can unsubscribe anytime.

Sign up here

Insofar as people care about politics at all, they only seem to do so for very short periods of time. This should give pause for thought for those of us already starting to tire of a campaign that has only just officially started.

Then there is the issue of different amounts of engagement across the generations. As James Sloan of Royal Holloway has pointed out, a striking feature of recent general elections has been the decreasing turnout among young voters.

Turnout among the young (18 to 24-years-old) fell from over 60% in the early 1990s to around 40% in the elections of 2001, 2005 and 2010. This is all the more troubling in the case of the referendum as its impact may take up to a decade to be felt, and may impact on us for a generation or more. The young, in other words, will be disproportionately affected by the outcome. 

A lack of interest is matched by ignorance. Levels of knowledge about the EU in Britain are extremely low. In comparative terms, we score worse than other member states. In May 2015, around 1,000 British people were asked three basic questions about the EU: 84% could get at least one right, which sounds OK, except only the Spanish did worse. A mere 27% of British people got all three right – placing us second from last.

Not, of course, that a lack of knowledge is confined to the general public. A recent survey of MPs we commissioned also highlighted their ignorance about the EU. When asked which country held the presidency of the Council of the European Union, 61% of respondents admitted they did not know (it was Luxembourg at the time).

Watch BBC’s Question Time and you will often hear the refrain, from at least one member of the audience, that “we need more information”. But the media is not helping. My colleague Christoph Meyer has highlighted just how poorly the British public think of their TV and print media: 73% of survey respondents claimed “not to trust” newspapers and 46% don’t trust television.

Nor is social media the answer. It is generally seen to act merely as an “echo chamber“, reflecting people’s pre-existing tastes and confirming their prejudices rather than providing new information that might challenge these.

Let me be clear: the British public are not to blame for their ignorance. Years of negative hyperbole about the EU – frequently from people who are now propounding the “remain” case – have not helped. Nor has the media’s lack of interest. The BBC’s Nick Robinson may have interviewed the great and the good for a documentary now that the EU matters for domestic politics – but the broadcasters were allergic to programmes on the EU before a referendum was called.


We need your support


Social Europe is an independent publisher and we believe in freely available content. For this model to be sustainable, however, we depend on the solidarity of our readers. Become a Social Europe member for less than 5 Euro per month and help us produce more articles, podcasts and videos. Thank you very much for your support!

Become a Social Europe Member

The referendum matters. It matters to all of us and particularly to the young. Surely, the British people should be informed before they decide?

Anand Menon

Anand Menon is Professor of European Politics and Foreign Affairs at King's College London in the United Kingdom.

You are here: Home / Politics / Young Brits Have Most At Stake In The Brexit Referendum But Know The Least About The EU

Most Popular Posts

European civil war,iron curtain,NATO,Ukraine,Gorbachev The new European civil warGuido Montani
Visentini,ITUC,Qatar,Fight Impunity,50,000 Visentini, ‘Fight Impunity’, the ITUC and QatarFrank Hoffer
Russian soldiers' mothers,war,Ukraine The Ukraine war and Russian soldiers’ mothersJennifer Mathers and Natasha Danilova
IGU,documents,International Gas Union,lobby,lobbying,sustainable finance taxonomy,green gas,EU,COP ‘Gaslighting’ Europe on fossil fuelsFaye Holder
Schengen,Fortress Europe,Romania,Bulgaria Romania and Bulgaria stuck in EU’s second tierMagdalena Ulceluse

Most Recent Posts

EU social agenda,social investment,social protection EU social agenda beyond 2024—no time to wasteFrank Vandenbroucke
pension reform,Germany,Lindner Pension reform in Germany—a market solution?Fabian Mushövel and Nicholas Barr
European civil war,iron curtain,NATO,Ukraine,Gorbachev The new European civil warGuido Montani
artists,cultural workers Europe’s stars must shine for artists and creativesIsabelle Van de Gejuchte
transition,deindustrialisation,degradation,environment Europe’s industry and the ecological transitionCharlotte Bez and Lorenzo Feltrin

Other Social Europe Publications

front cover scaled Towards a social-democratic century?
Cover e1655225066994 National recovery and resilience plans
Untitled design The transatlantic relationship
Women Corona e1631700896969 500 Women and the coronavirus crisis
sere12 1 RE No. 12: Why No Economic Democracy in Sweden?

