Who are the lovely dictators? You might find yourself wondering if generation Z has access to a historical cache of great guys who just didn’t want to waste their people’s ever-enriched time with stuff like democracy. The results of a study commissioned by Channel 4 this week found that 52% of gen Z, who are aged between 13 and 27, thought “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”.
That feels … not great. And, of course, the reflexive tendency for many older generations is to resort immediately to ridicule of gen Z. You know the sort of thing. Oh, I guess they got bored halfway through the video summary of whichever dictator’s life, and just scrolled to the next thing. Or: this is why they have to put those captions on clips saying, “What happens at the end will blow your mind!!!!!” Short shrift would no doubt also be given to the finding that 33% of gen Z think the UK would be better off “if the army was in charge”. Ooh, the army’s going to need a lot more soldiers, then. Wait till these kids find out the age of the conscripts. You like the army? That’s great – you’re going to be the army!
The study, carried out by the polling company Craft, was based on a sample of 3,000 adults of all ages, which many people will feel is much too small. But the question on the “strong leader” seems to have been near identical to the one asked in 2022 by JL Partners, for UK Onward, in a poll of more than 8,000 adults. That latter poll found that 61% of 18- to 34-year-olds supported running the UK with “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with parliament/elections”.
Anyway, now we’ve got the sneering and nitpicking out of the way, perhaps it’s time to park the great British talent for deflection, particularly given today’s children’s commissioner’s report into why children became involved in last summer’s riots. At least 147 children were arrested and 84 charged, with sentences handed down to those as young as 12. Almost all were boys.
Rachel de Souza’s findings make for fairly despairing reading. None of the children she’d spoken to said they were motivated by anti-immigration or far-right beliefs – in fact, some actively disdained those. They did, however, deeply dislike and distrust the police, and felt they had few or no opportunities in life. De Souza’s research suggested they were “impulsive” and searching for a thrill. As she puts it, this raises “some really serious questions about childhood in England and why our children feel so disaffected and disempowered”.
If only we’d consider those questions with the same urgency that the authorities prosecuted and sentenced children after the riots, despite concerned parties including the NSPCC and the Youth Justice Board urging that children only be criminalised for their involvement as a last resort. Yet many children were arrested under what De Souza highlights as “unusually severe and swift charges”, despite most of them not having been in trouble with the law before.
Children might sometimes do very bad and stupid things, but they are not so stupid that they can’t see they live in a country where the gulf in opportunities is quite staggering. It’s droll to think that two months after the riots, we’d be listening to Keir Starmer’s blithe defence of his decision to take up the freebie loan of an £18m penthouse so his son could study for his GCSEs in peace and quiet. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” explained the prime minister. Any parent, if you please. I do wonder what on earth the parents of the rioting youngsters were doing making the choices they did. I would simply have let my teens spend the afternoon in an £18m penthouse instead. Anyway, speaking of guillotine-beckoning comments, perhaps it isn’t the most enormous surprise that the Channel 4 study found 47% of gen Z agreeing that “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”.
Again, it’s easy to dismiss, but if they believe these things, surely it’s on those of our generations who failed to make the status quo seem remotely appealing? Many of the behaviours of today’s teens and young adults are not simply thick / snowflakey / lazy, but rational responses to a world created by their elders, if not always betters. The childhood experience has deteriorated completely in the past 15 years or so. We have addicted children to – and depressed them with – smartphones, and done next to nothing about this no matter how much evidence of the most toxic harms mounts up. Children in the US are expected to tidy their rooms by generations who also expect them to rehearse active-shooter drills. We require young people to show gratitude for living in an iteration of capitalism in which they have not only no stake, but no obvious hope of getting a stake. It seems to them that there have been better times to be alive.
If overly “woke” politics was hurtled into statute, it was done by people much older than those now being harried for investing too heavily in it all. By the time today’s teens reach an age at which they might hold public office, politicians will be mere front-of-house figures to the real powers: the Silicon Valley titans. Parliaments will be self-driving. We will all be watched over by machines of loving grace.
There’s a good couplet in The Mission, a movie from the mid-cretaceous period (1986) that no one in gen Z will have watched. “Such is the world,” deflects one character. “No,” counters another. “Such have we made it.” The answer to the question “will no one think of the children?” is usually: no, not for a second. We should, though, and urgently. The future quite literally depends on it.
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
