There’s a famous clip that still does the rounds on social media, which is weird, because it’s Russia Today, hardly regular viewing, it happened in 2017, a fairly long time ago, and it was on the show Sam Delaney’s News Thing, which was never appointment viewing. In it, Nigel Farage is ceremonially knighted by a girl of about seven, who then says: “My mummy says you hate foreigners.” Delaney cuts in, “No no no, little girl”, and Nige falls about laughing, because good old Nigel, he’s always game for a laugh.
Pause on whether or not Farage hates foreigners; the reason I can do an impression of the little girl is that every teenager I know is pitch perfect on all three parts – the girl, Delaney, Farage. Whenever people say, “Is it bad that Nigel Farage is the only politician my kids have heard of? Should I worry?”, I try in vain to think, “No, this is nothing to worry about – this is just a peculiar moment that went viral, the wind changed and it stayed like that.”
This is wearing thin, unfortunately; the Reform party leader enjoys a TikTok following of 1.3 million, miles ahead of any other UK politician. Zarah Sultana is the next nearest, with 489,000, which is testament to the fact that she understands the medium, rather than resounding proof that Your Party is shaping up the way she hoped or intended.
What does it mean when the most penetrating messages are the shortest, bluntest and least challenged? When everyone’s attention is won on vibes? Will dropping the voting age to 16 deliver quite the progressive advantage it was always tacitly expected to?
Missing from those questions is what exactly all these followers are rewarding. It isn’t straightforward approval: a “like” doesn’t necessarily signal liking. Nor do younger people believe everything they watch: the curse of mindless credulity is a much bigger problem for boomers and gen X. Mainstream politics has spent years complacently writing off the under-25s as not interested or inert, which was convenient, as it pointedly wasn’t offering them anything. Given it’s now demonstrable that gen Z are interested in something, it would be useful to examine more closely what that interest signals, before we write it off as the silliness of the low-attention economy.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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