Article

Culture

Education

Politics

26 February 2025

6 min read

Does Gen Z crave the dictator?

If young Brits are turning away from democracy, here’s how to stop it.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A cat with a small black moustache marking snarls while sitting in front of a tablet.

Kanashi on Unsplash

I knew something was seriously wrong when I hosted a live interactive online assembly for a couple of thousand sixth formers last year. Given a range of emojis the one that was chosen most to represent how they felt about politics wasn’t a thumbs up, or sleeping face, - it was the pile of poo emoji. The vast majority also expressed a deep distrust in government believing they neither listened to nor cared about them. It was then that I realised democracy was in trouble—and not just on the global stage. Here in the UK, a deeply worrying trend is emerging: more than half of Generation Z (those aged 13-27) believe the country would be better off under a dictator.

Recent controversial polling from Craft, commissioned by Channel 4, reveals that 52 per cent of Gen Z believe the UK should be run by a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections. Even more alarmingly, 33 per cent think the country would be better off if the army were in charge. If that doesn’t make us sit up and take notice, consider this: nearly half (47 per cent) of Gen Z believe our society must be radically changed through revolution.

These numbers are staggering. For those of us who have grown up with a strong commitment to democracy, it is unthinkable that the generation raised with the most freedom, the most access to information, and the greatest digital connectivity could be so willing to give up their right to vote, protest, and hold leaders accountable. But before we rush to condemn, we need to ask the hard question: why do so many young people apparently feel this way?

A lost faith in politics

What if it isn’t so much that Gen Z has turned against democracy, but that they feel democracy has turned against them? Think about it. Their schools are crumbling. Their teachers are stressed. If they need mental health support or special needs support, they have either a long wait or a hard fight on their hands and probably both. If they want to go to university, they have to take on a debt that will last longer than the time they have been alive. And pity help them if they want to buy a house - statistics suggest they will probably have to wait until they are 33 years old to even think about getting onto the property ladder.

You might think that these struggles would force Gen Z to become more politically active. But this generation remains the least politically engaged group in the UK. Whilst it is true that currently many are too young to vote, there is also a large proportion who is too disconnected to see the relevance of formal politics. Voter turnout for young people has been abysmal in the last three UK general elections:

2015: 43 per cent
2017: 54 per cent (a temporary spike due to Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal)
2019: 47 per cent

Compare that to the 70 per cent plus turnout for over-65s, and the message is clear: young people aren’t voting, and in return, politicians aren’t speaking to them. Which only exacerbates the problem. Despite the Labour Party manifesto promise that they would introduce voting at 16, they seem to be in no hurry to introduce the reform.

While Gen Z engagement with traditional politics is low, their political leanings have shifted. Over the past two decades, Gen Z has moved slightly to the centre-left, while older generations tend to lean centre-right. Today, age is a stronger predictor of voting behaviour than social class, which is a dramatic shift from previous decades. Though Gen Z is more liberal overall, they are also more radical in their discontent—and that’s where the real danger lies.

When young people feel unheard, they don’t just disengage—they seek alternatives. Their frustration has left them susceptible to radical ideas and strongman narratives. While previous generations turned to grassroots activism, protests, and community engagement, Gen Z is more likely to be influenced by leaders they can follow online - like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Nigel Farage, who offer clear, confident, and often extreme critiques of the system.

The result? Despite strong examples in the positive activism of Greta Thunberg, Marcus Rashford and Malala who have used democratic means to make a positive difference, there is a growing number of young people who see democracy as weak and ineffective, and dictatorship as strong and decisive.

A wake-up call

But there is hope. By engaging young people directly there is an opportunity to change the trajectory. That’s what we discovered at our online interactive event for sixth formers. One of the most powerful voices at the event was Sophia, a recently turned 18-year-old Ukrainian refugee, who spoke about her experience fleeing war. She told her story of being separated from her father who was in Ukraine fighting for democracy. She shared how Ukrainians are fighting—not just with weapons, but with their lives—for the very democracy that young Brits are so ready to discard. Her message to British students was simple: “You don’t know how lucky you are.” She challenged them to see democracy not as a broken system, but as one that requires their participation to work.

It was a powerful moment. And it proved something vital: when young people hear real stories, from real people, they begin to see the consequences of the choices they are flirting with. As a result of that event, thousands of young people signed up to vote at the electoral commission.

Rebuilding trust in democracy

So what can be done? Here are three crucial steps.

Make politics relevant to Gen Z. Young people do care about issues like climate change, mental health, and social justice. But they are turned off democratic political solutions by the bureaucracy, mud-flinging and dragging timescales. By taking time to explain to them the processes, to involve them in the campaigns and to improve accessibility to politics and highlight the difference they can make, we may find that our most disconnected demographic could become democracy’s greatest asset.

Rebuild Gen Z’s trust in leadership. Scandals and dishonesty have left Gen Z cynical. We need leaders who are transparent, accountable, and willing to listen. We need parties who will do what they said they would do in their manifestos and on the doorsteps. We need Members of Parliament who are committed to spending time with the young people they are supposed to represent so that relationships of trust can be deemed possible again.

Empower Gen Z. There are initiatives out there—like our interactive live assembly and the G-EPIC project—that prove a simple truth: when young people feel heard, they engage. When they are inspired, they engage. When they are empowered to participate in the political process, they engage. Perhaps if we create more spaces for them to speak, lead, and act, they will step forward to shape the future.

