I have been thinking quite a lot recently about how much political power older generations have compared with people my age, and I keep coming back to the same uncomfortable thought: I am twenty-one years old, and an enormous amount of the world I am going to live in has already been decided for me.

I am not arguing that older people should lose their political voice. Experience matters, and there are plenty of older people whose knowledge and contributions I would not want to lose. What bothers me is the imbalance. Young people are constantly described as the future while having comparatively little power over the present.

We are already adults. We work, pay taxes, build things, use public services, participate in communities and deal with political decisions every day. We are also the people who will have to live with those decisions for the longest.

That matters particularly when the world being governed is changing faster than the institutions governing it.

We grew up in this world

There is a kind of knowledge that comes from growing up inside a particular technological and social environment.

It does not make someone inherently more intelligent. Being young does not magically make somebody understand everything, and being old does not make somebody incapable of understanding anything. But someone who grew up with smartphones, social media, online communities, algorithmic recommendation systems and the modern web has a different baseline understanding of those things from someone who encountered them after decades of adulthood.

I grew up on the internet. I was a child while social media was becoming normal, and I spent my adolescence watching the internet change underneath me. I know what it is like to have your social life happen partly online, to find communities through the internet that did not exist around you physically, and to watch platforms repeatedly change their rules and interfaces.

I also understand how people respond to those changes. Put a technical barrier in front of people and some will find another route around it. Change what a platform allows and people adapt. Sometimes they leave, sometimes they move somewhere else, and sometimes they build something themselves.

That does not mean every young person understands technology particularly well. It means there is a whole generation with lived experience of a technological environment that older political institutions are increasingly trying to regulate.

I want more of those people in the room.

The Online Safety Act is a good example

The UK's Online Safety Act is one of the clearest examples I can think of.

There are legitimate reasons to want children to be safer online. I am not arguing that the internet should simply be left unregulated, or that platforms should have no responsibilities towards their users.

What concerns me is what happens when regulation intended to address those problems starts changing how an entire generation accesses the internet.

The Act already places requirements on platforms around age assurance and access to harmful content, and the government has announced further plans to prevent under-16s from using social media. Ofcom's own 2026 work has also highlighted the practical difficulties around age assurance and the ways children attempt to circumvent restrictions.

Those measures have consequences beyond the narrow problem they are intended to address. They can affect privacy, anonymity, access to journalism and political information, educational resources, communities and perfectly legitimate material that platforms would rather avoid dealing with.

From my perspective, the practical effect has sometimes felt like parts of the internet being closed off to younger people in the name of protecting them.

That is precisely the sort of thing I think politicians need younger people to explain to them.

If you are going to regulate a technology that has become an essential part of everyday life, you should have people involved who genuinely understand how that technology is used. You should understand the thing you are regulating.

Brexit was another decision I was too young to have a say in

The same generational question comes up whenever I think about Brexit.

The 2016 referendum happened when I was ten years old. I was old enough to understand that something significant was happening, but nowhere near old enough to have any say in it.

The result was 51.9% Leave to 48.1% Remain, with a turnout of 72.2%.

There was also a substantial age divide in referendum voting, with younger voters tending to be more supportive of Remain and older voters more supportive of Leave. The exact figures vary between polling sources because there was no official record of how individual voters voted by age, but the age divide itself was well documented.

That does not mean “old people caused Brexit”. People of every age voted on both sides, and the referendum result was the result.

But there is something worth saying about the fact that a ten-year-old in 2016 could not participate in the decision while potentially spending the majority of their adult life living with its consequences.

I am one of those people.

And Europe is not abstract to me.

Spain is part of my story

I was born in Spain to British parents who were simply on holiday. I was premature and required newborn intensive care simply to survive. I would not be here without that care.

I do not have Spanish ancestry or relatives there. I have family-friends in Spain who are important to me, and I have always had a strong affection for the country. I have wanted to go back for a long time.

At the moment, however, I feel quite constrained by the amount of money I would potentially need around my medical expenses. Travelling is not something I can treat as simply buying a cheap flight and booking a hotel. My circumstances make leaving the country considerably more complicated and expensive than it is for many people.

I cannot honestly say that Brexit is the reason I cannot afford to visit Spain. My medical circumstances are the immediate reason. But there is something difficult about knowing that there is a country where I was born, where I spent the very beginning of my life, and where people who matter to my family still live, while being unable to simply go and see it.

