“The Uniparty has nothing to offer me” –Anonymous Zoomer

A few weeks ago, I asked an anonymous, right-leaning twenty-something member of Gen-Z to write a column on how they see the state of our politics and country. That column went viral and has become one of our most read pieces since we launched. For that reason, I’ve asked Anonymous Zoomer to keep writing for us on a regular basis. Here’s their latest.

Aaron Bastani, a journalist of the left, has recently seen several of his ‘vox pops’ go viral. Shockingly, while interviewing young Zoomers like me about the 2024 election, he discovered that many of them are not planning to vote for the Labour Party or the Conservative Party. Nope. They are planning to vote for Nigel Farage and Reform.

This seems to have provoked a crisis in confidence for Bastani, who was reduced to spluttering about how Reform voters are mostly old white men who own properties rather than members of Gen-Z who were born in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. As the polls show, Zoomers like me are more likely to back Reform than the Tories which, for Bastani, the left, and indeed much of the establishment, turns the sacred maxim that the young are all left-wing completely on its head.

For Bastani and the more radical left, in particular, the presumed left-wing bias of young people can be explained by the context in which he and others like him entered politics and came of age. Bastani, a Millennial, first came to prominence at the time of the student radicalism of the early 2010s. Occupy Wall Street, with it’s promise to tax the 1%, sparked sympathetic protests across the world, especially among students. At one such protest against tax avoidance, Bastani even managed to earn himself a Daily Mail headline for taking his shirt off, which read: ‘Bodybuilding fanatic brings chaos to Britain’s high streets as ringleader of anti-tax avoidance movement’.

There’s no doubt the populist left of Bastani’s time identified clear problems and offered direct solutions to them. Student fees, introduced by New Labour and then tripled by the Coalition Government, was a direct tax on the rising numbers of young people going to university and one their parents, the Boomers, did not have to pay.

The Great Recession, caused by rampant corruption in financial services and also the failure of the established parties to regulate those services also exposed Millennial graduates like Bastani to a severely constrained jobs market.

Millennial leftism offered precise material solutions to these problems. New taxes on the rich could rebalance economic power away from the owners of capital towards the new, downwardly mobile but also highly educated middle class that was stuck renting in a broken housing market and working menial jobs.

International finance would be tamed through new taxes and regulation. Public services would be funded through redistributive taxation. Student fees would be abolished. Social housing would be built en-masse to relieve a growing housing crisis.

Which is also why, today, Bastani and others like him have responded to the rise of a radical right youth right in both Britain and Europe with shock and bemusement. The best they can offer is handwaving about the power of Nigel Farage’s success on TikTok, and complaining about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Ash Sarkar has demanded a renewal of ‘Left Populism’ as an antidote to what she calls ‘the far right’.

But in reality the appeal of national populism to Zoomers like me owes less to what we’re witnessing on social media and more to what it is actually offering. One of lower taxes, sharp reductions in immigration, stronger borders, unambiguous opposition to woke ideology, and a smaller welfare state, changes that will make us richer and safer.

The ‘Populist Left’ cannot even begin to articulate a more attractive policy platform, and so older millennials like Ash Sarkar and Aaron Bastani are being left behind, waving their hands about ‘populists’ and the ‘far right’ as politics moves on around them, sounding like the establishment they usually pretend to set themselves against.

Bastani’s worldview prevents him from presenting an intelligible solution to the material conditions that are faced by younger people, like me. The elements of the welfare state they hold to be sacrosanct, like the National Health Service, are themselves vehicles for redistributing wealth from the young to the elderly.

The idea we should fund these services even more, at the expense of young people, is politically illiterate. Funding these changes through new debt is now impossible thanks to the massive debt imposed by the Covid lockdowns, which Keir Starmer and the left would almost certainly have kept going for longer. Zoomers like me are intelligent enough to see through this wishful thinking.

We also see, clearly, many other things the left denies, like the fact that mass legal immigration and concomitant amnesties for illegal immigrants are now a major cause of our country’s housing crisis. We see too that the fiscal burdens imposed by our new low-skill, low-wage, non-western immigration policy are further hollowing out our already weak ‘Deliveroo economy’ and worsening young people’s lives. And we see how, under the current Uniparty regime, any promised social housing, if it is even built, would be almost immediately occupied by immigrants and asylum-seekers before it is made available to young British people like me. Neither left nor right have any serious interest in embedding the principle of national preference in our politics.

At the same time, the abolition of the prisons or ‘rehabilitative justice’ combined with continuing high levels of illegal and legal immigration will make safety on Britain’s streets even worse —just look at what’s happened in Democrat-run cities in America. Contrary to the view that it’s mostly pensioners who are scared of ‘broken Britain’, it is routinely young people like me who now bear the brunt of violent crime.

While young Zoomer men in this country are the most likely to be the victim of armed robbery, stabbings, and beatings, young Zoomer women are now the most likely to experience street harassment, sexual assault, and menacing glares from newcomers who, to be frank, come from completely different and incompatible cultures. Polling consistently showsyoung people are more worried about violent crime than older people, who tend to live in rural and suburban areas which have less crime.

