The Kids Are Alright

The aftermath of England's defeat by Italy in the European Championship Final has highlighted our ambivalent attitude towards youth. For all the praise of the young England players' bravery, there was an appetite for tales of yobbery on the day and racist social media thereafter, with the assumption that this was down to the lairy lads "who have given football a bad name". In fact, the scale of the trouble was relatively small while the online hate reflected the ingrained bigotry of the old as much as a youthful lack of respect or self-control, and much of it clearly wasn't even from football fans. The government made a mistake in assuming that it could extend this disdain for the young to the players' social conscience, not just in the taking of a knee before matches but in the extramural work of Marcus Rashford. The Tories' volte-face this week is not only evidence of habitual opportunism but of a genuine confusion over how to handle a youth cohort increasingly confident in its social and cultural politics - it's "wokery", if you prefer. Demonising football fans is easy, but demonising football players has proved anything but, largely because they (despite being rich) represent their age group as much as their sport. 

While the youth vote was crucial to modern conservativism's reinvention under Margaret Thatcher (the Tories won fractionally more than Labour among 18-24 year-olds in 1979), the dynamics of the property market and the electoral impact of age-sorting between big cities and small towns has pushed the Conservative Party towards an antagonism towards the under-30s since the millennium. But this is not just limited to the Tories. William Davies, in an article that's really chiding Labour for turning its back on the younger voters who flocked to it during the Corbyn years, notes that the angry melancholia that underpins Johnsonism manifests in a resentment: "the attitude to younger generations is also a component, the insistence that the future cannot – must not – be better than the past". This same attitude was on display this week in the BBC recording of a focus group session between Keir Starmer and ex-Labour voters in Blackpool (ex-Labour here means "has voted solidly for the Tories for decades") in which under-25s were derided as lazy. While he didn't agree, the Labour leader failed to challenge this (as far as I can tell from the BBC edit), presumably on the grounds that it wasn't worth having a fight. I think that was a mistake.

Labour is the party of youth, in the sense that its ideological function is to manage labour for the benefit of capital. That includes training the young for the world of work, hence the focus on education and entry-level jobs, but it also involves a normative dimension. This includes not only the overtly disciplinary, such as the party's support for more police officers and "crackdowns" on antisocial behaviour, but also a fear of the disruptive, which manifests most obviously as a reluctance to support extra-parliamentary protest. It also produces a tension over social developments between the conservative instincts of the hierarchy and the progressive enthusiasm of the membership. Feminism, anti-racism and pro-LGBT+ rights have all proved to be touchy subjects. However slowly, Labour did move in the right direction on each and did push public policy towards progressive outcomes. But then it was going with the grain of youth, reflecting the evolution of society. The problem now is that the interests of the young are orthogonal to the route the party believes it must take to recapture lost seats. The same calculation informs the Conservatives, who want to retain those seats. The result is that both parties are torn between celebrating and criticising the young in the service of an electoral demographic that may be nothing more than a figment of the media's imagination.

The recent Education Select Committee report on working class underachievement was used to launch another culture war talking point around the supposedly pernicious influence of the term "white privilege". It's worth noting that in late 2020 the rightwing MP Steve Baker was conceding that white privilege was real, showing just how mutable Tory attitudes are (this week, to reinforce the point, he has suggested the Tories should be supportive of players taking the knee). The Prime Minister and Home Secretary's intervention last month, when they failed to condemn the booing of the England players, was not only a convenient way of distracting the media after the Chesham and Amersham by-election loss, it was also a transparent attempt to divert attention away from the government's poor track record on education, notably the disproportionate impact of lockdown on children from poorer families and the inadequacy of the proposed catch-up funding. It's also worth noting that like the earlier report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (aka the Sewell Inquiry), which downplayed structural racism, the claim in respect of "white privilege" is that we are being misled by language and in particular the language of the young. 

