It’s easy to feel a little sad this summer – with that fateful referendum in June, Donald Trump’s rise, the terrorist attack in Nice, a coup in Turkey and the burkini ban being just a few of the topics we’ve been agonising over in the last few weeks. Sure, this has been far from the normal summer churn of news (maybe it’s just the new times we live in) but something disturbing in British politics has really haunted me this summer: acts of selfishness by those who run the country, no matter how small, can have a big impact on how we live and the direction society takes.

Imagine if Boris Johnson, who, in his own words, was not a “natural outer”, thought less about his own ambitions and more about the ambitions of normal people, particularly young people, and so campaigned to stay in the world’s largest single market, the organisation which has garnered European peace and progress for generations. He may not be prime minister today (which serves him right) but his actions still got him his cabinet promotion at the expense of the rest of us. Or, let’s suppose that Jeremy Corbyn put his heart and soul into the EU referendum campaign, teaming up with Conservatives, Greens and Scottish Nationalists alike to persuade the hundreds of thousands of voters not to fall for half-truths from the Leave campaign. Instead, for the sake of his own vanity in choosing to not appearing alongside David Cameron or any other major party leader during the campaign, we barely saw a response from the Labour leader to the nasty nationalist rhetoric of the Leave campaign which has since inspired a wave of hate crimes across the UK.

I’m not just angry about Brexit. Going even further back, imagine if Ed Miliband hadn’t challenged his less awkward and more experienced brother, David, for the Labour leadership, so giving Labour a real chance of victory at the last election – a victory which could have meant no EU referendum, no Brexit and no repealing of the Human Rights Act due next year. Alternatively, say leading Liberal Democrats were not so fixated on cabinet positions during the coalition negotiations that they demanded more centrist policies: what would have happened to tuition fees or cuts to disability benefits? What if Gordon Brown had given people a chance to vote in an election the year after he took office? He was popular then and a win would have prevented the formation of that coalition government, which increased homelessness and NHS waiting times, and embarked on austerity just after the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Instead, he dithered, ultimately thinking that his own political fortunes would improve further into his leadership – and not about what another government would do to the country in 2010. Perhaps even a self-centred desire to be a war prime minister was a contributing factor to Tony Blair’s decision to send British forces to Iraq in 2003 – he ended up using the armed forces in more conflicts than any other leader in British history.

For me, the irony is that I used to think that the real heartless careerists were in the Conservative Party, but the Labour leadership contest has really tested that theory during these post-referendum blues. Resigning should have been natural for Jeremy Corbyn after the referendum result, but he wants to personally lead a lasting revolution in the Labour Party whatever the cost – including at the expense of the next general election. Meanwhile, the right wing of the Parliamentary Labour Party doesn’t seem to care much about Owen Smith; they want to form their own breakaway party or faction in a split which would surely only guarantee another five years of Conservative government. Regardless of policy, are these people really more altruistic than the Conservatives? Regarding policy, tepid support for NATO from many aspects of Labour today forgets how vulnerable small Baltic states and their populations are to Russian aggression. That “kinder, gentler politics” doesn’t want to protect our friends abroad.

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised; maybe we only have ourselves to blame. Do we really only think about the societal consequences when we put a cross in a box for a particular political party or do our own interests about our future home, job and tax-bill creep into our voting mind-set? Some people might blame the legacy of Thatcherism encouraging the ‘greed is good’ attitude to life; our current set of politicians did grow up during her time in office. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know – I’m only 20. But as a young person, looking at how we interact with each other – on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter – it’s all about ourselves. Our holidays, our nights out and our times catching up with old friends are all showcased for everyone else to see. While we all might be just as guilty as the politicians on the right, left and centre for voting in our own self-interest, as our generation gets older, I doubt the ‘me, me, me’ way in which we interact will have no spillover effects on our decisions and the way we vote.