Kemi Badenoch is worried about me. More generally, she’s worried about Gen Z. She thinks we’re consumed by national self-loathing, that we see racism on every street corner, and that we’re filled with a “nihilistic rage”, whispered into our ears by “loony-left voices”, including from within our government. She wants to help me. In fact she wants to treat me like an immigrant to this country, teach me to feel valued again, to feel pride again, to “integrate” me back into the society that I’ve become so alienated from.
She was writing in this morning’s Times (11 February) in response to a series of sweaty headlines from our newspaper of record, which has chosen this week to deploy a “landmark” generational survey of the oldest members of my age cohort. There were several striking, if unoriginal findings: Most of us wouldn’t fight for our country in the event of war. We’re not especially proud of Britain either, which we see as “stuck in the past”. We have no faith in basic state functions: 31 per cent would not trust the police if they were the victim of a crime, as opposed to 8 per cent 20 years ago.
It’s not the first time I’ve read about myself in the papers. It’s become an odd hobby, actually, sort of like being famous, though most famous people (other maybe than Arthur Scargill and the Cambridge Five) didn’t have to read about themselves as a kind of enemy within, noxious fifth column or – in the leaden clichés of the Leader of the Opposition – a “wake-up call” that reveals “what happens when we let divisive narratives run wild without setting the record straight”. We’ve received much worse coverage in recent years: chastening descriptions of the national sex drought for instance (alongside quite contrary and detailed descriptions of a polymorphous kink boom). The other weekend we were lobbying for fascist takeover, longing for some Anglo-Duvalier and their troop of aiguilletted officers to sweep to power and stop the rot. But like all other inquiries of the soul of Gen Z this one only ever rings half true – and Badenoch’s response continues to misread an angst which is no less real for evading simple definition.
Generational portraits are always more like landscapes – and, in the case of this Times package, one sketched by a latter-day Brueghel, filled with twisted stereotypes, wild overstatements and hopeless contradictions. Badenoch’s greatest anxiety – about how British youth feel about domestic racism – flows directly contrary to a previous media narrative that, the vibe had now shifted, the youth were turning right and such talk was lost to the heyday of BLM and the woke era. Badenoch’s boasts about trying to combat this hyper-progressive hegemony only ring of further anachronism. “I remember refusing to give a government grant to a band called Kneecap that had violent lyrics, extremely anti-British and pro-IRA,” she writes, sounding like Norman Tebbit addressing the Tunbridge Wells Conservative Association in 1991.
At the level of the broadest generality though, I think there is something we can gather from these findings – something that Badenoch knows but which she cannot interpret. The nihilistic rage she diagnoses is real. It’s more of a historic mood than a generational one, but which is felt most keenly by the young who have necessarily been confined to one, very enervating, historical era. The British 21st-century has mostly been a period of threat and contraction. Growing up, the car radio was a dark voice, talking of terrorism, austerity, and distant, dusty defeats (“Baghdad” lodged itself in my mind very early – “Whose dad?” I remember thinking).
As we moved into adolescence the doomscroll took up the same function, algorithmically tailored to flatten events into a drumbeat that leaves you feeling glazed and powerless. And we can make and remake the laborious economic case for our generational penury: the march of global capital halted in 2008; static salaries and the neo-Victorian, HMO hellscape of the British property market ever since. It is now a truism to observe that this period of slump has driven young people to search for radical political solutions on both political aisles: the “youthquake” of Corbynism, and supposedly, on a smaller scale, the young men turning to the Reform party. But it is far more instructive to see these individual irruptions as part of a more pervasive disquiet.
The feelings of deracination and unease that make some young people see their country as irredeemably racist (and make other young people – the same young people? – reject democracy) are almost pre-political in nature, found in the gut and the heart. They can manifest on left or right, but their tone and source is a settled cynicism about not only how things are, but equally about their capacity to change. In the past few years, the smartest thinkers on the right – those campaigning for housebuilding, economic growth, and wealth creation – have become materialists very quickly. They can see that the conditions of life come before the patriotism that Badenoch seems to want to will into the population by “send[ing] signals to young people and newcomers about who we are and what we think is right or wrong”. “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us,” said Badenoch’s predecessor, Winston Churchill. The Conservatives cannot blame Gen Z for being shaped by the Britain they have built.
[See also: Trump doesn’t need TikTok to win Gen Z]
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