Reform politicians vie to say the most chilling thing – between Andrea Jenkyns’ promise to sack diversity officers who don’t exist, and party chair Zia Yusuf’s pledge to bring legal challenges against the use of hotels to house asylum seekers – and that, I accept with a heavy heart, will be the work of the next four years: finding an answer to this nastiness more convincing than Labour’s current plan of becoming more like them.
But something else Yusuf said was actually true: buried among nationalist bilge about the British empire being good, actually, he said in an interview, “There has been an industrial-scale demoralisation, particularly of young people in this country.” He thinks they’re being demoralised because they’re being taught to hate their country. In fact, for so many of us, hating our country, or certainly the flaws in its governance and behaviour, are what gets us out of bed in the morning. Yet there is a demoralisation in Gen Z, no question: the right may blame it on anti-patriotism, I could blame it on anything from a curriculum full of climate despair, juxtaposed with their own powerless and the visible inaction of those with power, to the simple fact that life has been economically really tough, for huge and increasing numbers of people, since the financial crash, which is to say, the entire time they’ve been alive.
But a couple of notes on pessimism – and none of them are “wave more union flags, and it will go away”: first, it’s really hard to meaningfully seed it in the young. You can make them feel stupid, for voicing anything other than gloom, but you can’t sap their will to action. Second, misery only serves two forces, those of reactionary politics, and those of capital. Ideally, we wouldn’t be teaching them any of life’s harsh realities without simultaneously teaching them how to organise. Realistically, on the current performance of mature society, it’ll be them teaching us how to organise.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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