This is not a generation at ease with itself. Photo by PYMCA/Avalon/Getty Images.
Here and there you can still see evidence of the collective madness of the Covid era. Some “social distancing” markers still linger on pavements or shop floors. Occasionally I find a face mask in a coat or handbag I haven’t used for a while. There was a feeble official “day of reflection” recently. But for at least some of us, life is sort of back to the way it was: four in ten workplaces are back in the office full-time, dog walkers are no longer hunted by drones, and the shops and churches are open. We mostly don’t talk about the Scotch egg thing, or being forced to say goodbye to dying loved ones by videolink.
But the kids are not alright. Back in 2020, we had no idea what the impact of lockdown would be on those young people whose normal development was so casually interrupted. And while every parent has a lockdown horror story, it was the most vulnerable children who were worst afflicted. Lockdown widened the school attainment gap, delayed children’s development, and plunged a generation of tweens and teens into psychiatric turmoil. But it didn’t just harm children; it also formed them. Especially for those who came of age concurrently with lockdown, the sheer strangeness of that period was itself a worldview-shaping experience — in ways we’ve scarcely begun to grasp.
Some of this was an effect of lockdowns forcing ordinary life online. This sense of reality coming unstuck preceded Covid, but was sharply intensified by it. I recall being taken aback when, toward the end of the Covid era, I had a conversation with a woman in her early twenties who cheerfully argued that not only is the earth flat, but also birds aren’t real. She might have been joking; but it felt like she wasn’t. Then again, if you’d just spent two formative years with nothing to do but scroll, you might be forgiven for concluding that there’s no meaningful difference between reality and internet memes. After all, in that situation most of your reality is internet memes.
This sense of generalised unreality seems to have become, especially for the young, a permanent fixture. Just recently, Channel 4 warned that Gen Z has lost trust in authoritative sources of information, preferring online sources of information, gathered in a “magpie” fashion and validated by peers. This echoes a broader trend noted last month by liberal commentator Anne Applebaum, who deplored the rise, across the globe, of a politics fusing New Age beliefs with anti-democratic practices. In this worldview, she laments, “superstition defeats reason and logic, transparency vanishes, and the nefarious actions of political leaders are obscured behind a cloud of nonsense and distraction”. She contrasts this critically with her own worldview, in which — she says — “logic and reason lead to good government”, and “the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes”.
But from the perspective of the “Birds Aren’t Real” cohort, we might ask: where was Applebaum’s logic and reason, during the multi-year collective freakout in which buying a Scotch egg prevented Covid infection, and children cut mouth holes in N95 masks to play the flute? For the unreality wasn’t just online; it was everywhere, often accompanied by vigorous social shaming and coercive state power. Asking zoomers of my acquaintance for their memories of Covid, the most common theme was the absurdist tyranny of Covid rules — and then how politically formative it was to defy them. One young friend describes seeing a group of “Covid marshals” exit the van in which they’d travelled together unmasked — and then, after climbing out, donning masks and fanning out through London streets to enforce mask-wearing and social distancing among pedestrians. Another remembers quietly abandoning mask mandates, and realising that doing so had no effect.
I don’t want to get bogged down in who went crazier. My point is simple: a whole microgeneration experienced, on the cusp of adulthood, a collective and officially enforced reality in which every rule suddenly turned nonsensical and authoritarian, at their expense and in the name of a threat that didn’t really affect them. How do you respond to an experience of this kind? At the extremes, the answer seems to divide between those who concluded that when the world is so arbitrary, there’s no point trying to do anything; and, conversely, those who concluded from this there are no limits at all on what could be done.
At one end of the spectrum, Gen Z has checked out. The youth mental health crisis preceded Covid, but lockdown escalated it. In its wake, disability claims have risen most sharply among teenagers and young people. Among claimants under 25, 70% were for mental or behavioural conditions, accounting for more than half of the rise. Labour’s Wes Streeting recently asserted that such conditions are “overdiagnosed”, and this may be the case. But it may also be the case both that the distress is real, and also that these young adults are just doing what they were conditioned to do. Given that they spent two years forcibly shut in with only the internet for company, while the government paid for everything, it would not be surprising if some of those young people might be a bit screwed up. Nor would it be surprising if many of them simply view this situation as normal, and expect it to continue.
Some of those young adults are now spiralling in psychological distress, and perhaps also learned helplessness. Lest anyone mistake me, I absolutely don’t want to shame those people. The shame should be on everyone who assented to policies that deprived a generation of normal coming-of-age experiences, in the name of a virus that posed little risk to them. What we owe to these now perhaps deeply damaged young men and women is not disability benefits, but contrition, reparations, and a way out of the hole we shoved them in.
But at the other end of the spectrum are those young people who drew the opposite conclusion, and are as a result exiting the political mainstream altogether. Again, small wonder: their entry into adulthood was equal parts internet unreality, nonsense rules, and finding that the only way to get laid was by flouting the mandates. Scale that up to a whole microgeneration, and the likelihood is that they’re not going to spend their adult lives colouring inside the political lines. For example, we should perhaps not be surprised that Channel 4’s study finds 52% of 13-27-year-olds would welcome “a strongman leader unbound by elections or Parliament”. Like the mental health crisis, the slide toward authoritarian views is a macrotrend that predates Covid; but there’s no question that Covid represented, for many, a definitive rupture. This is, after all, a generation that experienced two years of arbitrary, capricious, and profoundly post-liberal state power. Yes, lockdowns were a form of collectivist authoritarianism; even so, is it really so strange that some would afterwards gaze approvingly at the strongman variety? As one anonymous young commentator put it in 2023, it was “all wisdom of the wise was broken, torn up and transgressed purely to advance the interests of old people”. As a result, the author suggests, those who were young during Covid have concluded that “there is no limit to what politics can achieve”.
