When I arrived at the offices of the New Economics Foundation to meet its chief executive, Danny Sriskandarajah, the New Statesman’s photographer had already got to work. I listened in as the pair discussed the politics of South Africa, where Sriskandarajah lived while chief executive of Civicus, a global non-profit, between 2013 and 2018, and where our photographer, David Sandison, is from. “It’s where I start the first chapter of this,” Sriskandarajah – affable and warm in a brightly patterned shirt, suit trousers and trainers – said, tapping my copy of his book, Power to the People, which was placed on the table beside me.
Sriskandarajah spends much of his time at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) – a left-wing think tank founded by members of the Green Party in 1986 – considering imbalances of power across the globe and how to fix them. This is a crucial theme in his book. Published last year, Power to the People argues that rising voter apathy can be attributed to declining opportunities to participate in civic life, whether because of restrictions on the right to protest or the devastation of community spaces by austerity.
South Africa is, for Sriskandarajah, representative of this worrying global trend. Last June, for the first time in three decades, the African National Congress (ANC) – the party of Nelson Mandela – lost its majority. Democratic Alliance and Inkatha Freedom Party joined the ANC in a coalition government. Sriskandarajah is less worried about how this new era in South African politics will play out than he is about how it came to pass: turnout was the lowest in South Africa’s democratic history at 58.6 per cent. He is particularly concerned about the youth vote. In 2024 less than half of 18- to 24-year-olds in South Africa said they planned to vote. “Democracy is only 30 years old there,” Sriskandarajah said, “but [last year] saw the lowest levels of voter turnout among young people… The signs are there, wherever you look, that people are turning off mainstream politics.”
This sense of apathy among young voters is not exclusive to South Africa. An international survey by the Open Society Barometer in September 2023 found that only 57 per cent of 18- to 35-year-olds felt democracy was preferable to any other form of government (71 per cent of over-56-year-olds gave the same answer). According to Sriskandarajah, much of this disillusionment with the political status quo is due to an ongoing “crackdown on civic space” – forums in which citizens can come together to share their views and shape their society, including social media – in “relatively mature democracies”. The space once reserved for “the moderate middle” has been hollowed out, leaving room only for polarised dissent.
Sriskandarajah began writing Power to the People around the same time he left his role at Civicus. Though he had enjoyed working alongside prominent global activists – including Mandela’s widow Graça Machel, the former Irish president Mary Robinson and the former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan – he left the role with a sense of unease. “[I saw] the horror of what was unfolding across the globe: environmental activists were being killed or human rights NGOs were being shut down. Citizen power was being undermined. At what point do we think that’s a real problem?”
Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah was born in Sri Lanka in December 1975 to Tamil parents, who moved to Australia for work shortly after his birth. He was brought up by his grandparents in a “very rural” area; the family did not have running water or electricity. “The first few years of my life were in some ways blissful,” he told me. “I grew up with my grandparents on a little island off the coast of Sri Lanka; I didn’t know any better.”
Sriskandarajah left Sri Lanka in 1982 to join his parents in Australia; the following year, the Sri Lankan civil war started. “The war shapes my community’s life because a third of Sri Lankan Tamils now live in a diaspora in places like the UK, Canada or Australia.” By the time the war ended in 2009, more than 800,000 had been displaced. “I am the product of that process.” Sriskandarajah told me he often reflects that had he not left Sri Lanka when he did, he would likely have joined a rebel movement. “I would probably have died or got caught up in a brutal war, if my parents hadn’t taken me out at just that moment.” The conflict in Sri Lanka galvanised Sriskandarajah to want to create change.
After completing a degree in economics and social science at the University of Sydney, Sriskandarajah studied for a PhD in international development at Oxford. As well as his time at Civicus, he has worked at the left-leaning Institute for Public Policy Research think tank and was the youngest ever person (and first non-Brit) to head the Royal Commonwealth Society. Sriskandarajah joined the NEF last January. In 2019, he became chief executive of Oxfam GB at a time when the charity was reeling from revelations about sexual misconduct by staff in Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Oxfam was accused of not providing full details of an investigation into the hiring of sex workers by staff working in the recovery operation.Several high-profile figures, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, had withdrawn their support. “My pitch to [Oxfam] was: what’s really at stake is how power works within your organisation,” he told me.
Sriskandarajah is troubled that young people today do not have hope that a better world is possible in the way that he does. “I try and understand why it is that I was and remain so hopeful, but the generation after me doesn’t,” he said. Perhaps the divide stems from his generation’s ability to “get our foot on the property ladder” or that they became adults in “an era when globalisation delivered huge benefits” while shifting the true costs on to younger generations (for example, the delayed cost of decades of fossil fuel pollution).
On home ownership, the evidence of a widening generation gap is stark. In the UK, 55 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds were homeowners in 1997, compared with 35 per cent two decades later. The problem is not limited to the UK: Spain has dubbed its young people the “tenant generation”, and in Germany only 26 per cent of 25- to 44-year-olds own their own home. This gap, Sriskandarajah believes, is a major driver of youth disengagement. “If you start to realise how unfairly stacked the odds are against you as a young person today, whether it’s climate or wealth accumulation, no wonder you start to lose hope. One manifestation of that must be disengaging from a mainstream politics that is responsible for the mess.”
The solution? “You’ve got to nurture some of the undergrowth of civic life, that which brings us into the community.” This “undergrowth” could include playing for the local football club or volunteering for a community garden – feeling a part of something close to where you live. But these spaces are often the first to suffer cuts: “I do think that [civic life] has been neglected, and in some cases vandalised.”
In Power to the People, Sriskandarajah includes in his list of remedies the abolition of the House of Lords and the more frequent use of citizens’ assemblies. Globally, he suggests a Digital Geneva Convention, a set of “rules and regulations that can restrain the power and the instincts of Big Tech behemoths in appropriate ways” in order to protect privacy and halt the spread of misinformation. All his recommended measures are intended to bring citizens closer to the heart of decision-making and to preserve the civic realm. “Once the community gets stronger… you will see the sort of political and institutional changes we so desperately need.”
[See also: Michael Palin Q&A: “When was I happiest? On stage with Monty Python”]
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