State of the Race: the dire state of Britain as seen through the eyes of Gen-Z

One anonymous member of Gen-Z shares his thoughts ahead of the election

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This is a guest post from an anonymous 25-year-old member of Gen-Z. They live in London. They work in Westminster. And they are utterly fed-up with the dire state of the country.

If you believe the polls then the Tory party is about to be completely rejected by my generation, Gen-Z, the members of which were born in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Remarkably, just 5% of us are planning to vote Tory next month while a staggering 83% are planning to either vote Labour, Lib Dem, Green, or SNP.

But as one of those few right-leaning Zoomers, let me tell you —even that 5% figure is deeply misleading. Why?

Because, as Matt pointed out on Twitter/X, one enormous problem facing the Tories today is not just the remarkably low number of Zoomers who are planning to vote Conservative; it’s that the few Zoomer conservatives who do exist are also utterly fed-up and frustrated with the party and want to see it completely obliterated.

And why do they feel like this, exactly?

Well, consider my own story.

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I'm writing this at 3am in the morning and I have less than four hours before I need to get up and start my morning routine for work.

But, once again, the neighbours who live downstairs, below my flat, have decided to have another all-night party. And unlike me, they don’t have to wake up for work.

Because, unlike me, they don’t have to work.

They qualify for social housing; their rent is subsidised by the large and rising amount of council tax I am forced to pay each month —on top of ruinous income taxes, national insurance contributions and student loan repayments.

The majority of the tenants in my housing block are unemployed; I see few of them leaving the house for work in the morning.

My interactions with them are limited to hostile glaring mixed in with the occasional attempted mugging. On the rare occasion I have female company I have to escort my dates to and from the bus stop to stop them being sexually harassed.

What scraps of my salary the State allows me to keep are eaten up immediately by rent. I pay almost half my post-tax income to live on an ex-council estate in Zone 3, London, with the smell of weed continually hanging in the air.

Unless I achieve an income of more than £200,000 it will simply be impossible to secure a mortgage on a house the same size as the one my parents bought in 1989.

My friends work in high-powered finance and legal careers but, like me, struggle on with flatshares well into their late 20s, if not their early 30s.

They are spending the best decade of their life working until midnight seven days a week for the chance to attain the same middle-class lifestyle their parents achieved much earlier in life.

The reward for being wildly successful financially in 2024? To live in a semi-detached house that was built for unskilled professionals in inner London a century ago.

And that’s not all …

If I decide to have children, which you might think ought to be encouraged given the demographic crisis facing Western nations like Britain, I will have to contend with extortionate childcare costs, or deprive my household of a second income.

Renting a three-bedroom flat in a safe part of London will cost in excess of £3,000 a month; my children will have to grow up in far more cramped conditions than I did, most likely having to share a room and perhaps dodging stray bullets.

The only feasible route out of this incredibly depressing situation is to leave the city I grew up in and commute two hours both ways from a town I have no local connection to —where I have no friends or family living nearby.

Even with cheaper housing, I will still have to send my kids to local schools where they will be bombarded with relentless propaganda about how to ‘change their gender’, acknowledge their ‘whiteness’, and apologise for the British Empire.

It is certainly true that previous generations of young people faced more challenging circumstances. I am not (yet) being asked to walk across No Mans Land and into a sea of barbed wire and machine guns.

But it is one thing being asked to suffer for a cause like liberty in Europe, or to grimace through destitution because of seemingly uncontrollable events like the Wall Street Crash. It is quite another to be economically enslaved to the point of infertility to sustain a growing population of resentful dependents. 

And I am one of the lucky ones. 

Consider some of the other trends …

Most of the people I know from my university days are still stuck in their childhood bedrooms. If their parents happen to be from London, they can still commute in and enjoy access to the best job market in the country.

But if their parents do not happen to live a commutable distance from London then they are geographically chained to where they grew up.

Aside from a few other cities like Leeds, Manchester and Bristol, this freezes them out of the vital years in their early-to-mid 20s when they could be building a career.

I think of those people when I have to step over littered dirty nappies, smashed bottles, needles, and homeless people on the way to my Tube station every morning.

