Bonnie Blue, the porn actor who recently made headlines for her antics in Bali – which you probably shouldn’t Google – has come out in support of Nigel Farage.
And in not unconnected news, “rage baiting” – saying deliberately annoying things to get attention – is the Oxford University Press’s word of the year. Bonnie’s most effective way of advertising her X-rated content to the masses now is by generating enough controversy to get her publicly talked about, and she’s very good at making just enough noise (this time in the Spectator, of all places) to drum up a bit of traffic.
But to say that diversifying into hard-right politics makes her an outlier for her existing young fanbase is nonetheless an understatement, given Reform is now polling at just 5% among under-24s. If Bonnie is selling something young men want, it ain’t her take on inheritance tax policy.
What a lot of lost teenagers actually want from government, according to research launched this week by the culture secretary Lisa Nandy, is heartbreakingly simple: a trusted adult outside the family with time for them (one in five can’t identify anyone who fits this category, with boys twice as likely as girls to lack such a figure); something fun to do that gets them off the phones with which they have a love-hate relationship; a secure job; better mental health support.
The national youth strategy unveiled this week was Labour’s attempt to reach out to gen Z, with a thoroughly welcome £500m investment in youth workers (to provide those supportive trusted adults) plus more youth apprenticeships and a review of what is undermining their mental health that may prove a lot more thoughtful than headlines about overdiagnosis suggest. (I’d be very surprised if Peter Fonagy, the psychologist leading the review for Wes Streeting, doesn’t dig deep into the societal shifts affecting teenagers, from the pandemic to parenting, social media and academic pressures at school.) But it will take more than Keir Starmer joining TikTok to get all this across to young people, and more than this rather thin strategy to bring it together coherently.
Like Bonnie, politicians live or die now by their ability to reach an audience increasingly getting its news from what goes viral on social media. Streeting instinctively gets the need for drama and controversial talking points, which is why his bit of the package is the one arguably mostly likely to reach gen Z ears. Reconciling the showmanship with serious policymaking, however, appears to be a work in progress.
So here’s a talking point to consider, and it’s rethinking the generational contract between old and young. A report this week from rightwing thinktank the Centre for Social Justice, authored by former Tory MP Miriam Cates, argued for scrapping the pension lock that has been boosting pensioner incomes ever since her party introduced it back in 2011, and investing the money in children. She joins a groundswell of rightwing voices saying surprisingly loudly what a Labour government daren’t: that too much of the welfare bill goes on elderly people, painfully squeezing what is available to the young.
As young children, this generation of teenagers endured a lockdown that disrupted their education and kept them from their friends, mostly to protect the lives of elderly people. Now they’re trying to spread their wings in a world that won’t make space for them. They’re berated for not getting jobs even as well-intended rises in the minimum wage and in employers’ national insurance make them more expensive to hire, and nagged to get off their phones even when there’s precious little else to do. (Nandy’s research on the gap she is trying to fill showed a quarter of teenagers didn’t know of anywhere nearby offering opportunities to do something more sociable, from youth clubs to sports clubs to the kind of arts and music provision that councils have had to cut in the austerity years.) Bans on teenagers congregating in shopping malls and fast-food joints, often introduced post-pandemic amid fears about antisocial behaviour, froze them out of the few remaining places they could hang out independently with friends.
Though Nandy’s new youth clubs are a good downpayment on a new deal for the young, tackling their unhappiness at the root will require less blaming them for their own troubles, more money, and more honest reflection by adults on whether as a society we’ve got the balance between maturity and youth right. If it takes a village to raise one child, then raising everyone’s children takes a country.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
