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

JUN 3

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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.

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 ……