I owe Spain my life. I would like to be able to visit it again.

That is why Europe does not feel like an abstract political concept to me. Spain is part of my story even though I am not Spanish and have no Spanish relatives. I was born there, received life-saving care there, and would like to return.

I also want to travel more generally. I actually quite like this island. Britain is my home, and I am not permanently wishing I lived somewhere else. I want to move to Scotland and build a life there, but I also want to look beyond these islands and experience more of the world.

I do not think those things contradict each other.

Scotland is part of the future I am inheriting

Scotland makes the generational question more personal for me.

I have Anglo-Scottish heritage, but I grew up in England and have always lived in England. Scotland is not somewhere I can honestly describe as the place I was raised. My connection to it comes through my heritage, my interests, my identity and, increasingly, through the fact that I want to move there and build a life there.

I have also been learning Scottish Gaelic, or Gàidhlig na h-Alba.

As far as I know, Gàidhlig was not the language of my family in any recent generation. It may have been at some point much further back, but I simply do not know. I am not learning it because I am trying to reconstruct some lost family tradition.

I am learning it because I find it fascinating. I do that with languages generally.

It also connects several parts of my identity. My name is directly linked to the yew, a tree with a long history of sacred significance, and that symbolism has become meaningful to me. Gàidhlig gives me another way of engaging with Scottish language and culture. It also has a place within my faith. I am a Hellenic-Celtic syncretic Pagan, with the Hellenic side being more devotional for me and the Celtic side more connected with ancestry, heritage and spirituality.

I do not want to turn this into an explanation of my religion. The important part is simply that Scotland, Gàidhlig, my name, my heritage and my spiritual life are not completely separate things to me.

That makes my relationship with Scotland more complicated than simply having Scottish ancestry on a family tree.

I am interested in the place, its history, its language and its culture because I genuinely find them compelling. I want to learn more because I want to, not because I am trying to prove some ancient familial claim that I cannot substantiate.

I am twenty-one. I did not grow up speaking Gaelic, or even living in Scotland. I am still learning, and I am very much not fluent. But I can still choose to care about it.

Heritage does not have to mean repeating exactly what previous generations did. Sometimes it means discovering something that was not passed down to you and deciding that you want to engage with it anyway.

The same applies to Scotland itself.

Scotland has a history much older than any one political settlement. Its cultures, languages and identities have survived enormous changes. Whatever its constitutional future eventually looks like, my generation will inherit the consequences of decisions being made now.

I was nine during the 2014 independence referendum. I was a child, not a participant in that political decision. The referendum was ultimately decided by 55.3% voting No and 44.7% voting Yes, with turnout of around 85%. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds were able to vote for the first time.

I was not one of them.

I am now an adult who may spend a substantial part of my life living in Scotland.

If Scotland's constitutional relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom changes in the future, my generation will be living with that change for decades. If it does not change, we will still be living with that decision.

I do not know what Scotland's constitutional future should look like. I do not think being twenty-one gives me some special authority to determine it. But I do think I have a legitimate stake in being part of the conversation.

I grew up in England. I have lived my entire life here. But I may spend my adulthood in Scotland, and I want to be able to participate meaningfully in the society I hope to become part of.

I do not want Scotland to be treated as something that belongs exclusively to the generations who came before me. I want to engage with it as a living place that I could eventually call home and contribute to myself.

My generation will have a part in Scotland's future.

That matters.

America makes the problem particularly obvious

The United States provides a particularly striking example of what happens when political power becomes concentrated among people who have been in national politics for an extraordinarily long time.

Donald Trump is now 80 and is the oldest person ever to serve as president. Mitch McConnell entered the Senate in 1985 and has now spent more than forty years there.

There have also been highly publicised occasions when McConnell appeared to freeze during public appearances. His doctors and office subsequently discussed his health publicly. I do not need to speculate about his medical condition to ask the institutional question: how long should someone be able to remain in an extraordinarily powerful political position?

That is a question about institutions rather than television footage or amateur diagnosis.

There is also a strange irony in the way age has been discussed in American politics. Trump made Joe Biden's age and alleged cognitive decline a major political attack during the 2024 election. After Biden left office, Trump continued to focus on him, including ordering an investigation into allegations concerning Biden's cognitive state and the use of an autopen.

Those were political allegations, not established medical findings.

What interests me is the broader contradiction. American politics spent years arguing about whether one elderly politician was too old to serve while many other elderly politicians continued to wield enormous power.

