Bring me your young, your disenchanted

At the last election, the under-25s went missing in a big way. Can an army of comedians and rock stars persuade them to vote next time? Jonathan Glancey reports

In 1964, Harold Wilson turned up for the re-opening of the Cavern Club in Liverpool, to help swing the swinging youth vote Labour's way. The wily future Prime Minister liked to think he had the Beatles in his pocket; certainly he was instrumental in getting them their MBEs. Fetchingly, when the Fab Four went to Buckingham Palace to collect them from the Queen, they smoked dope in a royal lavatory. Some years later John Lennon returned his establishment gong. He did not vote Labour; in fact, having settled in New York, he did not vote at all.

The would be love-match between leftish politics and youth culture has never been less than awkward. "If I read in the papers that Jonathan King was going to vote X", says Jonathan King, the pop world polymath, "I would, on principle, vote Y. I don't care if it's Phil Collins or Damon Albarn; I don't want them to tell me how to vote."

"People have probably known more about my politics than my music," said a politically disillusioned Paul Weller five years after the 1987 election which returned the Tories to power for a third term. Weller had sung up and down the country for Neil Kinnock as part of Red Wedge, the pop'n'comedy drive that included Ben Elton and Billy Bragg and aimed to get young people to vote Labour. "Now it's music first and I'll leave politics to others," said Weller.

With another general election looming close, comedians and pop musicians are being drawn once more into the political fray. Only this time, the attempt by the organisation Rock the Vote is avowedly unaligned with any one party. Rock the Vote is a campaign, launched at the Ministry of Sound nightclub in south London in mid-February, to get the under-25s to vote. Not Labour or Conservative. Just to vote. This is because many young people are not registered and are therefore unable to exercise their democratic right.

Eddie Izzard, the stand-up comedian (very popular among the under-30s) is the campaign's front man. On Wednesday night he hosted a show at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, west London; this sweaty event was the opening gambit in a national Rock the Vote tour that takes in Edinburgh, Sunderland, Cambridge, Bristol, Liverpool and Southampton this month.

Izzard's message is simple enough. "All young people should be registered to vote because apathy never changed anything," he says. "A lot of 25- year-olds are very mobile, moving to different jobs, six months in one flat, six months in another. Actually getting registered is quite difficult. So that's why we're doing these seven gigs round the country. You'll be able to fill in these cards [shows pre-paid Rock the Vote postcard], post them back to Rock the Vote and we'll pass them on to the relevant councils to get people registered."

Not that he said that on Wednesday night, to a packed house of students and flat-share twenty-somethings who looked as if they probably did vote. Wisely he told his stream-of-consciousness jokes instead. So did potty Harry Hill, mimic Steve Coogan, oddball duo Lee and Herring and in-your- face comic Donna McPhail, all of whom have lent their names to the campaign, along with Jo Brand, M People, Radiohead and others.

Lee and Herring put their stubby fingers on the question of why young people tend to be apathetic when it comes to voting when they claimed to be "anarchists" and had not registered to vote because they "would then be charged council tax", or what most of the audience still knew as "poll tax".

If the under-25s did register and turn out en masse to vote at the next general election, what would happen? In all likelihood, Labour would do very well; a national poll in January found that 60 per cent of the under- 25s would vote Labour, with just 21 per cent claiming they would vote Conservative. Since Tony Blair (or "Blur" to the Shepherd's Bush crowd) became Labour leader, membership of Young Labour has doubled to 25,000. The Young Conservatives number 7,000, with the LibDem Youth and Student movement trailing at 2,000.

So is Rock the Vote really just a way of ensuring Labour gets a big vote at the next general election? "No, it's not," says Charles Stewart-Smith, executive director of the fledgling organisation. "Rock the Vote has been set up on strictly non-party lines. We've got the backing of John Major, Paddy Ashdown and Tony Blair. The idea is to get young people involved in national politics. Rock the Vote is a vote for the future of political democracy".

