Steven Campbell was 17 and still a high school pupil during the Scottish independence referendum campaign of 2014. “It didn’t matter what clique you were in, everybody was talking about the referendum and everyone had an opinion,” Campbell recalls. “For the first time young people were included in the conversation and the choice was about the rest of our lives.” Now a student nurse and chair of Young Scots for Independence, the youth branch of the SNP, Campbell is reflective: “2014 captured a generation but then it felt like not just the SNP but the entire political system in Scotland and UK-wide failed to capitalise on that.”
The independence referendum wasn’t just a seismic event for Scotland, it marked a historic moment for young voters – the first time that the franchise had been extended to 16- and 17-year-olds in the UK, and subsequent polling showed they were more likely to vote yes to independence. As the 10th anniversary of the referendum falls this week, what became of that youthful engagement, and the young people who were at the forefront of the yes campaign?
“We still don’t get that many young people elected to parliaments or councils – we only have one MSP under 30 – and when you do they get targeted to an extreme level on social media,” says Campbell. “No wonder it puts people off.” Young people’s support for independence has increased since 2014. Opinium polling published this weekend in the Sunday Times found that almost two-thirds of 16- to 34-year-olds want to leave the UK, compared with under a third of over-65s – and Scotland’s first minister, John Swinney, told the newspaper that this “independence generation” made him “very optimistic” about the prospects of winning a second referendum. But recent internal polling for the SNP also reported in the Times found that younger voters rejected the party at the general election. “I’m not surprised that young people are drifting away from the SNP or any party after what’s happened in politics across the UK over the last few years,” says Kirsten Thornton, who was a 19-year-old law student when she co-founded Generation Yes with the aim of convincing teenagers of the merits of independence.
“One of the biggest problems we had in 2014 was young people saying that politicians didn’t care about normal people and were only out for themselves,” says Thornton, who now lives in Spain and works in global mobility. “The scandals of recent years have made it much harder to counter that.” Purely in terms of turnout the lowering of the voting age was “definitely a success”, says Jan Eichhorn, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University who has been researching young people’s participation in politics since the referendum. The turnout in 2014 among 16- and 17-year-olds was much higher than that for 18- to 24-year-olds, and this engagement “translated into early adulthood”.
But more broadly, turnout among younger generations remains stubbornly low – fewer than half of 18- to 24-year-olds exercised their right to vote in the last election, with that age group the least likely to have voted or be registered at any election in the past 30 years, according to Ipsos. Concerns at the time that teenagers might be influenced by teachers or swayed by giveaways also proved unfounded, says Eichhorn. “Young people overall care about very similar issues to the rest of the population.” But in terms of support for independence, he says, the difference between younger and older voters has shifted in the past decade to a much steeper gradient – though not as steep as support for Brexit, which was much stronger in the upper age groups. Independence is now seen as “the natural choice for the future amongst my generation”, says Angus Millar, who was also involved in setting up Generation Yes and is now an SNP councillor in Glasgow. But he says a tumultuous decade that included “Brexit, the pandemic and several years of Conservative prime ministers each one worse than the last” has made it hard to maintain “hope and optimism”, particularly given the route to a second vote has reached an impasse with repeated Westminster refusals. Ellie Koepplinger, who was chosen to join the advisory board of Yes Scotland at the age of 16, says: “No one talks about politics in the pub these days. It’s symptomatic of having a Conservative government we didn’t vote for for the best part of 15 years, and also being pulled out of the EU against our will. We’ve ended up in a scenario where our vote means next to nothing.”
Consequently, she says, there’s “a real lack of trust” among young people. “Looking forward to independence, we have this opportunity to build the country that we want, to make it sustainable and equitable and all the rest – but who do we trust to actually enact that?” While agreeing that the concept of independence is far more normalised for her generation, Keopplinger, who now works for a returnable packaging company, points out that “especially after Brexit, folks are a lot more cognisant of the work that it’s going to take to get there, but it’s absolutely still on the horizon.” She adds: “For a lot of us, it’s almost a metaphor for growing up. We’ve entered the workforce, we’ve entered our adult lives, and we’ve seen the barriers to our personal independence, in the job market, the housing market, and now we want to build a future for our children that’s going to treat them with the respect and dignity that we deserve.”