Across many European nations including France, Germany, and Spain, the sharpest rise in so-called “far-Right” parties is consistently among the young — and, especially, young men. Just recently The Atlantic described the same phenomenon in the United States, linking it explicitly to Covid. In the UK, when we compare the 2019 and 2024 general election breakdowns, it’s clear that while the Right-wing youth vote hasn’t grown significantly in absolute terms, those young people that do vote Right opted in increased numbers for the party to the Right of the Tories: Reform.
But it’s not just a Rightward tilt; it’s an anti-mainstream one. The same vote breakdown shows the percentage of 18-24-year-olds who opted for the two mainstream parties fell by a quarter, from 77% to 50% of young voters. Along with Reform, the biggest winner among the youngest voters was “Other”.
Coming of age under lockdown, then, seems to have effected a generational exit both from any sense of shared reality, and, by extension, from political normativity. Will this right itself over time? Maybe. But looking around modern Britain, I see few obvious reasons why a twentysomething would feel motivated to salvage a political order that mortgaged future tax revenues to fund years of furlough and misspent PPE procurement, to no measurable benefit over countries that didn’t lock down and to the considerable economic detriment of the young. It is a political order that’s depressing white-collar wages through AI, and blue-collar ones through mass immigration; that’s squeezing young professionals and letting house prices soar, but safeguarding the triple lock.
In his push to get Gen Z to forsake PIP and re-engage, Wes Streeting should perhaps be careful what he wishes for. As this generation reaches political maturity, we should expect British politics to get angrier, more radical, more plural and fractious — and, perhaps, considerably less democratic.
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SubscribeI feel the same way, but as an old person my ‘worldview’ was destroyed rather than formed. I no longer hold any of the political opinions I held before 2020 and nor do I trust or respect any social or government institution or profession. I know many others around me who feel the same. I am not an aggressive person but if I ever bump into Matt Hancock I might not be able to control myself.
The reason free speech, due process, ministerial accountability to parliament and the rule of law are important is that they prevent arbitrary, ill thought out measures being imposed without adequate scrutiny and debate. Yet when they were needed most, all of the above were casually discarded by the political, judicial and media establishment charged with protecting them, with the devastating consequences we can now see. So the clear message conveyed to young people is that democracy is a luxury, not – as it is – a necessity.
Absolutely spot on sir!
The political and judicial Junta that rules this once ‘sceptered isle’ behaved quite disgracefully. We shall never recover.
The only high profile ‘voice of reason’ who spoke out about this catastrophe was Lord Jonathan Sumption, KS.
but sadly to no avail.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was also quite vocal in his opposition to lockdown.
Thank you.
Is that the Ulsterman, the former Daniel Hannan, MEP?
Yes.
Thank you.
What a shame he got sidelined to the HoL.
Here is what proved to be a prescient piece on Lord Sumption’s assessment of the Covid-19 restrictions – published in March 2020.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/former-supreme-court-justice-this-is-what-a-police-state-is-like/
Thank you so much!
That sentence:”We all have critical faculties and it’s rather important, in a moment of national panic, that we should maintain them” is an absolute jewel.
Sumption argued against lockdowns on the grounds of human rights. Unfortunately, he failed to persuade the virus to comply.
By the “virus” do you by any chance mean Dominic Cummings Esq?
Oh dear! If imposing lockdown policies had actually saved millions of lives then perhaps it might have been justified. However there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it did by comparing similar countries which did and did not have lockdown policies or indeed individual States within the USA.
There is very often by pro- lockdown advocates a deliberate sleight of hand here: lockdown does not mean people making their own decisions, for example , f they are elderly not to go into crowded places where people are coughing and spluttering. It means mandated restrictions at every scale from large to petty on what people can do where when and why. It is difficult to see how the virus would respond to endless changes of policy, I believe up to 100 times in a city like Manchester.
And Peter Hitchens.
When it came Brexit the Courts (and in particular the Supreme Court) were available time at the drop of a hat to hear challenges against the government.
When it came to Covid, it was not possible to challenge any of the restrictions through the Courts because of lockdown.
I believed from Day One that the whole grotesque charade was nothing more than an episode in orchestrated mass hysteria
In retrospect Diana’s funeral had been a harbinger of worse to come. And so it turned out.
Oh gods, who can forget? That display of national emoting cant…
One of my then colleagues, a deeply unpleasant man, went with his wife to lay flowers at Kensington Palace. I called him an “f**** t***”
Here in Canada, it took me a few weeks to come to the same conclusion. I also realized that some people actually liked being frightened out of their wits by “authorities”. It seemed to reinforce the sense of helplessness they’d already cultivated before anyone ever heard of Covid 19.
I’m Canadian and I agree Walter. I was shocked by how willing people were to simply put their faith in government and did not question the, in my opinion, draconian measures the government implemented.
Could not agree more
Or young people have figured out (some ‘unconsciously’) which political spectrum will not allow lockdowns again.