The reality is while I’m supposedly ‘lucky’ to live in London it is often a truly grim experience. Londoners talk much about the wonders of ‘diversity’ but in reality I live in a neighbourhood where few people speak English and most of us just hunker down, quietly turning away from one another and into our own worlds.

The reality of my housing estate reflects the fact that, today, more than 47% of social housing in London is headed by a foreign-born household. 

Which raises a question that my friends and I routinely ask. Why are immigrants, many of whom are out of work, being subsidised to live somewhere that hardworking, honest, and dynamic British graduates like ourselves, who are playing by the rules, are being actively priced out of? On what planet, in what galaxy, is this fair?

London’s Labour Mayor, Sadiq Khan, meanwhile, is busy buying up the limited remains of the private housing market and converting it to social housing.

Mainstream commentators and politicians offer no pushback to this —except for the rare few counter-cultural writers like Matt, who has discussed these issues.

But most do not, keenly aware of the social norms and elite gatekeepers in media and politics who govern what can and cannot be discussed in our ‘national conversation’.

It could be cowardice, of course. Being seen to oppose social housing opens you to accusations of social cleansing. But, more likely, it is ignorance, as most of the people who have prominent platforms in media, politics and the institutions are insulated financially from the vagaries of the rental sector. Just look at our media class.

Whatever the reason, young, productive, and hardworking people are being made to shoulder yet another financial burden in service of other demographic groups, and this outrage amongst outrages passes by without opposition, wordlessly. 

And as dreadful as this situation already is, it is now clear heading into the 2024 election that both of the two main parties are set on making it even worse.

Mass immigration is being used to prop up our expanding welfare state by depressing wages in the NHS and social care —services which are used far more by the elderly.

At the same time, it is raising demand for already scarce housing - made scarcer by older people assiduously blocking permissions for housebuilding in their local area.

The gerontocracy which we have stumbled into is coherent only in the sense that every aspect of it inevitably conspires to depress the living standards of young people like me. We are being screwed on multiple fronts at the same time.

Also completely absent from this election campaign so far is any discussion of the permanent harm of extended lockdowns to my generation’s living standards.

Up to £410bn of debt has been accrued, a fiscal chain which will be hanging around our necks until my generation is permitted to retire, at the tender age of 89.

The suggestion that pensioners, whose lives the lockdowns were supposed to protect, should have to shoulder this burden fiscally, is slapped away.

Instead, pensioners, who already have more disposable income than working age people, are being pitched a targeted tax cut as part of a new ‘Quadruple’ lock by a Conservative Party that is desperate to avoid electoral catastrophe.

This is complemented by inane chest-thumping about conscription, sold by hapless Conservative politicians as a way of building back the ‘community cohesion’ they have systematically wrecked by presiding over relentless mass immigration —which is the very opposite of what they promised their own voters in 2019.

In truth, it’s an attempt to play to a deeper prejudice about the young —the blanket stereotype we are all lazy, feckless and infantile, in need of a dose of military style discipline to peel us away from the iPads and avocado toast.

This sham macho patriotism would be less offensive if it was espoused by my great-grandparent’s generation, who really did endure war and peacetime rationing.

But to hear the Baby Boomers who wrecked the country they inherited opine about the selfishness of today’s youth is truly galling.

Labour’s fiscal redistributions, meanwhile, are more subtle but just as pernicious.

Rachel Reeves’s plan to give the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) a ‘fiscal lock’ over tax and spending commitments will permanently entrench higher taxes and higher spending as an incorrigible fact of economic policy.

Keir Starmer has also denounced the Tories for attempting to cut National Insurance - a tax which pensioners do not pay.

Violence, meanwhile, which disproportionately harms young men, continues to spiral out of control. The Conservative Party oversees a government which instructs Police Officers to not arrest criminals for which there is no space in the prisons for.

Spiralling car theft, enabled by illegal immigration, makes insurance completely unaffordable for young, newly qualified drivers such as myself.

And more destruction is on the horizon.

Senior Labour figures like David Lammy call for ‘BAME’ (Black and Minority Ethnic) Community Courts, to reduce the number of young black men sent to prison.

