Are young people more alienated from politics now? With Cameron Garrett

I'm Connor Knacken, senior researcher at the Intergenerational Foundation. We're a research charity fighting for a fairer deal for younger and future generations in the UK. We work on some of the big policy challenges shaping the lives of young people, from housing and student finance to taxation, the labour market and the environment. Our work focuses on exposing intergenerational unfairness and proposing practical evidence-based reforms. In this new podcast series, we'll be speaking to some of the UK's leading experts about the issues that matter most for younger and future generations.

My guest today is Cameron Garrett, Deputy Director of Research at More in Common.

Cameron joined More in Common after around eight years at Ipsos, where he worked in the politics and central government team. He has extensive experience in managing major electoral surveys, which includes the 2024 British election study, and moderating focus groups on politically sensitive topics. And More in Common itself has done a lot of research on public opinion, political trust, social cohesion, and the changing state of British politics. So today we'll be speaking with Cameron about intergenerational fairness and democracy. So what do younger people want from politics? Why do so many feel alienated from the mainstream political parties? And how our political system can better respond to the needs and interests of younger and future generations? So Cameron, thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Connor. What an introduction.

So you've spent a lot of your career working on public opinion, polling, focus groups and electoral research. So I think the best place to start is probably with how you first came to this type of work. Why do you find it interesting? And what do you think good research on public opinion can pick up that Westminster and other places sometimes fail to notice?

Yep, yep. For my sins, I've been doing it for my whole career so far. And I kind of stumbled into it after university. I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to do. I'd done a history degree and I knew I was interested in politics. And I'd followed the polls throughout elections and I'd heard of some of these big polling agencies and decided, yeah, that sounds interesting and a way in. And I actually think it's been... I kind of got there by accident, but I've stayed because I think it's a really foundational way of hearing actually what the public think and escaping that Westminster bubble. I think public opinion research is so important because we only have elections every so often, right, and local elections interspersed in between. But how are we actually tracking how people think about the government in between that? And the public opinion research is letting us do that. So we know everyone's annoyed at Keir Starmer right now. He's got a net satisfaction rating of minus 48. But we're seeing that because people are actually going out weekly and doing these polls and putting them out to people and capturing what people think. and then also more broadly we're able to see those wider societal trends so some of those studies that you mentioned up front like the British election study has been running for