Keir Mather and the institution cult of youth

The UK Home of Commons has a brand new ‘child of the home’. Labour’s Keir Mather, aged simply 25, gained the Selby and Ainsty by-election this week, turning into Britain’s youngest present MP. Ever since, the political and media courses haven’t stopped cooing about his youth.

Being younger, we’re advised, offers Mather a particular perception into the world that older politicians lack. For Labour chief Keir Starmer, the fresh-faced MP is the best individual to ship a ‘contemporary begin’ for his new constituents. Deputy Labour chief Angela Rayner claims that, due to Mather’s youth, he understands ‘the challenges his technology faces’.

Lewis Goodall, co-host of The Information Brokers podcast, went even additional. ‘There isn’t a one higher bloody positioned’ than a 25-year-old to satisfy the challenges of our time, Goodall claimed. We should always look to youthful MPs like Mather, he stated, to kind out every thing from the cost-of-living disaster to local weather change. ‘You recognize what the Home of Commons doesn’t want?’, he requested. ‘Extra 50- to 60-year-old geezers.’

In different phrases, Mather is greatest positioned to signify his constituents, and to alter politics for the higher, by advantage of his age alone.

All of this discuss of hope and alter must be taken with a heavy dose of salt. In any case, when you put Mather’s age to 1 aspect, he looks as if a reasonably typical instance of our professionalised political class. Since he graduated from Oxford 4 years in the past, his solely jobs have been in public relations and as an aide to Labour frontbencher Wes Streeting. He has little expertise of grownup life exterior of the Westminster bubble. So why, then, can we preserve listening to that Mather represents one thing completely different and contemporary?

We’ve heard this all earlier than after all. There was comparable pleasure within the Westminster bubble on the arrival of Labour’s Nadia Whittome in 2019, who was elected at age 23. Earlier than her, there was the SNP’s Mhairi Black, elected at age 20 in 2015, making her the youngest MP for the reason that Reform Act of 1832. These younger, rebel politicians have been additionally purported to shake up the fusty previous world of Westminster.

Besides, removed from being radical or providing contemporary concepts, what all these twentysomething MPs have in widespread is their unwavering dedication to the woke views of the institution. They’re feted not for difficult the established order, however for appearing as dependable mouthpieces for liberal-elite opinion.

In Mather’s case, his chief contribution to public life earlier than turning into an MP was to have denounced gender-critical feminist Germaine Greer as an ‘abhorrent transphobe’. Writing in an Oxford College pupil newspaper in 2018, he slammed her perception in organic intercourse as ‘dehumanising and downright harmful’.

Whittome and Black, regardless of being from completely different events, additionally maintain identikit views on all the large culture-war clashes. Whittome often makes use of her Commons speeches to assault those that query trans ideology. She says it’s fallacious to ‘debate’ issues like gender-recognition legislation and ladies’s single-sex areas. In the meantime, Black as soon as infamously accompanied a drag queen referred to as ‘Flowjob’ to a major faculty in her Paisley constituency. It’s the identical story with regards to racial identification politics, local weather change and Brexit – these youthful MPs have by no means deviated from the institution line.

That is what these older politicians and commentators are actually speaking about once they gush over the youth in politics. They don’t imply that we must always truly interact with the younger individuals of Britain. In any case, younger individuals, like some other age group, have a various vary of views, backgrounds and life experiences. What they really wish to hear extra of are the views of primarily middle-class graduates – that’s, these younger individuals who share their very own prejudices and preoccupations.

This elite pandering to ‘the youth’ does younger individuals no favours. It pretends that everybody underneath 30 holds the very same dreary views. Moderately than taking the younger critically as people and residents, it merely makes use of them to ventriloquise high-status opinion. It deploys them as a stage military within the tradition battle. It’s a drained, previous act that we’re all beginning to see by means of.

Lauren Smith is an editorial assistant at spiked.