The Labour party’s New Race Equality Act is likely to impose the recording of, amongst other things, the ‘ethnicity disciplinary gap’ in public services, another example of how a Labour government plans to mainstream woke ideology.

This will make it harder for managers to fire BAME employees for poor performance and misconduct; complementing their already privileged access to careers and universities through existing diversity schemes, which have been shown to prioritise minorities and often at the expense of white working-class kids, like me.

Diversity schemes are about ‘access’, giving a leg up to BAME individuals at the start of their career and at the expense of young White British people, such as myself.

White, middle-aged professionals, who clamour most for ‘diversity’ at work, never consider for a second they are pulling up the ladder which once enabled them to enjoy a comfortable career. Again, it’s simply expected that Britain’s Zoomers will pay the cost of this social engineering and offer no objection at all.

In 1999, after the Stephen Lawrence report was released, the broadcaster and journalist Andrew Marr wrote that it was time that institutions “seriously ask themselves how eagerly porous they are to black people”, calling for the government to look abroad to countries like South Africa as a guide for improving diversity.

For his part, Andrew’s career went from strength to strength - a year later he would become Political Editor of the BBC, presumably at the expense of an equally competent black candidate. He was convinced very much of the need for diversity in the abstract, but not to the extent he’d consider sacrificing his own career interests.

This is the privilege afforded to privately educated White liberals, like Andrew, who can afford to indulge in high-minded contemplation about the need for institutions to become more ethnically representative. Whose own children will be protected from the sharper end of diversity quotas by nepotistic networks and inherited wealth.

It is people like me, meanwhile, who suffer the consequences of his puerile virtue-signalling among the Luxury Belief Class —young, white, men who play by the rules, who pay their own way, but who are still completely screwed in one area of our national life to the next, from housing to what we call our ‘national culture’.

A rebuttal you will often hear to these points is that young people are, according to polling, in favour of their own ruination. They support mass immigration more than older voters. They are more likely to vote for Labour and the liberal left. And they were much less likely to have voted for Brexit.

Much of this is true, though it routinely overstates the case. Many young Zoomers know that something is profoundly wrong. But the only brand of youth politics that has been made available to them is Corbynism, a more aggressively redistributive brand of our existing, post-Brexit social democratic consensus.

All it will deliver is an even bigger state, even higher taxes, even more debt, even more immigration, even more obsession with Net Zero, even more corrosive identity politics, even more spending on pensions and welfare. None of these prescriptions will help the patient recover, in fact, all of them will hasten his death.

Yet elsewhere, outside of Britain, young people are beginning to wake from this slumber. National populist parties, such as Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, enjoy more support from the under-35s than any other age category.

In Canada, too, this change has found a milder expression in Pierre Poilievre, who is likely to sweep to power in 2025 on a platform of immigration cuts and increased housebuilding to relieve young Canadians from an overheated housing market.

But, currently, no such political formation exists in Britain.

Both of our main parties still compete to be the party of the pensioner. This might be because of our first-past-the-post system and the geographical distribution of older voters; but it could also be because the right politician has not yet found a way to articulate the concerns of the trampled, shrinking minority of working-age Britons, like me, who obey the law while contributing meaningfully to society.

Whoever has the courage and intellectual capacity to capitalise on their growing resentment will be blessed with a movement consisting of capable, energetic, young people who currently have little stake in the system and are sick of being exploited.

As a Zoomer, as a member of Gen-Z, I look at the two big parties as relics from a bygone era; two seemingly indistinguishable movements that are propped up, weakly as they are, by vanishing memberships and outmoded ideologies, dragged down by their joint enterprise in the destruction of this country.

So, unsurprisingly, I will not be voting Tory on July 4th, and nor will many of my otherwise conservative-inclined Zoomer friends.

Matt Goodwin’s Substack goes to more than 35,500 subscribers across 151 countries. Become a paid supporter to access everything —the full archive, unique posts, leave comments, join the debate, get discounts, advance notice about events, and the knowledge you’re supporting independent, contrarian writers who are making a real difference.