In my own country of Canada, we are now seeing this panic over Trump’s tariff threats. No sooner did he make the threat, our esteemed politicians began thinking up marvelous ways to subvert our democracy because of a “crisis”. Just yesterday, the premier of BC, David Eby, invoking WWII, began to push legislation that will suspend parliament and elections for two year and basically allow him to pass anything law he wants without complaint, oversight, or a vote. It seems the days of covid shutdowns and the suspension of our rights was just too delicious for our leaders to give up. Now, any crisis at all is a “WWII Moment”.
I’ve got to the end of this article and I don’t think these impacts are limited to Gen Z, I can identify with a lot of it aswell. The only significant difference is that what happened during the pandemic was one crazy thing in a series of crazy things that have more or less shattered my worldview, while it was formative for the younger generation’s.
Either way, it is psychologically strenuous and will reverberate through our societies and our interior lives for decades to come.
The rightwards/anti-estabishment shift among the young is in my opinion more generalised in its causation than what happened between 2020 and 2022. I think Gen Z look at the existing systems and justifiedly conclude that it’s not working for them, it is never going to work for them and so needs to be changed.
You can say what you want about Gen Z’s lack of work ethic, inability to concentrate, high level of entitlement etc., but young people aren’t dim and their dissatisfaction isn’t to be dismissed.
You say that but 1919 flu pandemic disappeared quickly from the public consciousness and Covid seems to be going the same way
I don’t know what proof you have for that statement, but if that is the accepted view then it might have something to do with the fact that it happened at the end of a great and deadly war and the collapse of several empires and was quickly followed (or subsumed?) by the resulting economic and societal upheavals.
Perhaps people didn’t “forget” the ‘flu pandemic so much as they were unable to untangle its effects from those of the other disasters which were unfolding around them so it became relative or subordinate in their minds to other events.
We have the “luxury” of being able to consider the Covid pandemic in better isolation (pun not intended) which is why I think it will be etched onto our collective memories much better.
This is my proof such as it is.
Years ago I read an article about the 1919 pandemic. Surprised at the death toll, and the fact that I had not previously heard about it, I asked my grandparents. There memories were really vague like it was not really a significant event.
When Covid kicked-off I was not particularly surprised to find that I was about the only person who knew of the 1919 pandemic. It had disappeared from the collective conscious which I always put down to being sandwiched between 2 world wars
Living through Covid I thought it was the defining event of the century, but apparently not so. No one talks about it and when you raise the subject memories are vague, particularly amongst those who towed the line. So much to my surprise it looks like it is heading to the blackhole of human memory
But of course it followed the Great War and no-one was locked up. Though you might argue it led to the roaring twenties and subsequent economic collapse. The fact is that pandemics have often been followed by periods of economic and political instability. It was the combination of locking people up, borrowing money like topsy and the advent of social media etc which in my view will prove to be so toxic. Add to that children being locked up at home for months in broken or dysfunctional families with no relief or repsite. It is asking for trouble.
Interesting you should say that.
In early on in the pandemic, in answer to the question where it would end, I said that it would result in war. When asked why I said it made the world order, which before had looked unassailable, look vulnerable which would encourage countries outside the fold who would not previously have dared to challenge the hedgmon
I suspect your grandparents were ‘vague’ because they were from the generation that was used to ‘crises’ and just kept calm, carried on and then got on with life and preparing for the next crisis.
I would agree but the recollections of WW1 and the 1920s were far more comprehensive
My parents were born in 1911 and 1907 but I don’t remember either of them ever mentioning the 1919 flu as a major incident.
My grandparents never mentioned it either. I only asked them about it because I read something (about bodies being dug up I think) and thought why have I never heard about this.
The high death rate of the 1919 ‘flu has been credibly attributed to the excessive use of a new drug , aspirin.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article-abstract/49/9/1405/301441?redirectedFrom=fulltext#:~:text=The%20hypothesis%20presented%20herein%20is,%25%20and%203%25%20of%20recipients%2C
There was no internet nor social media.
Yes, only real lives to be lived.
“…from the collective conscious…”
Conscience.
One way of looking at it
People weren’t frittering their time away online in 1919. They had real lives to get on with.
Compared to the slaughter of the Great War is that really surprising?
Additionally weren’t the majority of the 1919 ‘Spanish Fu’ fatalities in the Far East etc?
250,000 people died in the UK and between 50m and 100m word-wide so it puts it in the same ball park only over a shorter period.
UK Great War Fatalities were around 750,000, add in the Empire and it is about 1,000,000.
Annualised that’s about 250,000 pa.
How long was the Spanish Flu epidemic, two years or so? So in reality more of the same?
That is about right
Historically illiterate. There’s no comparison between the Draconian measures taken by governments during Covid and the much less stringent measures during the 1919 pandemic.
It’s the measures taken, not the event of a pandemic occurring, that’s at issue.
I was not on about lockdown measures, but you may be surprised. In 1919 there were bans on public gatherings, school closures, and strict quarantine and isolation and Australia put in place a maritime quarantine .
250,000 died in the UK, which is more than Covid, and it was at a time when we had significantly smaller population.
Also the 1919 pandemic killed predominantly the young adults which must have made it more impactful and traumatic, particularly when the nature of the illness was a lot less understood .
Pleased to have enlightened you
Australia seems to have ‘form’ then in overreacting!
As someone remarked during the recent Covid Scamdemic, the problem was we that the British, not only left the convicts in Australia but also the Warders too!