History shows that democracy is never guaranteed—it must be fought for and protected by every generation. It also requires constant effort to ensure it serves all communities without scapegoating, persecuting, or marginalizing. And history warns us that without democracy, most dictators quickly become tyrants.

The challenge before us is urgent: we must help Generation Z recognize the power they hold to shape their world—before they surrender it to leaders who would take that power away from all of us.

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Article

Community

Culture

Sustainability

Wildness

2 June 2025

5 min read

Hedgerows are boundaries, but they don’t divide so much as abound

The lines we draw between land and lane connect us.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Down in Devon.

Craig Cameron on Unsplash.

In May and June, the Devon hedgerows that hold the landscape outside my window are at their fullest, most colourful state of being. Walking the narrow lane that runs away from our house means walking between high hedgerows that rise like soft green walls either side, which really, means walking between ancient living things, because these hedgerows are old. Devon has some of the oldest hedgerows in the country, and so the world – older than the Parish churches whose towers I can see to the south, east, and west, which rise like old-growth trees out of a blanket of green fields.

Early Bronze Age farmers had to clear woodland to make their fields, and sometimes they left strips of woodland to mark boundaries. These are our oldest hedgerows. They are often found on parish boundary lines, and can support over 2,000 species, also acting as important wildlife corridors for many of them. To roughly date a hedgerow, you count the number of species in a 30m stretch – one species equals 100 years. I have taken to counting random 30m stretches of the hedges that line the lanes near us, and have concluded that we are surrounded by hundreds, in places thousands of years of history – of braided hawthorn and blackthorn, hazel and oak, pink campion and bluebell whose bulbs hide in ancient earth banks that many of the hedgerows sit on.

Now, in these spring hedges, hawthorn is in blossom, nettles overflow with prickly exuberance, and somewhere deep in the tangle a blackbird tunes its song. The hedges are thick with memory stitched together from centuries of hand-laying, stock-keeping, quiet watching. They are Devon’s old boundaries, but they do not divide so much as abound. Life spills from them: wrens and mice, vetch and violet, and so many more things unseen. These are not just boundaries that mark where other things like fields and roads begin and end then; they are living spaces in their own right. They are pathways for diverse life, they are structures that hold home and shelter, food and safety, they are corridors that contain history and story. They are not just edges, they are the centres of whole lives and worlds.

Walking here one May morning, I find myself wondering about the lines we draw – between land and lane, but also between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – and whether these lines too might be porous like the hedgerows, which have lived for so long not through independence but through care and relationship.

The hedges speak paradoxes that I am confronted with every time I go for a walk – of division and abundance, of separateness and connection, of containment and invitation. Lately, I am sitting with these and am coming to understand a threshold that the world offers me: between independence and interdependence. But the truth is I’m not very good at interdependence. I have so often retreated behind the wall of my self-sufficiency, but I am trying to pull that wall down and replace it with a porous and lifegiving hedgerow.

We draw lines – around ourselves, and between people, nations, beliefs, social classes, politics. Sometimes these lines are for safety, sometimes for exclusion. But the hedgerows tell me that it is possible to hold a line and also to let light and life flow through it and shape it. They tell me that these lines are not end points but invitations to communion.

In The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Le Guin wrote:

“…I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry?”

Le Guin’s work of science fiction is about otherness and connectedness, with different species having to learn empathy in order to collaborate and communicate. The darker the events in the book, the brighter the hope and relationship. The book feels like it was written for now, for this world.

On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations.

In a world whose people are persecuted, othered, tired, it is easy to believe that the way of things is division and separation. But hedgerows suggest another way to live: layered, porous, complex and interconnected, creating space not just for encounter but for new life through that encounter. This is how I picture the Kingdom that Jesus speaks about and so often found solace in: a world of intermingling and ever-growing aliveness. I think Jesus would have walked with the hedgerows had he lived in Devon. I think he would have used them to speak of boundary-crossing between heaven and Earth, clean and unclean, Jew and Gentile. I think he would have pointed to them and said, see the tangled beauty of these? They are what the Kingdom is like: held and open, living and lifegiving. This is what I want our future to be too.

As I walk these old lanes, I am deepening into my hedgerow apprenticeship. I am learning to sink my roots in, to tend boundaries with care, to make space for life. I am also finding that there is nothing in the hedgerows that speaks of self-sufficiency. These ancient, interwoven green features that have defined this landscape are here because of relationships between species. It is easy to talk about the interconnectedness of everything, it is another thing to try to live it – to live like gifts, reciprocity, community, are things that might take the weight of our time. These old hedgerows give me a foothold though – they enliven the overused but hard-to-live idea of interconnection, they show me what it looks like and that it is an approach to life that is patient, strong, sustaining, real.

When I reach out my hand I can usually find something edible or beautiful in the hedgerow depending on the time of year: blackberry, hazel, oxeye daisy, pennywort, primrose. Yesterday, it was the cow parsley that really caught my attention: its frothing, foaming flourishing. In a few weeks it will give way to what comes next, just as it has always done, just as this world will always do. On my hedge-edged walks I am in the presence of lives so unlike mine – plants, creatures, the people who have tended and cared for these hedges through generations. I am also in the presence of relationship, and of hope.

Now, with so many crises bearing down on the world, and with anxiety and despair blooming, it is the hedges that remind me of other, older, wiser ways to be. It is the hedges that show me how to root deep into solid ground, and how to reach out to others, and to light, which are so often the same thing.

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