A broken social contract and perceived intergenerational inequality are driving Britain's youth to abandon the political mainstream in favour of radical ideologies.
Interesting analysis. The piece around immigration struck me as odd though - the premise being that the older generation are insulated from the effects and therefore fine with the status quo, while the young are having to compete with immigrants and becoming more polarised as a result. But is the sentiment around immigration not the exact opposite to this?
Good point from my perspective. The young are often so ideologically driven that being anti-immigration ... and by implication, a racist is akin to being a paedophile.
The middle classes are often too afraid of the corporate optics to speak up and suppress their thoughts on these issues.
Speech has been monitored so closely over the last decade and more that I actually question wether many have the ability to think anymore.
It's very hard to know what people actually think compared to what they say. But we will see how they vote.
Brilliant piece, Gabriel. You’ve mapped out the contours of Britain’s democratic and generational fracture with precision — and a sense of restraint that makes the implications hit even harder. What we’re witnessing isn’t just a failure of policy. It’s the slow unravelling of belief in the very idea of politics itself.
Your analysis echoes what many of us have warned for years: that a society that abandons its young — economically, politically, emotionally — will eventually face a reckoning. What’s emerging now is not apathy but a form of justified radicalism: a generation no longer asking for tweaks, but questioning the foundations.
The Weimar parallels are chilling — a hollowed-out centre, permanent crisis, public cynicism, and a political class more interested in managing narratives than addressing root causes. But unlike Weimar, we face a far more complex matrix of threats: climate collapse, entrenched inequality, and now AI-driven disruption that could accelerate exclusion, automate inequality, and annihilate truth itself if left unchecked.
The Humanity Project was born out of this very moment. Not to offer another policy tweak or political brand, but to build a new kind of civic infrastructure — rooted in radical empathy, emotional intelligence, and democratic co-creation. We’re bringing together movements across race, class, generation, and geography — because the system won’t be transformed by technocrats or strongmen, but by ordinary people re-entering politics on their own terms.
But for us this isn’t about nostalgia for a social contract that never fully served us. It’s about building a new one — together, from the ground up.
Thank you for giving this fracture such clarity. The challenge now is how we respond — before the forces of despair, division, or digital authoritarianism do it for us.
The late 1970s and 1980s were hard. For those in work inflation was running at 15% making saving for housing almost impossible. House price then rose and crashed leaving many people in negative equity. By the early 1980s 3 million were unemployed. The older generation worried for us. Live wasn't easy for many and even now many (25%) elderly exist on the state pension alone (£11,500) and are in relative poverty.
The young are certainly known for automatic dissatisfaction, often based on youthful impatience; ignorance; or inability to understand things are not as simple as they seem; although that must be viewed in contrast to older generations resistance to change against a background of bewilderingly rapid development.
But : across Western Europe an ongoing liberal revolution against basic conservative values seeks far more : a permanent replacement of the very racial & cultural identity and even history of each nation, using mass Third World immigration to which clearly only the "far/extreme Right" objects; and this concerns all age groups who are further estranged from that philosophy by the dreadful record of its proponents in every aspect of its endevours, aims, and so-called "values".
The parallels with the collapse of Weimar Germany are interesting. Weimar collapses when the middle classes (everyone from clerks to small businesspeople) are wiped out by the Great Depression. They had suffered a similar event in 1923, but were gradually recovering. 1929, was too much to bear. They abandoned the traditional conservative parties and moved right. The left was split with the SDP (Social Liberals) discredited by their inability to solve the crisis. Nobody could form a coalition with majority support. Lucky we don't have a demagogic alternative with a simple solution to everything who fosters a hatred of everything that is not "us". Oh, wait a minute.
You are correct in identifying housing as the key issue in the UK. However, AI is already creating an employment crisis that will explode in the next few years. The destruction of decent entry level jobs for non graduates occurred decades ago, but as a society we ignored it because so many were going to get degrees that they were a minority, but if today's graduates are competing for minimum wage jobs with the non graduates, we lose the young completely. That for me is the tipping point.
We in Britain, same as America, have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, and really I'm not surprised, the system is rotten and needs to change in every way. I fear we have gone too far down the rabbit hole, it should have happened a lot sooner, is there a way back?
Thanks for this excellent article Gabriel. You might have noticed my LinkedIn post that discussed it from my Cordial World Project perspective. I'd warmly welcome the opportunity to discuss it further with you to perhaps reveal some further useful insights. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7351687300231176193/
With the root of the problems being primarily economic, and the ever increasing concentration of wealth being at the centre of this issue, should we not be talking about the core problems and real solutions?
Gary Stevenson has rightly talked about the increasing wealth inequality. Peter Turchin has written on the expansion of the super elite billionaire class - elite overproduction. Angus Hanton has hinted at how much of this wealth is moving across the Atlantic to corporations and private equities.
The reality is that wars, net-zero, pandemic policies, digital surveillance etc etc are luxuries - or worse, manufactured crises - that the country cannot afford, yet our politicians can’t help but keep lining the pockets of major corporations, finance bros and their cronies from the public coffers. How long can this wealth transfer continue?
Perhaps if people see the bigger picture, energy will be put in facing the problems rather than fracturing society needlessly. Can we connect the dots?