As i said, no comparison between the Draconian nature of the measures taken. You really do need to think it through before making such claims. I’ve studied the 1919 pandemic, and your response only highlights the relative triviality of your perspective.
I did not realise I was dealing with a self-professed expert.
What I said was “I was not on about lockdown measures, but you may be surprised. In 1919 there were bans on public gatherings, school closures, and strict quarantine and isolation and Australia put in place a maritime quarantine.”
I gather a couple of chaps in the US were shot in 1919 for not wearing masks.
They can get shot for much less in the States!
Indeed, as one Ms Ashli Babbitt recently find out to her cost.
The ex-MP Andrew Bridge raised questions of covid vaccine safety several times to an almost empty House of Parliament, was ignored by most other MPs and was rewarded by his constituents deserting him at the General Election. People don’t want to think about all that happened in the”pandemic”,they just want to return to what passes for normality. All duly noted by authority I assume.
That is also my conclusion
Wasn’t that Andrew BRIDGEN who was expelled from the Tory Party for his heretical views on the efficacy or otherwise of the ‘miracle’ Covid vaccine?
I gather another MP, one Desmond Swayne deserves our thanks for his robust vilification of the great Covid deceit.
Andrew Bridgen (also the outer of the Post Office Horizon scandal) has been very poorly treated by the HoC, the Cons and, most of all, his constituents.
I think Gen Z look at the existing systems and justifiedly conclude that it’s not working for them, it is never going to work for them and so needs to be changed.
On a related note, THIS is why Donald Trump was elected. The critics focus on the man, purposely ignoring the conditions that made his election possible. When people capable of critical thinking see career insiders vowing to bring “change,” they are naturally skeptical. And so they take a change on a guy who is anything but the status quo because they understand the conditions that define insanity. Trump may do great things, he may break stuff, but a course correction is necessary.
Yes, that is what I think.
Compare and contrast to European governments, for example Germany’s, who have ignored or denied the existence of problems for too long (urgh, the dreaded migration question, everyone is so sick of this), then said “oh we can’t do anything about it – international law!”, then finally promised to finally do something but now either rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic or, worse, chicken out on remedial action entirely (watch Merz’s new coalition).
Then there is shock and indignation when people start to vote for fringe or extremist alternatives. I mean, it’s not such a hard thing to understand, is it?
My yearning for a political wrecking ball is growing by the day.
I agree. Here in the states I tell the Progressive pudding heads that are hating on Trump that they need to stop and think about it. If Trump is as awful as they think he is, what does that say about what people think of their candidates.
Of course they do not and will not. They simply declare that the problem is that the Trump voters, (about 53% of the voters nationwide) are just too stupid to see how smart the Progressives are.Of course we all know that Trump is a noisy and often obnoxious ass-hat. We voted him in anyway rather than the status quo.It’s not so much that we love Trump, it’s more that we hate the Progressives more.
Meanwhile they don’t see that it is exactly that attitude that sealed their defeat.
You are so right on. I would give you ten likes if I could.
But what a shame they’ve been brought up at a time when they are more concerned about their ‘rights’, what they’ve ‘missed out on’, how they’re ‘victims’ etc. Had they (and several generations before them) been taught to consider what they could do for others they might be less upset.
What exactly would you have had them do? We’re talking about children. Maybe they should have stood around screeching like Greta T. Would that have helped?
Absolutely, I simply do not trust the UK authorities at all. I was always mildly sceptical of their bona fides, but after covid, I have no trust whatsoever in our government and our national institutions, starting with the Monarchy, Parliament, the courts, civil service and the police.
You’re not alone, and the ‘collapse’ of the once much vaunted Judiciary is particularly lamentable.
Yep.
It would be very helpful if we were to roll back the trend to medicalise human emotions and behaviour, not least because the resources to respond to the self-created epidemic of mental health diagnoses are unavailable.
Labelling normal human responses to abnormal circumstances and stress as autism, ADHD etc. doesn’t build resilience either for individuals or society.
Latest DarkHorse episode with Laura Delano was good on this.
Indeed, normal reactions have been pathologized as if that makes them more valid.
This echoes a broader trend noted last month by liberal commentator Anne Applebaum, who deplored the rise, across the globe, of a politics fusing New Age beliefs with anti-democratic practices.
Monopolists always hate it when their monopoly is threatened. By ‘anti-democratic,’ does she mean Team Biden’s active role in suppressing dissenting voices over a host of issues, the EU effectively nullifying an election outcome in Romania, or something else?
On the broader topic, it was highly amusing to see the New York Times publish a post-Covid piece titled “We were misled” as if the Times itself was not on the vanguard of that effort. And were not misled; we were lied to. Openly and repeatedly. Often by the Times and its fellow travelers, who took great joy in attacking skeptics, seeing people fired for jab refusal, and participating in the mechanisms that created the outcome Mary writes about.
Through the Covid era a growing number of people concluded that given what was done to them, they would never do anything for these people (the governing class) again. Democratic government lost its legitimacy.
People are not stupid. They notice things. Young people are particularly observant because they have no experience to draw upon. What they observe in their younger years becomes their experience. Is anyone seriously surprised that this should be the result?
