Politics & Power Quote by Adam Rickitt

There is a particular kind of politeness that only shows up when someone is trying to sell politics as customer service. Rickitt frames the "youth vote" less as a constituency with grievances than as an audience to be reached, coached, and, ultimately, converted. The verb choices do the work: "encourage", "show", "connect". Youth are positioned as incomplete citizens who need to be walked through the basics, while government is cast as an omnipresent brand whose benefits simply haven’t been properly explained.

The intent is pragmatic: boost participation and, not incidentally, steer that participation toward "our message". That last phrase is the tell. It turns civic education into a soft campaign tool, implying that if young people understood the role of government, they would naturally align with the speaker’s politics. The subtext is a quiet anxiety familiar to parties watching younger generations drift away: the problem isn’t policy, it’s marketing. Fix the communication pipeline - schools plus "youth media" - and the votes follow.

As an actor, Rickitt’s instinct to meet people where they are reads as culturally savvy rather than sinister, but it’s also revealing. "Utilise the youth media they relate to" treats youth culture as a delivery mechanism, not a set of values. It’s politics imagined as outreach strategy: improve the interface, lower the friction, and you can make democracy feel less like homework. The risk, tucked inside the well-meaning tone, is that participation becomes synonymous with persuasion - and that the line between civic literacy and partisan messaging gets conveniently blurred.