Interview: 22 year old UKIP candidate

Harry Aldridge is a 22 year old United Kingdom Independence Party candidate for the upcoming European Parliament elections. The Vibe caught up with him for a quick chat about improving youth involvement and life on the campaign trail.

How’s the campaign going?

It’s going pretty well actually, you’ve probably seen the latest polls that we’ve got which are putting our support slightly higher or around the same as we got in 2004, which is pretty good. We’ve been getting a reasonable response from people, no doubt a lot of it is down to the current expenses scandal.

What’s life on the campaign trail like?

There’s an awful lot of literature to put out obviously. I do everything from going around stuffing leaflets through letterboxes to standing on high streets and doing something which the large parties no longer do by having public meetings. I’m speaking at about a half a dozen public meetings this campaign.

Why, as a young person, did you get into politics?

I’m 22 at the moment, 23 in the summer. I’ve always been interested in the world around me, I’ve always read newspapers and watched the news. I noticed when I was going through secondary school that a lot of students weren’t particularly interested in politics. They had a fairly narrow focus on their own lives, which is fine, but I was always interested in the bigger picture.

I studied economics as an A level, and found it particularly interesting. We discussed things such as the Euro and the single market and that helped give me an understanding of that side of things. Politics is important, it affects our lives and you can either sit at home and disagree with what you see on the news or you can get out there and try and make a difference.

Is being young a disadvantage in politics?

In some ways it can be as I’m still forming my views but then I’m not set in my ways. It hasn’t held me back. If I had been in a different party it maybe it would have. If I chose to become a Conservative I would be expected to work my way up. In a small party, there is a very flat structure. Anyone with interest and ability can rise up very quickly.

How can we get more young people involved in politics?

Young people are drawn to radical ideas, teenage rebellion and all of that. Perhaps young people are more idealistic, less beaten down by the inability to bring about change. When you look back through history, students have traditionally been the ones to take to the streets on particular issues.

Young people engage with and are very passionate about issues that affect them. The problem we have is they feel that many issues don’t affect them. Countries with Proportional Representation have a lot of smaller parties and I think that does help engage young people by allowing them to present a whole spectrum of different views rather than choosing between two alternatives.

Many people regard UKIP as an anti-politics party, are you not just making the situation worse?

I don’t think so. A lot of our support comes from people that look at the big three parties which have coalesced around a similar platform. There is a large section of people who feel they’re not being represented. This then breeds contempt.

By allowing them to make their point, it keeps them engaged. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have said that they always vote and they’ve been very tempted not to vote in recent years. If there was an option for “none of the above” on ballot papers I think that would be the overwhelming winner.

What does UKIP stand for?

Traditionally we were founded with a single message that is to leave the European Union. However, that doesn’t mean everyone believes we should isolate ourselves. We believe that cooperation is needed, we believe there are issues bigger than any one country that need to be resolved on an international level, we don’t believe the European Union is the right way of doing that. That said, we’ve certainly been very poor at explaining what the alternatives should be.

So you believe in reforming, rather than leaving the EU?

It depends what your perspective is. It’s a case of saying that we want a Europe where we co-operate but a European Union that can bind its members is wrong. Libertas (another party) want to reform the EU to make it democratic but support using a federal system. We would oppose that. We think that national governments should be at the centre. We would say that whilst there is a lot that is shared culturally between European nations there is also a lot that isn’t.