COVID revealed the extent to which western nations were ruled not by elected leaders, but by unnamed, unseen, committees of bureaucrats who got their positions by virtue of their ‘expertise’ and who were basically untouchable by elected leaders under the current, ostensibly democratic order. Given that ‘democracy’ is supposed to mean people rule themselves through elected bodies, what was democratic about the COVID response? It was out and out tyranny, executed by elected governments that were supposed to be better than that. Why shouldn’t young people pine for a strongman like Putin to take a sledgehammer to a corrupt system that failed them.
The situation in the US was not as bad as over there thanks to our federalized system. The federal government doesn’t actually have much authority over the everyday lives of the people. That is delegated to the states, and as you might expect, they don’t all agree. Some governors went all-in on lockdowns and mandates. Some didn’t and made reopening a higher priority. Those that made the latter choice saw their popularity increase and their states benefit. Those that made the former choice are already being punished for it in terms of people and businesses leaving the state. Competition is good in politics as well as economics. This state to state competition tends to limit how stupid policy can get before politicians have to restrain it or abandon it.
I think the author has once again provided the closest thing to a definitive perspective on how and why our world is changing.
As Katherine Eyre also comments, it’s not just the young who’re experiencing this, although for them it may be more formative.
Herein lies a danger. If disillusionment leads to a breakdown in the democratic process, why would “a strongman” type of rule be any more favourable to the interests of the young? The chances are, it might be precisely the opposite, and then there’s no chance of redress.
How we protect democracy – so hard-won, over centuries of turmoil and bloodshed – from this low point is going to be central to all our futures. The elites who’ve subsumed democracy to their interests must be overturned, but crying “Vive La Revolution!” won’t cut it. A pivot point, then.
Trump is the nearest example of shaking the foundations whilst remaining within the rails of democracy we’ve got, but at least that’s something, like him or not.
The trumpism delusion will be shattered soon, then what fanaticism will you support next
You’re trying to apply logic where it simply doesn’t belong.
If you want to know why the young are attracted to the thought of rule-by-strongman you should ask them; with the understanding that they’ll never give you a straight answer. Such is life among the humans.
Well the main reason for Gen Z to be angry is that the billions of pounds pumped into the economy by the government during the pandemic has ended up in the pockets of the rich. Result: skyrocketing asset prices and impossibility for the young to buy affordable homes.
And all of this was in response to a disease which five years ago to this very day (19 March) the UK public health authorities declared to “no longer to be considered a High Consequence Infectious Disease in the UK”.
Today should be a day of reflection on how we – all of us – allowed this to happen.
And then four days later …
“liberal commentator Anne Applebaum … says ‘logic and reason lead to good government’, and ‘the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes’”.
This from a woman who apparently doesn’t think “rules and laws and processes” should interfere with government and social networks working together to suppress opposing political views.
One mark of the doctrinaire progressive is the ability to simultaneously hold competing thoughts without seeing the contradiction.
Well, as a top leader of the Progressive movement once said…
It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.
-Joseph Goebbels
There are an awful lot of people in my opinion, it seems, who are ‘wise after the event’. I realise it was not easy to be a dissenting voice at the time of COVID. But it is terribly easy now to denigrate all those people who went along with the mainstream narrative as if, somehow, they should be ashamed of their behaviour. But this is really deeply unpleasant and very, very unfair. Before the COVID frenzy most people believed that government would act in the best interests of the populace in times of trouble. The following statement in the above essay is, I feel, completely unjustified:
‘The shame should be on everyone who assented to policies that deprived a generation of normal coming-of-age experiences, in the name of a virus that posed little risk to them. What we owe to these now perhaps deeply damaged young men and women is not disability benefits, but contrition, reparations, and a way out of the hole we shoved them in.’
I am not seeking to defend what was done to the country during COVID – far from it; I think it was an unmitigated disaster but I am honest enough to say that I am making that statement with the benefit of hindsight. Does Ms Harrington truly believe that all those that adhered to the goverment mandates are somehow complicit in the harm caused by the government’s actions? If so then I think she is a deeply misguided, if not downright unpleasant, person.
The statement quoted above is, in my opinion, a piece of ill-considered, virtue-signalling nonsense which has absolutely no merit whatsoever. I am not saying that young people were not harmed by what they had to endure. I am, however, saying that the honest, law-abiding citizens of this country who, loyally, if reluctantly, went along with the government mandates are not to blame for what occured and owe nothing to anybody and should feel no shame for what they did.
Perhaps Ms Harrington could spend her time more effectively challenging and berating the mainstream media – in particular the BBC – who went all-in to support the government narrative and shame people into compliance.
One more question for Ms Harrington: She accuses the government of ‘letting house prices soar’. Perhaps she would be good enough to inform us all of just exactly how, were she to have in her hands the levers of power, she would stop house prices increasing?
House prices have been protected as the only legitimate way to get rich. Even journalists can own and understand houses. Our inflation, caused by government overspending and the relative decline of our currency after 30 years of mismanagement and profligacy, causes house prices to rise. A further cause is the growth in population, relative to supply.
With respect my question was how would it be possible to stop house prices increasing. I understand the reasons for house price inflation as most reasonable people do which is why I asked the question. By the by I don’t ascribe to your opinion that ‘house prices have been protected as the only legitimate way to get rich’ because, for the vast majority of people, such a statement is demonstrably untrue. If you can only afford to own one house then it’s value is almost irrelevant because, until you die, that value will only ever be set against the value of the next house you wish to move to.
