EU referendum: Justine Greening on mobilising the Millennial vote for Team Remain

Justine Greening talks to Joy Lo Dico about Gogglebox and being down with the kids
Bridging the generational gap: Justine Greening
Justine Greening
Joy Lo Dico27 May 2016

You can’t even get away from the EU referendum on Tinder now that Downing Street has said it is looking at advertising on the site to get young voters to sign up. Are you campaigning on Tinder, I ask Justine Greening, who is backing her Prime Minister, David Cameron, to stay in the EU. The International Development Secretary for a second freezes at the question and consults the aide who is sitting next to her prodding his phone. Mutter, mutter. “I’ve done a blog on my Medium,” she says suddenly, beaming at her own social network credentials — Medium is long-form Twitter, and also a clever response . She doesn’t have to go down the swipe-right route of questioning and, as a Cabinet minister, betray any awkward interest in the hook-up site.

The reason we are talking, in a starchy committee room in the House of Commons, is that Greening has taken on the challenge of how to wake up those younger voters who are yet to get their teeth into politics, to make sure they register in time for the referendum (by June 7) and then get them down to the polling stations.

She attacks the issue with a similar method to the one she uses when talking to the visiting school parties she wants to enliven with the opportunities of politics. “Hands up any of you that would allow your grandparents to buy your clothes,” she asks them. “So why would you let them put a cross in the box about your country?” I feel a little like a schoolchild myself as she trots through the technical route of how it is done: “It is really easy: go to gov dot uk. It takes five minutes.”

A Britain Stronger In Europe poster
PA

The Brexiteers realise you can’t argue against voter registration, while the Remain campaign knows that getting those votes — potentially two million in London alone — could tip the result in favour of staying in the EU. Those aged under 43 are far more likely to vote to stay, and polling suggests that those under 25 would back staying in the EU by as much as two to one but also least likely to bother to vote. Her own special interest in this is that her Putney constituency has one of the lowest voter age profiles in the country, peaking at around 36-38-year-olds, stuffed full of young people and families starting out.

As tactics to engage da youth, she can at least see the funny side at some of the mis-steps of the Stronger In campaign, not least those posters that came out this week, orchestrated by MP Sam Gyimah, and with such dad-speaking-hipster slogans as “Chillin Meetin Tourin #Votin”. “It made me laugh too,” she says. “But I suspect that was the point. If it’s getting a debate going, then that’s what counts.”

But registering isn’t the end of it: then you’ve got to decide which way to go when faced with the ballot. Greening recounts what happens when constituents come into her surgery and she asks them what they think about it. “First of all you get this impression of them [thinking they’ve] been given some really difficult election homework — an “Oh God, I’ve got to give an answer to this.” I have more than a twinge of sympathy with a constituent faced with a question from Greening: she is smart, smiley, even twinkly, but speaking to her you feel you could very easily fail to gain her respect if you don’t do or say the right thing: slackers aren’t OK.

But sitting comfortably on the Remain sofa, Greening admits that she too has had her reservations about the EU, and the aspirations it has had for overweening supra-governance, which she thinks Cameron has gone some way to checking. Like a true child of Thatcher she loves the single market aspect of it. She mentions how younger voters will not remember the pre-membership, pre-harmonised Europe, when stories would appear in newspapers of how British videos sat stacked in ports in France, undistributed, because they didn’t meet foreign regulations. They may not even remember videos, I think.

But there are more serious points. At the Department for International Development she’s been working with her EU counterparts on the refugee crisis after the fallout of the Syrian civil war. She cites her own meeting in December at the Council of Ministers, one of the executive bodies of the EU, where she argued for Jordan to be allowed to sell its products into Europe, creating a virtuous circle of a bigger and better economy for the country that neighbours Syria and houses more than half a million of its refugees, stuck in the limbo of camp life. Get Jordan going, and you create jobs for them.

On the British policy of pouring money into the region around Syria rather than flinging open the doors to refugees, Greening talks of how “we won over the rest of the member states because, actually, it was the right thing to do and it was a constructive, sensible response to this refugee crisis. You’ve seen the rest of Europe shift.” Or, decoded, the British led Europe, but we couldn’t deal with the crisis alone.

Greening was transport minister before moving to the Department for International Development in 2012. A quote went around, possibly from an aggrieved colleague, that she was disappointed to get the job. She was supposed to have said — and she strongly denies it — that “I didn’t go into government to spend money on poor people.” It seems very unlikely she used those words because she’s one of those people whose brain has thought out the whole sentence and its implications before saying it: Greening does not have natural off-the-cuff quotability. But the reason it did the rounds is that she thinks like a soft Thatcherite: she talks about “the dignity” of work in Africa and the desire to better oneself, not the usual language of the international developmement community, and it is most striking when she talks about women.

Greening is the driving force behind the United Nations’ High-Level Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment. She proposed the idea, which would take the UN sustainability goal on gender equality and turn into an action plan. UN Secretary-General Ban-Ki Moon’s staff initially sniffed. “Oh, everyone wants to do a high-level panel: everyone is always asking him.”

But after a one-to-one with Moon she persuaded him and now has a team of economists, business leaders and politicians working globally on solutions to get the world’s women, particularly in developing countries, having rights and freedoms that will themselves lead to economic growth and productivity. Their first report is due in September.

When you listen to Greening you begin to think her ambitions lie beyond her departmental remit. As well as gearing up the youth vote, Greening is keen on enhancing social mobility in the country. She frequently mentions in interviews that her father was a steel worker in Rotherham and has immense pride in parents who laid the foundations for her to move up through society.

But where does such competence and ambition go after the referendum, and after the risk of backing the losing team? Could Greening, despite being a Cameron loyalista, stomach the idea of working for Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, should they be victorious in their Leave campaign and topple the PM?

“First of all, as a London MP, I worked with Boris as Transport Secretary and not only enjoyed that but got of a lot of good work done on the London transport system.” It is not quite a ringing endorsement, and she makes no mention of Gove, though does drift on to party unity and the higher shared goals of the Conservatives.

But if anything, she’d be most disappointed because Brexiting isn’t the smart thing to do in a world where there are bigger problems. And that’s not even mentioning the tedium that will ensue should we leave the EU, as we then have to negotiate new trade deals. She giggles and reminds me of what she said at her speech to the London Business School recently. It’ll be on our TVs every night for ever, and “Gogglebox is going to get really boring: I wonder what Scarlett Moffatt’s response is going to be.”

Follow Joy Lo Dico on Twitter: @joy_lo_dico

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in