this is NOT about Eurovision or compulsory voting

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! Can't say I've ever started this newsletter with a policy proposal before but there's a first time for everything, I guess. It's nice to keep people on their toes. So: as nerdier Bluesky users may have noticed, the topic of compulsory voting has been in the news again recently. Well, it has, at the very least, been floating near the surface of the cesspool that's online political discourse. Potato, potato.

I personally don't believe that voting should be made compulsory, but I also think that the status quo is unideal, which is why I have come up with a not-so-secret third thing. My pitch to you is: it should be compulsory to vote in the first general election you're eligible to vote in.

Here are some pros:

1. Vote early, vote often

It's been shown in multiple studies that people who start voting quite early in life tend to keep voting afterwards. That's the main reason why I'm in favour of this policy: it's nowhere near as intense as full-fat compulsory voting, but would still, hopefully, go some way towards addressing voter apathy. As it turns out, voting is quite moreish, and we should take advantage of that.

2. Birds of a feather

Another thing studies have found is that people are more likely to vote if members of their household vote as well. This policy - my policy - would, one hopes, lead at least some of the relatives of those young people to the ballot box as well, without having to force them to do so. A win-win!

3. Now you see me

This is probably going to be the most obvious argument in this little list but: political parties do not currently care about young people. None of them do. They all have their reasons, and their unique flavours of "pandering to the olds", but on the whole they're not massively concerned with The Youths. We all know why that is. It's the ol' vicious circle; young people don't vote so they don't get heard so they don't vote so they don't get heard. What would happen if politicians suddenly had to actually appeal to people under the age of 25? I think it would make politics more interesting, and maybe even fairer.

4. Welcome!

To finish on a slightly more whimsical note, I reckon you could make this feel quite symbolic and nice. Congratulations, you're an adult now! Got your whole life ahead of you! What would you like to happen next? What sort of country do you think we should have? Here: we're offering you the chance to have your say, as the freshest grown-ups in the game. I think that'd be quite a poetic gesture.

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As I'm sure you will agree this is a great idea and it has been very well argued here, so the only thing left to do is to cc this newsletter to Keir Starmer and he will agree with me and make voting compulsory for the first general election in which people are able to vote. There are no drawbacks whatsoever, thank you very much.

Also: this week I enjoyed this piece on how video game sex scenes are made, because I contain multitudes.

Thanks for your time.

A column

I really, really didn't know what I wanted to write about this week so I asked Bluesky for inspiration, because sometimes it's fine to be lazy, and several people told me to write about Eurovision. It wasn't exactly a bad shout: I do love Eurovision. I've been watching it since I was a kid, back in France where my mother would resentfully let me stay up and watch it all, despite finding it incomprehensible.

On one memorable occasion, as an adult, I got hideously drunk at a friend's flat and spent several hours bellowing xenophobic abuse against the great nation of Portugal, as they'd just won thanks to this one boring lad with a guitar singing a sad little song. That just went completely against the spirit of Eurovision, in my view.

Most recently I remember being incensed - incensed! - by how poorly the Breton witches had ranked. I thought that France picking a band singing in a language that wasn't French was neat, especially as someone who grew up near Brittany, and I will always support hot women looking ominous. I still don't get why we didn't win that year. People have no taste.

I love Eurovision but there's no point in asking me to write about it, because I don't actually have anything to say. For a start, I've no idea what any of the songs are like this year, as I refuse to watch the semi-finals. I believe that true fans should limit themselves to precisely one evening a year, during which they get to discover every single act. You wouldn't do a Christmas dinner with all the trimmings on December 17, then another one on December 25.

I've also just never felt the desire to read up on Eurovision. I'm sure there's a lot of interesting stuff out there on how it's actually organised, how the acts are picked by all the different countries, what happens to a city or a town once it gets chosen as the next host, why the voting rounds are the way they are, and everything else. It is, in theory, a fascinating topic. I just don't really care about it.

Once a year I turn up at a friend's house, I drink a heroic amount of wine, I scream a litany of abuse at various European countries, I have strong opinions on who should or shouldn't win, I am happy or furious at whoever ends up winning, I drink a pint of water, I feel awful the next day. It's neat.

It's also something I've been thinking about for a while, as a broader idea. I increasingly feel that liking things just a little bit is underrated, and something we may come to miss. The internet makes it too easy for us to become fanatics or haters. I've written about the latter before, and the fact that, in a pre-online age, I almost certainly wouldn't have loathed Taylor Swift's guts. She would have been easier to ignore.