Well, I can only speak for myself. I live in the very middle of the USA. There are about 15,000 people in my town. Here, the whole masking thing really never caught on. I was going to restaurants without wearing masks and so were mostly others. Of course there were some folks who were really afraid and they were grasping at the fake life preservers that were thrown to them. And of course the doctors offices and hospital had to do the masking thing.
The few time I saw or heard anyone challenged for not wearing a mask, they were told in no uncertain terms to mind their own business and stay home if they didn’t like it.
Let’s not forget that school kids were banished from the classroom as teachers or rather their unions refused to go back to the classroom.
We should also remember that it is these very same people who are now losing their minds over the “harm” that Trump is causing the children with his attacks on the Dept. of Education.
Covid measures were not just in the interest of the elderly (my generation) but principally in the interest of the middle class and (in this country) a rickety health service that a weak Health Ministry can’t get to grips with because of the powerful and ruthless vested interests in the health service with which it has to contend. I’m not surprised that the young are swinging right, if they are.
I think Covid merely accentuated what was already happening. People like Steven Pinker and Jordan Peterson have been warning against having obviously false/true statements that are made a taboo in the official narrative (e.g. men and women are physically equal, people start as a blank slate and no genetic inheritance). When young people enter adulthood they find out about these through alternative media/influencers, and conclude (correctly) they’ve been fed a significant amount of BS during their schooling. What’s worse is, such influencers as Andrew Tate then package these forbidden truths with a whole bunch of BS of their own, creating the far-Right radicalisation of young men. Its effect on young women seems to be driving large numbers of them literally insane.
All the while, what the liberal commentators seem to be capable of doing is to call for more forcefully forbidding wrong-think, and be very smug about holding the correct set of beliefs “our democracy” and all.
I really do not buy this. Modern UK society is ceaselessly trying to turn children into deprived victims. It simply isnt true . They do not have ADHD- they are ill disciplined indulged little sods. Lock down did not cause them huge distress. Detention doesn’t give them PTSD.
We have generation of weak feckless parents creating a midwitch bunch of cuckoos. Christ knows what frightful parents they will grow up to be.
Being kept mostly at home for a year or two with good food , entertainment , heating lighting running water and on line teaching is not the same at two years in a 1916 trench
You have to wonder how they would have handled living through the great depression followed by WW2, omg wearing a little mask and some social isolation while being entertained at home , what trauma eh. And being paid while not having to work or working from home in pajamas, how do you get over that? Prefer the blitz maybe?
Britain has tremendous problems with the economy, and with immigration and its ramifications on British culture and the rule of law. From the standpoint of this outsider (and I could be wrong, I admit) Parliament seems quite helpless (and in large part unwilling) to address these concerns. Years ago C. N. Parkinson explained the popularity of dictators during the1930s:
“To the people it seemed that dictators could fullfil their promises if they would, and that parliamentary parties could not even if they would.” from The Evolution of Political Thought.
Perhaps the appeal of a strong man to British youth is a reflection of the above sentiment.
No mention of the fact that the most vocal lobby for more and longer lockdowns were the teachers and their unions, keeping schools closed far longer than necessary. And despite the fact that, in the form of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and PCs, the vast majority of their students had the most powerful information, ideas, and educational media and resources at their fingertips, the education blob, as always devoid of ideas, initiative, enterprise, and imagination, refused to use them.
Precisely, well said sir!
Some Australian older women kept very quiet during the covid crisis.
My partner and I (aged in our 80s and 70s) were reading commentary long before the lockdowns, kept reading reports from medical/scientific doubters in South America and Spain (used google to translate). These experts were warning about the dangers of mRNA before they were even in popular use.
Neither of us ever had a test for covid, nor a vaccine injection. We avoided public places.
We dared not whisper a word because of the virulence of public opinion, whipped up by daily broadcasts by our premiers and health ‘experts’.
After it was all over we began to run into other older women who said they had not be vaccinated. Seems there was quite a large cohort of silent resisters. We were fortunate in that, being older and retired, we were not afraid of losing jobs etc.
One friend, a general practitioner in her sixties, regretted getting the vaccine, something she had to do in order to be allowed to visit her mother in a nursing home. Otherwise she would not have accepted the vaccine.
How has it affected us? We have learned to be very circumspect and careful about expressing our views about anything at all that might arouse a strong reaction from neighbours, acquaintances etc. We don’t trust the crowds who are so readily swayed by politicians and media.
Sounds a lot like what I understand that Nazi Germany was like.
Good article.
The disappointing thing from my perspective is that so few people seemed outraged by all the absurdity in COVID times.
If the young are more awake than the middle aged, middle class muppets who went along with the madness, that’s a good thing.
Agreed, simply appalling and unparalleled in my lifetime!
I never thought I would live to see the ‘Gadarene swine’ throw themselves off a cliff, but I have been proved wrong.
I thought it was self apparent nonsense from day one. The disappointing thing for me is that many people whose views I used to value bought into it hook line and sinker and even spouted the rubbish they were fed by the Government.
To borrow form J’Accuse
“I have no pity for anyone who was the age of majority in March 2020 who did not fight, in whatever small way, against the Covid panic. For the few of us who did will always carry the guilt that we did not do enough. How is it that such people are not plagued by suicidal ideations when they contemplate the mask is mystery enough to me. I cannot even begin to contemplate the tortures that the lost generations will inflict on us, as revenge, once they come of age.
Lockdown, for me, was the breaking point for belief in ‘the normies’. Be as derisive as you like about Luke Tryl and his various polls, the reality that normal people are cattle who should be studiously ignored was made irresistible truth to anyone who had the misfortune of having an independent mind during those unfortunate months.
