One of the most ignominious accusations that has recently been levelled against gen Z – people born between 1997 and 2012 – is that we cannot do DIY.
Nearly a quarter of us can’t change a lightbulb, a fair chunk can’t identify a flathead screwdriver, and a fifth don’t even know what a spanner is, according to research by DIY enthusiasts’ favourite Halfords, which surveyed 2,000 people, 323 of which were aged between 18 and 27. (I should get out of the way early that I was born in 1997 and no, I don’t know my flathead screwdrivers from whatever the other ones are called.)
The commentators, as they are wont to do, had a field day. “Why young people can’t handle DIY,” ran one headline, as though it were national service. “Revealed: the basic DIY tasks gen Z won’t do – as young adults pay thousands of pounds for others to do easy household tasks,” said another. Op-eds were commissioned. Radio producers were dispatched to social media to seek these feckless layabouts out for a soundbite. Instead of a nation of DIYers like great generations past, we have, according to the people who sold bikes before we all started Living in the Moment Everyday (limeing), become a generation of Gotdits – the get others to do it-ers. It practically trips off the tongue.
Regrettably, though, it’s not just “basic DIY” that we’d outsource completely if given the chance. According to recent – and, yes, markedly more worrying – research from Channel 4, 52% of gen Z would chuck democracy in for a “strong leader” who “doesn’t have to bother with parliament and elections”. (This from a sample size of 3,000 adults of all ages.) Not only that, but 47% agreed that “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”. A not insignificant margin – 33% – thought the UK would be “better off if the army were in charge”.
Hot on the heels of this was polling from the Mail on Sunday, which found that 45% of 18- to 27-year-olds supported the death penalty, and 67% were in favour of chemically castrating sex offenders. The revelation that my generation can’t change a lightbulb suddenly feels quite small-fry.
Last week, in the latest dispatch from the gen Z trenches, the Times and YouGov published a survey of 1,161 adults aged 18 to 27 (comparable to a similar report the paper ran in 2004) exploring their views on everything from national pride (no chance) to one night stands (very much not happening). Just 41% of those surveyed said they were proud to be British (this compared with 80% in 2004); only 11% would fight for their country; almost half thought that Britain was racist; and only 11% would trust the police “a lot” if they were the victim of a crime.
Confronting reading? Yes. Unexpected? Not exactly. As Jovan Owusu-Nepaul, the impeccably dressed 28-year-old who stood against Nigel Farage in Clacton at last July’s general election, tells me: “If young people knew that going to work resulted in a decent standard of living, if they knew that they could get a hospital appointment, if they had confidence in the areas they were living, they felt a sense of community and solidarity among people, they knew their neighbours, they were proud of the contributions of their town to the national story, then I think those attitudes would completely change.”
Instead, it feels like the social contract has been torn up, put in an envelope and mailed back to us alongside a statement from the Student Loans Company. The labour market’s a dud, starting salaries are risibly paltry, owning so much as a parking space is a pipe dream and the great, terrible truth is that we’re heading for an uninhabitable planet. When I canvass my own friends for their thoughts on the state of the nation, the answers variously come back as “a joke”, “a mess” and “girl, I’ve literally just been Googling how to move to Australia”. It’s not exactly life-affirming stuff.
“With gen Z, so much of politics has been done to us, and there have been so many really big decisions taken that we have been locked out of,” says 22-year-old Issy Waite, the national secretary of Labour Students, who stood in Kemi Badenoch’s North West Essex seat as the party’s youngest candidate last July. “Whatever your views on Brexit, a lot of gen Z didn’t have the option to even exercise our opinion – and this is a life-changing decision that’s going to affect the rest of our lives.”
“Young people seem to think that the picture’s broken,” says Joshua Reynolds, the 26-year-old Lib Dem MP for Maidenhead, a seat that was held by Theresa May for 27 years until she stepped down at the general election. He is one of the first generation Z MPs. “I think it’s a feeling of, well, what has politics done for me?
“I don’t in reality think that young people want to get rid of elections or democracy. I think it’s that democracy and politics and politicians haven’t listened to young people for so long. They feel disillusioned by it.”
Which is probably why we’re already feeling the creep of “strong leader” syndrome. Reynolds says he visited a school in his constituency a few weeks ago and asked some of the students to name three politicians. “The answers were Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Elon Musk.”
Reynolds isn’t the only one unconvinced that democracy is as out of fashion with gen Z as Channel 4’s polling would suggest. “It just seemed wrong,” says Chris Prosser, a political scientist and co-director of the British Election Study, who pointed out that the response to the “strong leader” question contradicted other data from the British Election Study and the World Values Survey – the former by almost 40 percentage points.
“I’m obviously biased, but we’re quite a well regarded organisation, and according to our research, gen Z are the least likely generation to support a ‘strong leader’. There are all sorts of reasons that number might have arisen.”
When asked by Liberal Democrat president (and polling Substacker) Mark Pack to make the full dataset available, Channel 4 declined. The broadcaster had told the Guardian in a previous statement that it was “a robust, reliable and carefully thought through piece of research”.
When it came to the Times study, despite liberal views on issues such as trans rights (most of those surveyed thought pupils should be allowed to socially transition at school), drug decriminalisation (those in favour of decriminalising cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine had increased significantly in the past two decades), and immigration (76% thought it was good for the economy and society), gen Z’s monastic reputation preceded us in other areas.
Just 33% believed their friends were frequent binge drinkers, just 16% thought their peers were having regular casual sex, and – maybe most surprisingly – more young people believed in the institution of marriage in 2024 than they did in 2004.
“There’s a positive and a negative story to be found” about gen Z’s relationship with sex, says Natasha McKeever, a lecturer in applied ethics at the University of Leeds. “The negative is that gen Z are interacting less in person, and interacting more over screens. If they’re meeting less in person, they’re less likely to have sex or date. But the positive spin on that is that they’re drinking less, they’re less likely to have drunk sex, and they’re more clued up on things thanks to better sex and relationships education in schools.”
McKeever’s research reflects what I’ve been hearing rumbles of among my own friends over the past year: dating apps are dying a death among beleaguered young singles. (No wonder Bridget Jones, a woman who only had to walk downstairs at her own parents’ turkey-curry Christmas buffet to meet the love of her life, has found such an ardent new young audience.)
“It seems like, actually, young people don’t want to be hiding behind screens – they seem to be craving something different and authentic,” says McKeever. According to a report published by the alternative dating app Feeld last September, gen Z was the most likely age group to report having fantasised about monogamy.
And yet, there is still humour, albeit gallows-style, and there is some remaining sense of hope – at least in the people I speak to.
“This sense of injustice that people feel is motivating,” says Owusu-Nepaul. “I think our generation has been politicised just because the promise of what was meant to be pretty standard in society has completely broken down.”
As one friend reasons when we, two tipsy statistical anomalies, talk about it over a glass of wine: “At least we’re not America. Yet.” I’ll drink to that.
