I remember very clearly my first encounter with politics. It was the 2010 general election and I sat up to watch the results come in. I didn’t know what a swingometer was, I’d never heard of any of the leaders of the parties and I definitely hadn’t considered what politics really meant for me. But nevertheless I was captivated by the energy and the buzz.
Five years on, I’ve dropped out of university and built a company from scratch, helping to create the largest ever digital platform for a general election in this country, and the only one with a profile of every candidate, from each party, all in one place.
As with millions around the country, my story started at the dinner table. For as long as I can remember, our family used to sit and discuss what should be taught in school, how expensive trains were, why we were at war in a different country and why it was compulsory for me to run round a sports field in the depths of winter. I vaguely understood that these questions had something to do with “politics”, but when my parents took me to the voting booth, I still didn’t really understand the relevance it had for my life. But on that night in May 2010 the truth suddenly hit me.
After that, I started doing what I could to find out more. When I went to uni, I attended meetings run by all the major parties. I didn’t know which to support, and I still don’t look at politics through a party-political lens. What I did learn was that politics is a vehicle for getting ideas (or policy) from A to B. It is about getting things done.
When I realised that many of my fellow students had no plans to vote in any election, I felt I had to do something about it. I wanted to create a platform that would make it easy for people to get involved in active democracy. And so I took to the internet.
After a bit of digging on Google, looking for “voting made easy” and “who should I vote for”, I came across Voting Advice Applications (VAAs). These glorified quizzes are usually built by political scientists and allow voters to compare the national parties, based on a series of questions. They are very popular in places like Germany, but I found most of them incredibly boring. They suck the life out of politics and condense it into grey 45-minute surveys that leave you equally divided between three parties. And they don’t represent everyone. Not a single VAA, ever, has listed every candidate from every party.
So I got together with a couple of my friends and in May 2014, using the money my nan left me when she died, we built TickBox for the European election. The objective was relatively simple. From our dorm rooms in Exeter University, we would build a website with profiles of every party in the election (south-west, south-east and London only, at this stage, because of limited resources) and allow users to compare their views. We launched two weeks before the election and, at one point, had 40,000 users in 24 hours. With countless tweets from people thanking us for allowing them “to vote for the first time”, we realised we were on to something.
People think young people aren’t interested in politics, but I don’t believe that’s true. Most of us don’t agree with Russell Brand that the answer is “revolution”. We just think that traditional politics seems really old-fashioned. When you watch prime minister’s questions, it looks like some kind of pantomime. All that baying and shouting doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the issues we face. What we want to know is: are we going to be able to get a job or buy a house? But if you don’t engage with politics, you can’t blame politicians for not representing your views.