It is because of Lockdown that I take the following position, however uncomfortable, that within this Parliament the goals of the ‘Online Right’ should be structural and not ideological. That, whatever his flaws, Nigel Farage should be supported and not dismissed. Because whatever the force of Rupert Lowe’s argument, whatever the realities of demographic change; the fact remains that the voters through which power can be exercised remain, by too many numbers, bovine.”
“Gen Z has lost trust in authoritative sources of information, preferring online sources of information, gathered in a “magpie” fashion and validated by peers”.
Because they are liars.
Liberal commentator such as Anne Applebaum are not a symptom of the problem, unbowed by their own hubris they continue to demand to be heard
Just recently, Channel 4 warned that Gen Z has lost trust in authoritative sources of information, preferring online sources of information, gathered in a “magpie” fashion and validated by peers.
Online sources like Unherd, I hope, and including the comments. So-called ‘authoritative’ sources of information have been proven to be propaganda in many instances.
Collectivist authoritarianism is fine… as… long… as… the… “right”… people… are… doing… it.
“Back in 2020,when we had no idea what the effect of lockdown would be”
Really!
Didn’t care what the effect would be is more like it.
Having no idea of the effect that lock downs would have sounds like a very fine reason to not have them. It’s a bit like being told you have cancer and then going into the household chemical cabinet and randomly swilling the cleaning products. We hope we are curing cancer, but really we have no idea of what the effects will be in the end.
No Thanks.
With the lockdowns and the impact it had on the younger generation, we shall reap what the government sowed. It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be democratic.
Not only this: the impact will last for decades to come.
Who will, once again, re-establish the primacy of liberty, free speech, free movement, rule of law (as opposed to arbitrary edicts), and due process?
They may well be forgotten in 50 years from public consciousness. As unimportant and irrelevant as a thin fog, or the medieval era.
“Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”*
*Thank you RK.
And the planet is boiling, we’re on the point of a nuclear holocaust, and the sky is falling. Unfortunately, Gen Z will be most affected by the end of the world, and it’s all the gummint’s fault. Like innit.
We know that general mismanagement and unscrupulous greed cost the country much during the pandemic but people were dying in their thousands and even the awful government of the time felt that they had to do something. So hindsight claims of ‘authoritarianism’ seem a little foolish. Chaotic – maybe. As for Gen Z – many of whom it seems would sadly have been happy to see the old folk die off – since they have ‘stolen their future’ – Maybe what they missed most were their history lessons. Were there no parents at the time able to give these kids a better sense of how resentment can lead to future disaster? Is 1930s Germany too distant?
If your world only presents itself through the screen of your phone what difference does it make who that world’s leaders are?
Forcing the young to spend hours and hours a day on-line in the name of compulsory ‘remote learning’ took off and was normalized with Covid and has continued and escalated since here in my Canadian province. The resulting mass dumbing down, distraction, and dysfunction is profitable for the bad ol’ powers that be and the legions of ‘helping’ professions. Policy for children including education and daycare policy contradict reliable empirical research on child well-being and observable reality.
A revolution is needed. If we don’t get one, we’re finished.
Get a grip everyone! Lockdown was a farce but get over it. Nothing like living through the blitz, or the slums and hard times of the depression, or The slaughter of WW1 or the factory slavery of the early Victorian era. You only had to step outside to see birds were real. Pandering to hard done by or self indulgent feelings is just further corroding the moral fibre of young people in Europe and America. As does encouraging so many of them to feel aggrieved and entitled.
As fir Anne Applebaum, she represents the policies and outlook that have brought us to the sorry state of being unable to fend off the
medievalism of Islamists or the competitiveness of China. Right now she is a prime advocate for getting into war with Russia! Check out her political connections in Poland.
Excellent!
I disagree about Gen Z as I believe they have it just right. Early in the lockdown mid 2020, I encountered a Gen Z who was off to a very liberal state university. We had a great discussion regarding the lack of trust in social media, and of the politicians who sold out for the lockdown. She wanted to break up Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, and so on. I asked her why and she told me she did not trust them, they lied, and were very manipulative. I told her I agreed with her and she said her mother was very liberal and couldn’t understand her views.
She is graduating in June and we have kept in touch. She still has the same beliefs but has added the Federal and California state governments to the list of bad actors. She trusts nothing and tries to verify everything. She voted for Trump for disruption and change and she doesn’t particularly like him but is all in on what he is doing.
Gen Z is for disruption across the entire spectrum and millennials are joining in. These folks are the future of maintaining a democracy/republic and they are not necessarily right-wing or conservative, they actually believe in free speech, limited government, and ending the “elites” greedy and controlling influence. I am all in with them.
Here in sunny California, the County Health Directors had the final say on lockdowns. I didn’t know that until I contacted my county Stasi rep, er supervisor to object to various provisions of the lockdown, and during the conversation, I told her to fire the Health Director. She was aghast and then told me they couldn’t. Of course, it was a great political cover, and as they say, the rest is history.
Makes one wonder however our parents/grandparents managed to survive having to live through the war, it’s a jolly good job that it wasn’t so life threateningly terrible as Covid otherwise none of us would be here. Must be a miracle I suppose. Alleluia.