Foundation for European Progressive Studies Advertisement

Discover the new FEPS Progressive Yearbook and what 2023 has in store for us!

The Progressive Yearbook focuses on transversal European issues that have left a mark on 2022, delivering insightful future-oriented analysis for the new year. It counts on renowned authors' contributions, including academics, politicians and analysts. This fourth edition is published in a time of war and, therefore, it mostly looks at the conflict itself, the actors involved and the implications for Europe.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Hans Böckler Stiftung Advertisement

The macroeconomic effects of re-applying the EU fiscal rules

Against the background of the European Commission's reform plans for the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP), this policy brief uses the macroeconometric multi-country model NiGEM to simulate the macroeconomic implications of the most relevant reform options from 2024 onwards. Next to a return to the existing and unreformed rules, the most prominent options include an expenditure rule linked to a debt anchor.

Our results for the euro area and its four biggest economies—France, Italy, Germany and Spain—indicate that returning to the rules of the SGP would lead to severe cuts in public spending, particularly if the SGP rules were interpreted as in the past. A more flexible interpretation would only somewhat ease the fiscal-adjustment burden. An expenditure rule along the lines of the European Fiscal Board would, however, not necessarily alleviate that burden in and of itself.

Our simulations show great care must be taken to specify the expenditure rule, such that fiscal consolidation is achieved in a growth-friendly way. Raising the debt ceiling to 90 per cent of gross domestic product and applying less demanding fiscal adjustments, as proposed by the IMK, would go a long way.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ILO advertisement

Global Wage Report 2022-23: The impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power

The International Labour Organization's Global Wage Report is a key reference on wages and wage inequality for the academic community and policy-makers around the world.

This eighth edition of the report, The Impact of inflation and COVID-19 on wages and purchasing power, examines the evolution of real wages, giving a unique picture of wage trends globally and by region. The report includes evidence on how wages have evolved through the COVID-19 crisis as well as how the current inflationary context is biting into real wage growth in most regions of the world. The report shows that for the first time in the 21st century real wage growth has fallen to negative values while, at the same time, the gap between real productivity growth and real wage growth continues to widen.

The report analysis the evolution of the real total wage bill from 2019 to 2022 to show how its different components—employment, nominal wages and inflation—have changed during the COVID-19 crisis and, more recently, during the cost-of-living crisis. The decomposition of the total wage bill, and its evolution, is shown for all wage employees and distinguishes between women and men. The report also looks at changes in wage inequality and the gender pay gap to reveal how COVID-19 may have contributed to increasing income inequality in different regions of the world. Together, the empirical evidence in the report becomes the backbone of a policy discussion that could play a key role in a human-centred recovery from the different ongoing crises.


DOWNLOAD HERE

ETUI advertisement

Social policy in the European Union: state of play 2022

Since 2000, the annual Bilan social volume has been analysing the state of play of social policy in the European Union during the preceding year, the better to forecast developments in the new one. Co-produced by the European Social Observatory (OSE) and the European Trade Union Institute (ETUI), the new edition is no exception. In the context of multiple crises, the authors find that social policies gained in ambition in 2022. At the same time, the new EU economic framework, expected for 2023, should be made compatible with achieving the EU’s social and ‘green’ objectives. Finally, they raise the question whether the EU Social Imbalances Procedure and Open Strategic Autonomy paradigm could provide windows of opportunity to sustain the EU’s social ambition in the long run.


DOWNLOAD HERE

Eurofound advertisement

Eurofound webinar: Making telework work for everyone

Since 2020 more European workers and managers have enjoyed greater flexibility and autonomy in work and are reporting their preference for hybrid working. Also driven by technological developments and structural changes in employment, organisations are now integrating telework more permanently into their workplace.

To reflect on these shifts, on 6 December Eurofound researchers Oscar Vargas and John Hurley explored the challenges and opportunities of the surge in telework, as well as the overall growth of telework and teleworkable jobs in the EU and what this means for workers, managers, companies and policymakers.


WATCH THE WEBINAR HERE

About Social Europe

Our Mission

Article Submission

Membership

Advertisements

Legal Disclosure

Privacy Policy

Copyright

Social Europe ISSN 2628-7641

Social Europe Archives

Search Social Europe

Themes Archive

Politics Archive

Economy Archive

Society Archive

Ecology Archive

Follow us

RSS Feed

Follow us on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on LinkedIn

Follow us on YouTube