You can see the bros online too, looking a bit like the teens who dressed up in suits to go and see Minions: The Rise of Gru a couple of years ago, all three-piece suits and slicked-back Jack Grealish hair.
The logic runs that Reform is part of the same right-wing revolt as Trump’s Maga Republicanism. In capturing the “bro vote”, it took an amorphous collection of grievances, which young men supposedly hold against a post-feminist world that wants to tell them off all the time, and turned it into electoral success. Reform, which regularly rails at “wokery” and has a leader who last had an unphotographed pub pint at some point in 1995, feels like a natural place for politically homeless dudes to congregate.
Among 16 and 17-year-olds, the divide was even more pronounced: 35 per cent of young men said they would vote Reform against 17 per cent of young women. And there is the TikTok boom too. The Guardian’s analysis suggested that Reform posts during the election outperformed Labour’s by about 30 per cent per post.
Some context. The YouGov poll says Labour were, by far, the most popular party among men and women of that age group. Labour’s 41 per cent outstripped the next two most popular parties, the Lib Dems and Greens, put together. The median age of a Reform voter was 56, the second-oldest average after the Conservatives at 63.
Nigel Farage is watching hungrily as the far right sweeps to power across Europe
Read MoreAll that said, there is something bubbling there. This is a particularly male thing. Stats suggest 71 per cent of young women dislike Farage, versus 9 per cent who do like him. It feels like a new and strange kind of masculine flexing.
I don’t know how many of my mates thought Corbyn’s charge from 12 or 13 points underwater, to denying Theresa May a majority, was a genuine political awakening after seven years of Tory prime ministers, and how many just felt like it was a good summer vibe with some decent merch. Either way, the Oxford English Dictionary named “youthquake” its word of the year. But the whole youthquake thing was a mirage. There was no discernible uplift.
That’s what animates quite a few young people. One Reform influencer, Nicholas Lissack, wrote on X that he “woke up politically for the first time on 16 June 2015, when Donald Trump descended the escalator and announced his presidential campaign”.
But as fun as it is to kick the Establishment, I doubt that the “bro vote” is going to upturn British politics. TikTok matters, but every time that social media noise has hit the cold, hard reality of the ballot box it’s turned to mist.
Yet none of this is the point. Just because young men aren’t likely to deliver Farage the keys to No 10, that doesn’t mean this can be dismissed. There are clearly many young men who feel disaffected and disillusioned. Online, disparate statistics – the numbers of men who kill themselves, who are killed at work, who sleep rough, who end up in prison, who are addicted to alcohol and drugs – are weaponised, used not as proof that work needs to be done on, for instance, mental healthcare provision and dismantling the prison of masculinity which still stops men expressing their feelings, but proof that the world has stopped caring about men.
Add to that the kinds of messages that people like Andrew Tate – someone Farage said in February was “a very important voice” for young men, before walking that back a touch – are sluicing into the teen boy ecosystem, and there’s a readymade worldview that will tell men and boys who want to make sense of the world that there is a very simple answer: it’s everybody else’s fault.
There are lots of committed young activists too; people who are already changing the world around them, people who might even end up near Parliament in the future. The difference is that bragging about it is inherently not bro culture. You may not have met them yet, but you’ll know them long after this “youthquake” is gone.
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