If you wanted a powerful argument against lowering the voting age in the UK to 16, you may be inclined to look no further than a poll of 3,000 adults commissioned by Channel 4.
Among the 13- to 27-year-olds (the Generation Z cohort) who took part in the survey, more than half thought “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”.
The irony was, seemingly, lost on them: in offering your opinion, you’re saying you’d prefer to live in a land where your opinion didn’t count. And a third of Gen Zers polled reckoned that we’d be better off “if the army was in charge”.
Rather than suggest they all go and live in North Korea or Equatorial Guinea and see how much they like that, or indeed to lament the teaching of history in schools, it is worth unpacking what might lie behind their curious ideas.
Channel 4 is calling this a “deeply worrying” study and, with Holocaust Remembrance Day, it’s as well for the world to be reminded that democracy isn’t a political concept, but is actually a matter of life and death.
What many of the respondents might be indicating, however, in addition to a general disenchantment with organised politics, is something more prosaic: that their lives are blighted by having too much choice.
Ever since they were infants, they were given freedom to choose what they wanted to do by indulgent parents who sought their approval, and this may not have produced the harmonious result we all desired.
I recognise that this is something of a crude generalisation, but it is true, too, that young people crave direction and leadership, and there is a perceived lack of that in their lives, at home, in school, and, most certainly, in politics.
We, the current generation of parents, have adopted a policy of appeasement because we want them to have what we didn’t, and have ignored the fact that young people sometimes find a comfort in being told what to do. Choice is a responsibility as well as a freedom.
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Read MoreOf course there is a world of difference between being unnerved by the suite of life’s options and wanting to live under the yoke of Kim Jong Un, and this is where the failures of our political leaders come in. Young people admire the certainty of, say, Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson, or even Donald Trump, who vocalise disillusionment with the status quo, something to which they feel in tune.
And there are very real issues to consider, like the extreme dissatisfaction felt by the young over declining job prospects, lower wages, the march of technology in the workplace, and the impossibility of the housing market. Of the Gen Zers polled, 47 per cent agreed with the proposition that “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”.
The desire for radical change should hardly come as a surprise, therefore, and goes beyond the age-old anti-establishment inclinations of the young. This piece of research indicates a malaise that finds its expression in the ubiquity, power and influence of social media. It should worry us all that 58 per cent of Gen Z respondents said they trusted social media posts from friends as much as, and sometimes more than, they trusted mainstream journalism.
The findings, clearly, are connected. The disengagement with traditional politics means that young people are searching for an alternative settlement for society. And, in having almost unlimited choice in sources of information, they are curating their own truths about the world.
So while the headline finding – “Generation Z yearn for a dictator” – may be risible, and not sustain deeper investigation, we should, equally, resist the temptation to discount this snapshot of our younger people as irrelevant. It’s not.
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