It is very easy to turn this into a conversation about whether one particular politician is too old. The more interesting question to me is why political institutions are so comfortable allowing power to remain concentrated in the same generation for so long.

Britain has its own version

Britain is hardly immune.

The House of Lords is a particularly obvious example. The average age of its members was 70 as of June 2026, and the committee examining retirement and participation reported an average age of 71 at the end of the 2024–26 session. The youngest member was 30 and the oldest was 101. The average age of new appointments was 59, while the average age of retirement was 82.

There is value in institutional memory. Someone who has spent decades understanding how Parliament works possesses knowledge that someone elected yesterday simply cannot have.

But continuity can become inertia.

I do not want a Parliament where everyone is twenty-five. That would be just as ridiculous as a Parliament where everyone is seventy.

I want political institutions containing enough different generations that the people making decisions are not overwhelmingly removed from the experiences of the people who will have to live with them.

That applies to ordinary legislation, technology and the economy. It also applies to the much bigger questions of what this country is and what it is going to become.

Young people are not just the future

One of the phrases I have increasingly come to dislike is that young people are “the future”.

We are not.

We are the present.

We are already living with the consequences of housing policy, education policy, economic policy, technological regulation, healthcare decisions and constitutional changes. We are already paying for decisions made before we had any ability to influence them, and we will be living with those decisions for decades.

That is why I want younger voices in politics. Not because youth is inherently virtuous, and not because being young automatically makes somebody competent, but because there are things about the present that you understand differently when you have actually grown up in it.

My generation understands the internet because we grew up inside it. We understand social media because it shaped our adolescence. We understand smartphones because they were already becoming ordinary while we were children.

That contextual knowledge matters. It should be treated as useful expertise rather than dismissed as youthful impatience.

The same applies to places and cultures. I inherited Scottish heritage without growing up in Scotland. I discovered Gàidhlig rather than inheriting it as a family language. I have chosen to engage with that part of my identity, and I may eventually build my adult life there.

I am not simply waiting for somebody else to hand me the future. I want to participate in making it.

This is not about blaming a generation

I do not think generational politics should become an excuse to blame every problem on Baby Boomers.

Older generations built things that I benefit from. They experienced circumstances that were completely different from mine. There are older people whose experience I value enormously.

But younger people have also been asked to accept an enormous amount of political inheritance without having had much opportunity to shape it.

We inherited the consequences of decisions about housing, education, the economy, the environment, Europe and technology. We are now being asked to solve problems that did not begin with us, often while having comparatively little power over the institutions responsible for solving them.

We inherit places too.

We inherit Britain. We inherit Scotland. We inherit institutions, cultures, languages and constitutional arrangements that previous generations shaped. Eventually, those things become our responsibility.

I do not want to inherit political decisions passively. I want younger people to have enough power to participate in deciding what we keep, what we change and what we build ourselves.

I do not want revenge against an older generation.

I want political renewal.

We need political renewal, not generational warfare

I want older people in politics. I want experienced people in politics. I want people who remember how institutions work and why previous decisions were made.

I also want people my age there.

I want younger software developers involved in technology policy. I want young disabled people involved in decisions about accessibility and healthcare. I want people who grew up online involved in deciding how the internet should be regulated. I want people who are going to spend most of their lives living with constitutional and economic decisions to have a meaningful role in making them.

And I want that representation to be real rather than tokenistic.

I do not want a twenty-year-old brought into a room so that somebody can say the consultation included “youth voices”. I want younger people to have enough actual political power that their perspectives cannot simply be acknowledged and then ignored.

I also do not want Scottish identity, English identity or British identity to be treated as things that belong exclusively to the generations who came before us.

Cultures survive because people inherit them and then make them their own.

For me, that means learning Gàidhlig even though I did not grow up speaking it. It means taking an interest in a part of my heritage that was not necessarily passed down to me directly. It means potentially moving to Scotland despite having spent my entire life in England.

I am not saying that my generation should automatically get its way. I am saying that we should be there when decisions about our future are made.

I was ten when Britain voted to leave the European Union. I had no say in that decision, but I am old enough now to live with its consequences. I was nine when Scotland voted on independence. I was a child when many of the political decisions that shape my adult life were being made.

I am not a child anymore.

I am building an identity, a career and a future in the world those decisions created.

I want a say in what happens next.

Not because I am young.

Because I am here, and I will be living with it.