Climate change and Net Zero, another obsession of the Millennial Left, can only be resolved by imposing yet more restrictions on Zoomers like me. Proposed taxes for flying will always fall disproportionately on the young, who fly more, while attacks on motorists make it harder for young people to start driving. Zoomers produce more carbon than older people, so any attempt to tax individual carbon production inevitably targets younger people more than older people, too.

Millenial leftists like Aaron Bastani might have cheered for Jeremy Corbyn at Glastonbury, but if Corbyn’s platform had actually been implemented it would have made them poorer and less safe. Meanwhile, it’s precisely because the Tory party of 2019-2024 —filled politicians who lean further to the cultural left than their own voters— carried out many of the policy imperatives of the Corbynite Left, albeit often by accident than through conviction, that they too have lost Zoomers like me.

Illegal migration because the Tories did not have the political will to control Britain’s borders. Mass legal immigration to prop up the welfare state and plug holes in our broken economy because the Tories were too slow to reform welfare and dare not talk about the most conservative thing of all —encouraging families to have children. And early release for violent criminals because they failed to build prisons.

On issues like Net Zero, too, the Tory party of Boris Johnson largely chose to govern as Corbyn would have governed, while also forcing a level of immigration on the British people that would once-upon-a-time have made even the left wince. And so now the electoral fruits of this way of governing are bearing out in the polls; with the Tories retreating to campaign in once ‘safe’ seats with majorities of more than 10,000 votes in a desperate attempt to continue existing in a country that very clearly no longer wants them to exist at all.

But there was, at least, something admirable about the attempt by Bastani and his flavour of the Left to at least make a gesture to improving the lives of young people. Today, in sharp contrast, this tendency has been ruthlessly purged from the Labour Party by Keir Starmer, who does not even offer small glimmers of hope to Zoomers like me, such as abolishing tuition fees and giving us priority in housing.

Instead, Starmerism is best summed up in the word ‘stability’. By removing Ministerial Authority over the State, by rapidly expanding the unelected and unaccountable Quangocracy, Keir and the people around him want to make it impossible for elected politicians and especially ordinary people to be able to change the direction of the country in the years ahead, as we did with things like Brexit.

The ‘fiscal lock’ of the OBR will ensure that taxes and spending on things like our pensions and National Health Service will rise indefinitely. With this infrastructure in place, it will be impossible for any future Government, including ones further to the left than Keir, to redistribute money in favour of the young.

If a future Prime Minister Bastani was to attempt to forgive student loan debt, the ‘independent’ OBR would immediately rebuff him on the grounds of value for money. If Bastani tried to follow this up by abolishing the OBR, the financial markets would immediately go into meltdown, as we saw with Liz Truss.

Interest rates for government debt would soar. Any international financing deal from, say, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) would inevitably come with stipulations requiring the reinstallation of the OBR. This is how, in a nutshell, any radical alternative to the existing, dreary, elite-driven status-quo will be neutralised.

The chapter has been closed conclusively on the chance for Millennial Leftism to really transform Britain. Keir Starmer has hijacked the only effective political vehicle of the Left, the Labour Party; whilst the accrual of hundreds of billions of pounds in Lockdown debt has permanently reduced the fiscal headroom of the British State.

Still, Millennial leftists can take some relief in the knowledge Starmer will continue to immiserate the middle classes. Whether through ‘Community Payback Boards’ which will give ‘communities’ the ability to decriminalise some crimes. Or Labour’s review of the Mental Health Act, once used to detain psychotic individuals, on the grounds that it disproportionately impacts black people. Zoomers like me have to pay tuition fees but at least there’ll be more criminals and mentally ill people on the streets.

Personally, I don’t think Nigel Farage and Reform have all the answers to these problems but what they represent, to Zoomers like me, is what many of us now see as a final chance for the under-40s to actually push for, if not demand, something close to the standard of living our parents and grandparents enjoyed. By rejecting Net Zero, by tearing up the expanding welfare state, by stopping millions of mainly low-skilled immigrants from moving to Britain to absorb more of the rapidly shrinking pie, and by actually prioritising British people, they do offer the kind of radical alternative that simply does not exist anywhere else on the political landscape.

That is why those young Zoomers in Chichester, who Aaron Bastani bumped into, are turning to Reform. They have neither the patience nor inclination to reiterate debates from the 1980s about Margaret Thatcher and the coal mines, while they understand that the Uniparty commitment to big taxation, big immigration, big state politics, big debt and big woke will steal their future away. And they grasp, like me, that the Left, from Keir Starmer to Ash Sarkar, has nothing to offer.

We can see through the pretence that prosperity can be universal, or that one final tax raid will solve all of the world’s problems. We can see that the Egalitarian principle, in practice, means lowering the quality of life for young white men and women; through reparations (via foreign aid) and diversity quotas which discriminate against us. And we can see that reducing ‘greenhouse gases’ will wreck our industrial base and make us colder and poorer. Which is why, on Thursday, we are saying no.

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