The directors of Rock the Vote are far from being Labourites. They are Stewart-Smith, a successful PR man, John Booth of the Banker's Trust, Matthew Parris, Tory MP turned Times journalist, Kate O'Rourke, a lawyer, and John Preston, head of BMG, the record conglomerate and friend of Tony Blair, though no friend to the Shepherd's Bush crowd who know him as a keen supporter of the extraordinarily high price of compact discs in Britain.

Moral and financial support for the Rock the Vote is amassing through businesses wanting to capture the youth market; to date they include Virgin, Tower Records, Carlsberg Tetley and Lloyds Bank.

There is no doubt that the under-25s are disaffected from Westminster. "Of the 40 per cent, or 2.08 million young people who did not vote at the last general election," says Anne Callaghan of Charter 88, the campaign for electoral reform, "more than one million have disappeared from the electoral register." Why? "It is a combination," she says, "of disenchantment, apathy and a hangover from the poll tax." Activ88, the youth wing of Charter 88, is also running a campaign to distribute voters' registration cards at youth venues. Rock the Vote is not alone.

Statistics reported by Demos, the independent think tank, reinforce the view that young people have little interest in taking part in the parliamentary process. In the 1992 general election, says Demos, 43 per cent (or 2.5 million) of under-25s eligible to vote chose not to, compared to 31 per cent in 1987. As 5.2 million under-25s (16 per cent of the electorate) could vote if they wanted to, their political impact could be potent.

"For this generation," say Geoff Mulgan and Helen Wilkinson of Demos, "politics has become a dirty word. Over a third of 18- to 24-year-olds take pride in being outside the system. But they are nevertheless concerned with many specific issues: environment, Aids and, above all, animals.

"The overwhelming story emerging from our research, both quantitative and qualitative, is of an historic political disconnection. In effect, an entire generation has opted out of politics."

Which is not entirely true. The number of young people fighting the road lobby, campaigning for environmental and animal welfare issues, tackling the Criminal Justice Bill and taking an interest in human rights issues has been growing apace over the same period.

Pop stars have met with success when campaigning on single issues. Damon Albarn of Blur has been an effective spokesman for the Vegetarian Society. His partner, Justine Frischmann, played a much appreciated concert on behalf of Shelter. What many young people feel divorced from is the apparent pettiness of the House of Commons, the remoteness of national politicians, their "media-friendly" (ie banal) sound-bite way of speaking, their dreadful, let's- offend-no-one dress sense, and their inane and insincere fixed grins used particularly when addressing those they call "the kids of today", or the 18- to 25-year-olds who will never vote for them while they behave in this way.

This would suggest that by associating themselves with young comics and pop stars, politicians are barking up not so much the wrong tree as an imaginary one. Rock the Vote is confident of success ("although we have no target figures in mind," says Charles Stewart-Smith) because it is able to cite that the campaign in the United States it pinched its name from was either pretty effective or extremely effective, depending upon which figures you believe. One source suggests that the number of under- 25s voting in the 1992 US presidential election was, at 60 per cent, 24 per cent up on 1988; another source puts the figure at a more conservative 9 per cent.

Whatever, it was a significant rise and appears to have helped Bill Clinton into office. The campaign had the very vocal support of REM, Pearl Jam and Madonna, who told her national audience, "if you don't vote, you're gonna get a spanky". This nursery threat appears to have worked.

In Britain, potential young voters are assumed to be more sophisticated than their North American counterparts. They are unlikely to persuaded by the likes of Madonna any more than they are by Tony Blair or John Major. What they are interested in, beneath superficial cynicism, is policy. If there was a political party that represented their ideals those laughing with Eddie Izzard and Harry Hill would probably turn out to vote for them.

It does not really matter that William Hague, secretary of state for Wales, is (God help him) a Meatloaf fan; what matters to the under-25s is what the young minister actually believes in. By the same token, if Geoff Hoon, Labour's spokesman for trade, were to advocate knighthoods for the three surviving Beatles he would be unlikely to win extra votes.

But perhaps Ken Livingstone best expressed what the young people who turned up at the Shepherd's Bush Empire on Wednesday night tend to think, when he said, some years ago: "If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it."