It’s not what you think it is. Alex Salmond of the SNP made some rather bizarre remarks yesterday. He was expressing why young voters are disenfranchised and are less likely to vote than the rest of the population:

Firstly, he said that young people find Polling Stations to be intimidating. I was gobsmacked. How is a Polling Station intimidating? Mine’s a classroom at a local primary school (word of the day ‘blaze’ for those who are interested). Yesterday it had two people checking people off and two little booths to choose from in order to make your vote. Scary huh?

Then he said that young people don’t know how to vote and that whilst ‘our’ generation were taken to vote by our parents, this doesn’t happen nowadays. Well guess what? The first time I voted I went with a bunch of friends. Not a single parent in sight. Nothing particularly difficult there. Oh, and let’s not forget that the polling postcards have instructions on the back of them, and the polling booths have step by step instructions on how to vote. Truly frightening.

Needless to say the interviewer chose not to comment on these two pieces of wisdom, nor was there any mention of the real reasons young people don’t vote. Typical.