This distrust of the young is not limited to elderly conservatives pining for a mislaid past. Its chief cultural manifestation, the disdain for the "woke" and the claim that the young are censorious enemies of free speech, is as much the response of a liberal intelligentsia troubled by the erosion of its social status and sharing the conservative view that "things have gone too far" (a notable iteration of this is the gender-critical attack on trans rights). For all the talk of Britain as a young country in the 1990s, its rhetorical manifestation was the canonisation of George Orwell, who had died over 40 years before. When a writer like Howard Jacobsen refers to the "monotonous chorus of young people" today he is not merely dismissing their concerns as aesthetically displeasing, he is literally reminding them of their subservient place on stage and their duty to follow the script of others. It is no coincidence that many of the recent "cancellation" rows have centred on authors and academics being held to account by younger critics and students. It's also the case that these rows have been inflated out of all proportion by the media and presented as an attack on the foundations of society. 

At the legislative level, this has given rise to the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) bill and the Online Safety bill. The former is the very definition of gesture politics: addressing a problem that is miniscule in scale and trivial in effect, all in the name of a higher principle. Of course this has nothing to do with free speech as such - i.e. the negative freedom that means I cannot be restrained from speaking my mind short of hate speech. Rather it demands a positive freedom that certain people should be allowed to insist on having their views aired in a particular and notably exclusive setting. Just as I cannot insist on The Times or Guardian printing my opinions, I doubt I'll be able to insist on the Oxford Union hosting my rants. In other words, this is legislation that would establish a privilege for a select few. Similarly, the Online Safety bill is concerned with privilege in the form of exemptions for news publishers (i.e. traditional media) and the requirement for platforms to protect journalistic content and the vaguely-defined "content of democratic importance". All speech is equal but some is more equal than others.

In practice, neither bill is likely to make much difference to the existing moderation regime of universities and social media platforms, but they do reserve the right for ministers to intervene in those areas in a way that would be considered intolerable for newspapers or TV. It is likely that this intervention will be selective and aimed disproportionately at the left, if only because the existing regimes already limit far-right "harms" (the reason why far-right-friendly platforms such as Gab and Parler exist is precisely because Facebook and Twitter are relatively successful in their moderation). While Labour has opposed the Higher Education bill on the grounds that it would protect hate speech, they have welcomed the Online Safety bill because it supports the liberal demand for online civility and the tighter regulation of platforms for the benefit of legacy media (a particular concern for liberal outlets, like the Guardian, that cannot necessarily rely on subsidy by the rich). 

A troubling aspect of the search for civility is its discriminatory impulses. One example of this is the growing demand for online accounts to be supported by an offical identity, on the grounds that anonymity shields offenders. This isn't likely to help law enforcement all that much, and it will probably be easily circumvented (the platforms have an obvious incentive to avoid stringent regulation), but it will make it more difficult for the powerless and vulnerable (who bias towards the young) to have a voice. Another is the proposal (floated by Labour and now endorsed by the government) that individuals found guilty of the online racial abuse of footballers should not only be barred by the relevant social media platforms but issued with a Football Banning Order. This is an authoritarian legacy of New Labour that anachronistically preserved the 80s idea of football as the sole locus of objectionable racism, long after the social changes in the game had marginalised it in the 90s. In reality, most of the abusers probably don't even attend games. Racist trolls don't limit themselves to particular spheres of activity.

Given that the young currently vote disproportionately for Labour, you'd imagine the party would be supportive of pro-youth policies, and in many ways it is, albeit policies that are concerned with the socialising of the young as model citizens. However, it is also suspicious of politicised youth - not least those energised by Momentum since 2015 - hence the PLP's current disdain for free tuition fees, which it interprets not just as a subsidy to the middle classes but as encouragement for the critical independence and even social deracination of working class kids. If the public response to the dignified behaviour of England's football players - and in particular Tyrone Mings' calling-out of Priti Patel - tells us anything, it isn't simply that there is an overwhelming majority in favour of anti-racism. It's clear that society at large is more in tune with the views of the young than those of right-leaning, middle-aged newspaper columnists, let alone confirmed Tory voters who think the young are stting on their arses and living off benefits. That Labour appears keener on courting the minority rather than the majority is stupid, but perhaps an inevitable result of the determination to exorcise the influence of a politician who managed to connect with young voters in his 60s.