Of course young people think badly about Britain

Fewer than half of young Britons are proud to be British and half think the country is racist. Those are the results of a new poll conducted by The Times. 

Clearly, young Britons are a bunch of ungrateful wokesters — too busy munching on their avocado toast to appreciate the greatness of Britain. They should get off InstaTok and think about how pensioners died at Waterloo.

Only kidding. You can’t blame young Britons for thinking that Britain is a miserable racist place. After all, this is what the establishment has told them. It is not “Generation Z” which holds that Britain is a hive of bigotry. It is almost every British institution.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer took a knee in support of Black Lives Matter — a phenomenon which, in the UK, manifested itself through iconoclasm and fundraiser fraud. The Macpherson Report — ably addressed in a recent Ed West article — concluded that the police were institutionally racist. The Church of England has rushed to insist that it is institutionally racist as well. “There is a lot of evidence that points towards universities perpetuating systemic racism,” Professor David Richards of Universities UK told the BBC in 2021. 

Indeed, our institutions hold that Britain is so racist against ethnic minorities that white people must face discrimination to redress the balance. Ethnic minorities should be favoured when it comes to hiring, public bodies tell us, and when it comes to internships.

Of course, this riot of misplaced egalitarianism might — indeed, should — raise suspicions about the underlying premise. But it is hardly surprising that it does not — and it is hardly surprising if young people think that Britain is racist if Britain’s representatives fanatically insist on being seen as such.

Most young people also said that they would not fight for Britain. Miserably, 41 per cent claimed that there were no circumstances in which they would take up arms for the sake of their country.

Well, perhaps this would change if Britain faced an actual war. Famously, in 1933, most attendees at an Oxford Union debate supported the proposition that “this House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”. Once the Wehrmacht were storming across Britain, most people had found the circumstances in which they would fight.

Still, this is no excuse for complacency. It should depress us that young people are so unpatriotic. But it should not surprise us. People who have grown up in the 21st century, for one thing, have only known stupid and reckless wars — the failed invasion of Iraq and the failed war in Afghanistan. Granted, “no circumstances” remains sweeping. But you cannot blame young people for deciding not to trust the establishment to define the appropriate circumstances.

Young people have also been given too little of a stake in British society. Student loans have become a cruel credentialism-inflicted tax on their future earnings. Home ownership has become radically unaffordable. Family formation has been disincentivised. Meanwhile, as I have written above, the establishment has painted itself with the brush of bigotry — insisting that Britain be seen in bleak and uninspiring terms. 

Don’t get me wrong — I think people should be prepared to defend their country anyway. As an expat, I hope that I would be prepared to return to Britain in the case of a dire emergency. But we cannot be surprised if young people today are less liable to feel the same. 

If the establishment wants young people to feel prouder to be British, and more prepared to defend their country, then it must give them a reason to care about the place. They should have a bigger chance of owning a little piece of the nation, and of being able to raise future Britons themselves. If they always feel insecure in their country, what would they be fighting for?

It should also abandon the DEI agenda that encourages dissatisfaction with institutions. The assumption that unequal outcomes necessarily result from injustice bakes failure into the system. The minoritarian discrimination, meanwhile, alienates right-leaning members of the majority.

Frankly, the establishment should dwell on how the scale of recent immigration might make people less than wholly invested in protecting their adoptive homeland. I say that with no desire to bad-mouth recent migrants and their offspring. It is only natural that some people who have moved to countries for a better life might have second thoughts if that “better life” becomes less promising. As a migrant in Poland, I deeply hope that I would fight for Poland in its hour of need — but when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 I had various family members inquiring about the smoothness of my path back to the UK.

Young people should be proud to be British and should be prepared to defend the nation. But British political and cultural institutions have done everything they can to make young Britons feel otherwise.