Like a number of you – probably more than would care to admit it – I was a teenage leftist. Hammer and sickle t-shirts, mountains of socialist political theory and interminable debates with politics teachers were worn, read and had from the ages of 14-18. Maybe these were strongly held convictions? Maybe I enjoyed the films of Ken Loach? Maybe I thought girls would like it? Whatever the case, these were formative years.
Through a combination of wider reading and frontal lobe development, my political outlook changed for the better. I look back on those days with embarrassment and fondness, as one tends to remember passing fads.
These memories were prompted by new polling from Onward and Merlin Strategy that shows considerable support for anti-democratic forms of government among Britain’s youth. Almost 40% of those under 34 have a positive view of ‘a military strongman with no government or elections’. Some 28% of those aged 25-34 view fascism very or fairly positively, and 40% of the same age bracket hold a positive view of communism.
As Poppy Coburn wrote in The Daily Telegraph earlier this week, this antipathy towards democracy, while concerning, is hardly shocking. For young people, it can often feel like Britain’s political economy is geared against us.
Due to our historic failure to build sufficient numbers of homes, you’re more often than not stuffed into shared rental accommodation for which you could easily pay upwards of £1,000 per month. You step outside to go to one of the few graduate-level jobs not outsourced to AI or a bloke in Calcutta and see a high street lined with nail salons and Turkish barbers, perfumed by the omnipresent smell of skunk. All the while, you listen to politicians who purport to represent your interests justify why a portion of your salary should go towards inflation-proof benefits for asset-rich pensioners.
Some days, it’s enough to make you weep. But the notion that the silver bullet for this unfairness is collectivism of some variety is moronic.
Rather than glue themselves to the box whenever Ash Sarkar is on Good Morning Britain, the disaffected young ought to read ‘Socialism: The failed idea that never dies’, by Kristian Niemietz. From Mao’s China to Castro’s Cuba, all of history’s great communist experiments have brought, to varying degrees of severity, economic mayhem and political repression.
If you don’t want to read, book a flight to one of the countries blighted by it. On a holiday to Albania last year, locals spoke about the devastation of Enver Hoxha’s regime – an estimated 200,000 people passed through his gulags, and for families the hunt continues to find out what happened to relatives who vanished during his 41-year long rule.
The same goes for fascism. Mussolini didn’t make the trains run on time. He just used state propaganda to boast that he had. Propped up by massive campaigns of forced labour, price controls and re-armament, the so-called ‘economic miracle’ of Adolf Hitler’s regime in 1930s Germany – often cited by neo-Nazis – ended in the devastation of a world war and the horrors of the Holocaust. One would have thought this would be enough to put Gen-Zedders and Millennials off the idea. Then again, fewer than half of Britons aged 18-34 know what happened on D-Day – presumably they’re not informed enough to know the difference.
There are of course policies that can be pursued within our current system that would ameliorate the crisis of legitimacy driving young people away from the mainstream.
It’s been repeated ad nauseum, but we need to build more homes. It looked for a while like Labour had the right idea with their flagship Planning and Infrastructure Bill, but have since capitulated to the green lobby and ramped up the environmental stipulations for new developments.
Migration – both legal and illegal – is far too high. A state that cannot fulfil that fundamental function of policing its borders will not win the hearts and minds of the working-age people who stump up for it. Again, Keir Starmer has made a lot of noise about ‘smashing’ the people-smuggling gangs, and his Government has even produced a white paper on the issue. Yet while he’s brought himself around to conceding the argument on mass migration, there’s little in the way of a plan to reform the broken system that has allowed it to spiral out of control.
At an event hosted by Onward to discuss the poll’s findings, panellists Katie Lam and Simon Clarke – a sitting and former Conservative MP respectively – recognised the salience of these issues. Much needs to be done and they are clearly doing a lot of the thinking about how to position the Tories as the party with a plan to bring young people into the fold. As they should. If this polling tells us anything, it is that both the Conservatives and Labour risk being crowded out of the battle for the young by Reform UK on the Right and a Jezbollah-Green coalition on the Left.
Ruin down that way lies. While they have gauged the political vibe shift well, Reform’s economic package of welfarism for the old, nationalisation, and taxes on energy subsidies is not a model for national renewal. Likewise for the de-growth schlock Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn’s new outfit will inevitably promote.
We’ve seen this in Argentina. At the beginning of the 20th century, the South American nation was one of the wealthiest on the planet, exporting vast amounts of grain and meat. As international demand for said products declined during the 1930s, so did Argentina’s economy. A disgruntled populace voted in the military strongman Juan Peron, whose central planning and exorbitant spending drove the country into the ground for almost a century. The free-market reformer Javier Milei is now picking up the pieces.
Had I read about the plight of Argentina earlier, my adolescent taste for collectivism could have been short-lived. And if our leaders show that parliamentary democracy is the best environment under which to improve living standards – rather than wasting enormous mandates by achieving little – the same could be said for other young people, too. It’s not a necessity to suffer Peronism to reach Milei: we can just go straight to dessert.