At least you could go out on dates, have a sex life, go down the pub, see family and friends, pop into neighbours, go to church, attend football, theatre, shows, and there was comradeship and solidarity and a real enemy and ultimately victory and justification. Covid was all lies and deception with no victory.
Everyone seemed to lose their minds after Covid: Ukraine war, October 7th, authoritarianism, mental health crisis, homlessness, shambolic state of affairs across once stable western countries, having said that I don’t think there was any “plan” or “conspiracy”, people panicked, no-one knew what was going on. We were told to “trust the science” but the scientists themselves were confused. Nobody wanted to be held responsible for mass deaths so the measures grew increasingly draconian with jurisdictions out-lockdowning each other. Remains to be seen whether things are going to spiral even further out of control or whether some normalcy will at some point return..
I was at university with them (mature postgraduate). I mistook their sullen, joylessness as just a mark of their generation, as was their puritanical wokeness. I am more sympathetic now.
It’s a reasonable story, but I find myself with no way of telling whether it’s true or not. A range of things have changed over recent years, but whether the Covid experience, technology or something else entirely is the driver is hard to tell.
And it doesn’t really account for the big differences in youth politics in the U.K. and Europe.
Are countries which did not lock down, or did so to lesser degree, free of a youth mental health crisis?
Self-reported mental health problems in children aged 10–17 have increased by over 100 percent in ten years in Sweden. For young adults, 18–24 years old, the increase is close to 70 percent.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8570328/
There it is right there: no measurable benefit over countries that didn’t lock down – No doubt the Covid Inquiry will report on that and recommend never doing it again.
The most important consequence of lockdowns is that many young adults believed that they did not have to work and they would be supported by the furlong fairy and even given over-inflated academic grades. Many of the mental health issues are due to their realisation that the furlong fairy doesn’t exist.
Whenever I see Anne Applebaum quoted as a serious person saying she believes that logic “and reason lead to good government”, and “the political order inheres in rules and laws and processes” I want to call your attention to this:
https://x.com/ClayTravis/status/1511853692160458752
Anne Applebaum’s moment of truth.
You should not trivialise the Covid-19 pandemic. One may be sure that no totally accurate mortality figures can be taken as perfect but the lowest estimate of world-wide deaths is 14.9-million. Nor can our government be so heavily criticised over its decisions since the truth is that there were no experts on Covid-19 anywhere. Virologists were astonished and confused by its virulence and spread. The much-vaunted Swedish response actually resulted in a higher per capita mortality than any of its 3 Baltic neighbours. That said I return to the alienation of some of younger generations as a result of enforced isolation and the new epidemic of mental health issues. I am very old and was born in the Great Depression, lived through WWII, served in the armed forces in 3 campaigns, contracted the Asian flu in 1957, experienced 12 years of rationing all without a single laptop or smart phone. I have remained sane and raised 3 sons all of whom are remarkably balanced. Don’t blame Covid for the alienation issues that Ben Z has – blame the electronic media without which they cannot pass an hour.
Nor can our government be so heavily criticised over its decisions since the truth is that there were no experts on Covid-19 anywhere.
Please stop. From the beginning, a few things were clear: the virus was most threatening to the elderly – especially old people already sick with other things – along with the obese and people with shaky immune systems. It was NEVER an equal opportunity threat, and definitely not to young healthy people.
Govt earned criticism, in large part for failing to correct course when new facts emerged making existing measures pointless and for its steadfast refusal to admit to error.
I hope that wearing a little mask on your face didn’t create too much trauma for you, maybe you would have preferred the blitz
Spoken like a true believer
Great article, thank you.
How funny.
Mary thinks birds are real.
Next she’ll tell us dinosaurs existed.
Just to get this link on the site. This is an example of how you can try to learn from how COVID was handled, and draw lessons on what to do better next time. As opposed to refighting the old debates and try to ‘prove’ that you were right all along and people should have listened to you. Not coincidentally, this is in the Guardian rather than on Unherd.
LOL…This is exactly what you are shaming us for doing. Refighting the old debates. The whole upshot of this article is that the scientists got it right, the vaccines are a wondrous marvel, and in all other respects we had it right, though it does allow that perhaps they might have overdone a thing here and there.
Typical Progressive swill. Telling me not to say I was right and not to assign blame. Well Pinko, I was right and you and yours ARE to blame…not coincidentally in the Guardian…Yes, I suspect not. Another Progressive attempt to rewrite history to blot out your appalling failures.
There seems to be a concerted conspiracy among so many writers, here and elsewhere, to present ‘lockdown’ as a binary choice, you have one or you don’t, when in reality there were many variations both in terms of the actual rules and conditions imposed, the effectiveness, and as the writer points out about the attitude of young (and old) people, “how politically formative it was to defy them”.
And no mention of Boris Johnson, who delayed until it was too late.
And nothing on the impact on young people of the death of parents, grandparents and other family members, something far more traumatic for many, than not being able to go out for a few days or weeks.
According to a new modelling study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, the number of children estimated to have experienced the death of a parent or caregiver as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has climbed to more than 10.5 million globally as of May 1, 2022
https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2022-09-07-more-10-million-children-were-affected-covid-19-associated-parental-and-caregiver
Perhaps the Gen Z are suffering from the efects of long Covid. The purpose of the mask was to prevent you from passing it on, and some masks are fairly efficient (98%) at that.
However, Anne Applebaum may have a point. Superstition does defeat reason and logic, and no greater illustration of that can be found than in the belief that Hamas are terrorists but zionists are not.