Once, anti-establishment youth disillusioned with mainstream politics headed left. Now increasing numbers are tilting right. Why?
Josh is 24 years old and works as a carer. It’s not easy work, but he prefers it to his old job in a supermarket: most of his clients are elderly and “just want someone there with them, because they’re lonely”. In his spare time Josh used to be into boxing. But lately he’s got into politics instead.
Like many of his gen Z contemporaries, he’s thoroughly disillusioned with the mainstream kind. “The two parties that have been in power for 100-plus years have done nothing. The economy’s a mess,” he scoffs. But if he sounds like the kind of anti-establishment young person who once rallied to the radical left, Josh’s frustration has taken him in another direction. An ardent leaver in his teens, who backed Boris Johnson in 2019, he now belongs to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Farage was given a decade or more of regular airtime on the bbc despite not having one MP. This is a top-down driven rise to political power. The bbc is a defacto nation state information operation, it primarily serves the interests of the British establishment, of which the very wealthy are a significant part. They prefer the alternative to the red/blue Tories to come from the right, rather than the left.
Young people have and are witnessing their quality of life and future prospects diminish on an ongoing basis. Climate change is the biggest crisis multiplier humankind will ever experience. It isn’t just being ignored by Tories red and blue, protests against government inaction on it are now criminalised, and the surveillance state built to ‘protect’ society has reached a point of extreme data-totalitarianism that will breed extremists. Not to mention what happens when Tommy Robinson, or whoever is Farage’s Musk takes control of that surveillance state apparatus?
All of this has rendered mainstream parties non-credible. It is just more of the same austerity, more economic inequality.
With the best will in the world, the scale of immigration (not far off a London a decade) is not sustainable. It is impacting the unskilled labour markets and ‘benefits’ system many of these potential Reform voting young people are reliant upon. Its use is the easiest of wedges for any politician to use. This immigration is nothing compared to the coming climate change refugee crisis. We haven’t seen anything yet.
The home-owning-electorate’s response: “These people are racist. We should rejoin the EU” (thus completely disenfranchising former brexit, now potential Reform voters) can only make this situation worse, if anything driving those young voters into the hands of worse extremists.