Interesting analysis. The piece around immigration struck me as odd though - the premise being that the older generation are insulated from the effects and therefore fine with the status quo, while the young are having to compete with immigrants and becoming more polarised as a result. But is the sentiment around immigration not the exact opposite to this?
Good point from my perspective. The young are often so ideologically driven that being anti-immigration ... and by implication, a racist is akin to being a paedophile.
The middle classes are often too afraid of the corporate optics to speak up and suppress their thoughts on these issues.
Speech has been monitored so closely over the last decade and more that I actually question wether many have the ability to think anymore.
It's very hard to know what people actually think compared to what they say. But we will see how they vote.
Brilliant piece, Gabriel. You’ve mapped out the contours of Britain’s democratic and generational fracture with precision — and a sense of restraint that makes the implications hit even harder. What we’re witnessing isn’t just a failure of policy. It’s the slow unravelling of belief in the very idea of politics itself.
Your analysis echoes what many of us have warned for years: that a society that abandons its young — economically, politically, emotionally — will eventually face a reckoning. What’s emerging now is not apathy but a form of justified radicalism: a generation no longer asking for tweaks, but questioning the foundations.
The Weimar parallels are chilling — a hollowed-out centre, permanent crisis, public cynicism, and a political class more interested in managing narratives than addressing root causes. But unlike Weimar, we face a far more complex matrix of threats: climate collapse, entrenched inequality, and now AI-driven disruption that could accelerate exclusion, automate inequality, and annihilate truth itself if left unchecked.
The Humanity Project was born out of this very moment. Not to offer another policy tweak or political brand, but to build a new kind of civic infrastructure — rooted in radical empathy, emotional intelligence, and democratic co-creation. We’re bringing together movements across race, class, generation, and geography — because the system won’t be transformed by technocrats or strongmen, but by ordinary people re-entering politics on their own terms.
But for us this isn’t about nostalgia for a social contract that never fully served us. It’s about building a new one — together, from the ground up.
Thank you for giving this fracture such clarity. The challenge now is how we respond — before the forces of despair, division, or digital authoritarianism do it for us.
#TheHumanityProject
#DemocracyReimagined
#RadicalEmpathy https://www.corganisers.org.uk/campaign/humanity-project/
The late 1970s and 1980s were hard. For those in work inflation was running at 15% making saving for housing almost impossible. House price then rose and crashed leaving many people in negative equity. By the early 1980s 3 million were unemployed. The older generation worried for us. Live wasn't easy for many and even now many (25%) elderly exist on the state pension alone (£11,500) and are in relative poverty.
The young are certainly known for automatic dissatisfaction, often based on youthful impatience; ignorance; or inability to understand things are not as simple as they seem; although that must be viewed in contrast to older generations resistance to change against a background of bewilderingly rapid development.
But : across Western Europe an ongoing liberal revolution against basic conservative values seeks far more : a permanent replacement of the very racial & cultural identity and even history of each nation, using mass Third World immigration to which clearly only the "far/extreme Right" objects; and this concerns all age groups who are further estranged from that philosophy by the dreadful record of its proponents in every aspect of its endevours, aims, and so-called "values".
The parallels with the collapse of Weimar Germany are interesting. Weimar collapses when the middle classes (everyone from clerks to small businesspeople) are wiped out by the Great Depression. They had suffered a similar event in 1923, but were gradually recovering. 1929, was too much to bear. They abandoned the traditional conservative parties and moved right. The left was split with the SDP (Social Liberals) discredited by their inability to solve the crisis. Nobody could form a coalition with majority support. Lucky we don't have a demagogic alternative with a simple solution to everything who fosters a hatred of everything that is not "us". Oh, wait a minute.
You are correct in identifying housing as the key issue in the UK. However, AI is already creating an employment crisis that will explode in the next few years. The destruction of decent entry level jobs for non graduates occurred decades ago, but as a society we ignored it because so many were going to get degrees that they were a minority, but if today's graduates are competing for minimum wage jobs with the non graduates, we lose the young completely. That for me is the tipping point.
We in Britain, same as America, have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous, and really I'm not surprised, the system is rotten and needs to change in every way. I fear we have gone too far down the rabbit hole, it should have happened a lot sooner, is there a way back?
Thanks for this excellent article Gabriel. You might have noticed my LinkedIn post that discussed it from my Cordial World Project perspective. I'd warmly welcome the opportunity to discuss it further with you to perhaps reveal some further useful insights. https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7351687300231176193/
With the root of the problems being primarily economic, and the ever increasing concentration of wealth being at the centre of this issue, should we not be talking about the core problems and real solutions?
Gary Stevenson has rightly talked about the increasing wealth inequality. Peter Turchin has written on the expansion of the super elite billionaire class - elite overproduction. Angus Hanton has hinted at how much of this wealth is moving across the Atlantic to corporations and private equities.
The reality is that wars, net-zero, pandemic policies, digital surveillance etc etc are luxuries - or worse, manufactured crises - that the country cannot afford, yet our politicians can’t help but keep lining the pockets of major corporations, finance bros and their cronies from the public coffers. How long can this wealth transfer continue?
Perhaps if people see the bigger picture, energy will be put in facing the problems rather than fracturing society needlessly. Can we connect the dots?