This is a significant problem.
Essentially, Britain ran on a bedrock of civic-minded people throughout the class system who provided much of the scaffolding of "civic society" for free. Be it leading Brownies or Scouts or Boys Brigade, being the Chair of the local WI, being Parish Councillors, being the Secretary for the local working mens' club or local am-dram or choral society etc, all of it was unpaid work, and it provided the structure of life in Britain and a heck of a lot of experience.
In this, of course, was also membership of class-based groups that were affiliated loosely to a political position, and people also were members of political parties, so many of these structures were proving grounds, so to speak.
In my view, this bedrock has been almost completely destroyed over the last twenty to thirty years. As the nature of life changed, people now no longer have the time or the inclination to get involved in a civic pursuit. Only the problem is that a lot of our culture and political system depended on it.
We are now in a situation in my area where all parties are struggling to find decent candidates for all sorts of posts, and they are now putting forward people that are not really suitable whatsoever because, to be blunt, these people don't actually exist within the worlds of the people they are supposed to be representing. They live on facebook, or on twitter, or on instagram, or in little silos of their own households instead. In short, they don't know the people around them, and don't know how other people think or experience the world.
These weaknesses are dangerous not only because you end up with sub-par politicians, but because parties or institutions then become highly susceptible to vanguardism of various forms as there is no longer a core of solid "old guard" individuals saying that something is a ridiculous or dangerous idea.
I suspect this is how the LibDems have found themselves in such a bizarre situation. It doesn't help that Gen X is a smallish generation either, so the 40-50-something pool to pull from is smaller than that of the boomers.
But from my perspective, a lot of the remaining bedrock of civic society has been attacked badly and is still constantly attacked: as old, as fuddy duddy, as too formal, as worthless. But when it disappears, nothing comes along to replace it, and it's left us in a huge mess.
I've observed a number of situations where there's been a drive to get rid of the vestiges of an "old guard". Inevitably, what results is either an unholy mess of bad governance until someone comes along and sorts it all out by revolving back to how things were run under the old guard in the first place, or the institution collapses.
The issue with this dynamic is that we either lose something orfimportance, or we end up constantly remaking the wheel, and the time and energy used to sort it all out then cannot be used to actually do what we are supposed to be doing.
I'll give you a small, related example. Roughly every ten years, there is some sort of clamour about anti-social behaviour among youths. We had it in our area about five years ago, and, inevitably, you get the same reactions: these youths are bored, there's nothing for them to do, we need youth clubs etc.
Now I am a researcher type. I don't like to take a policy position without a deep dive, so I went to talk to a few retired councillors who'd done the job back in the 70s and 80s. Now these were old Tories, so I expected a "hang 'em and flog 'em" attitude.
I didn't get that. They both said the same thing: "There are two things that solve anti-social behaviour. The lads either age out of it or they do something so bad, they end up inside." One of them said to me: "We tried everything over thirty years. None of it works. Young lads causing trouble is just part of the way some young lads are. Go and look at old local newspapers for the juvenile reports, if you don't believe me."
So I did. And they were right. In our area, youth anti-social behaviour was arguably more disruptive in the 1950s than it is today. They were smashing streetlamps for bugger all reason, putting turf sods on folks' chimneys to smoke them out of their houses, breaking into homes to "teach him at number 5 a lesson", nicking money out of the poor box, posting dead mice through letter boxes, flinging dog poo at washing lines. Some of it was akin to a campaign of terror.
By contrast, our young lads smoking weed up in the woods was nothing.
But the old civic method of passing down information like this has gone now; I had to go out and find it. There's no mentorship anymore because the cycle of civic institutional renewal is severely damaged.
God knows what we are going to do over the next ten years. I'm in a position personally where it feels like we've just got to "hold the line".