AT DAWN on Friday one result will dismay every politician and pundit in the land. Fewer young people will have voted in the general election than in last year’s I’m a Celebrity . . . There will be hand-wringing, hair-tearing and soul-searching, yet the reason is blindingly obvious.

No matter how much we are begged, preached at or even rapped to, we will not stir ourselves to saunter down to the polling station. Politicians are at their wits’ end; they pose with rock stars and appear on MTV, to no avail. Middle-aged columnists have even taken to the streets to find “young people” to quiz.

Is mine a generation of apathetic text-messagers more interested in crazy ringtones than in our democratic duty? The youth-bothering columnists blame politicians for somehow alienating us and failing to make politics more “interesting”. In fact, for a young person, leaving the politics to the oldies is entirely logical.

We have almost nothing to do with “the Government”. In 21st-cen- tury Britain it does very few of the things that have provoked young people to take to the streets and flock to polling booths in years gone by. It doesn’t conscript us to go off and fight in questionable wars, it doesn’t attempt to control our sexual relations or our right to abortions, it doesn’t practise censorship or limit our treasured alcohol intake. If it did any of the above you’d be sure to get plenty of political engagement.

The reasons why older people vote say a lot about why the young do not. They make their decision based on what seems to touch them directly. The health service ranks top, followed by schools, immigration, crime and pensions. Parents worry about their child’s school, older people worry about hospitals and pensioners worry about, well, pensions.

My friends and I have never been near a hospital — after all, we are immortal — so MRSA is not on the radar screen. We couldn’t give a toss about foundation hospitals because we cannot imagine that we’re going to be in one any time soon. We have no children and, having just escaped from the confines of the classroom, we are not motivated to debate the pros and cons of city academies.

Crime is occasionally annoying but we think that parting with your wallet every so often is the price you pay for a good night out, and protec- ting homes and families seems rather abstract when you have neither. We don’t earn much and don’t pay a great deal of tax, don’t own houses and therefore, if anything, rather look forward to the spectacle of a property crash. Pensions are as far away now as next Christmas is to a four-year-old. As for immigration, we are far more likely to have friends and partners from ethnic minorities — and while it is true that suggesting limits on immigration is not racist, it seems, inexplicably, that the policy mobilises people who are.

We engage when things seem to affect us. We howled with outrage when we were asked to contribute to the cost of our degrees. We voted as well, and now student-heavy seats such as Oxford West & Abingdon are in the iron grip of the Lib Dems.

The old argument that politicians need to find issues to engage the young has always seemed a spectacular case of putting the cart before the horse. Yes, we would all vote if some parties proposed to close every pub in the land or to cancel Sundays, but it doesn’t follow that that would be good for our democracy. We are not a lost generation, but rightly or wrongly we do not see the Westminster Parliament as affecting us.

As we accumulate kids, mortgages, tax bills and health problems, we will no doubt earnestly debate the state of public finance. Worry not, we will become as involved as any baby boomer is today. In the meantime we just want to savour our last few years of political immaturity.