Want Gen Z to believe in democracy? Why not actually try it
Reports that Gen Z are increasingly disillusioned with democracy aren’t surprising. Too many powers in Britain have been handed to unelected quangocrats with no skin in the game while autocracies like China and the UAE are offering superficially attractive alternatives, says James Price
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” A recent poll has suggested that many young people, with their infamous short attention spans, have only ingested the first half of Churchill’s famous quip. It shows that Gen Z are ambivalent at best about democracy, with 52 per cent saying they thought “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”.
As shocking as this may seem at first flush, one has to consider the material outcomes that our democratic institutions have delivered. No growth since 2008, soaring house prices, unsustainable mass migration, crime, social tension and rising debts. Allied to this (or likely caused by it) has been the total diminution in quality of elected politicians in recent decades.
Democratic safeguards have been eroded
I would contend though, that for nearly 30 years, we have lost many of our democratic safeguards in Britain, and declining standards of living are the result. Allow me to make my case. When Labour won last July, only 200 people changed jobs across the whole of the British Government; 100 ministers of the crown, and 100 or so special advisers, political appointees with no direct executive authority.
This means that the same officials who were charged with carrying out Rwanda were then in charge of scrapping it. Those watering down net zero are now tasked with accelerating it. And so on.
And even those ministers, appointed by His Majesty on the advice of the Prime Minister, are not really in charge in many meaningful ways. Generations of their predecessors have frittered and sluiced their powers away to unelected, unaccountable quangos, arms-length bodies and regulators, not to mention the real power, the civil service itself.
Many of these people are wonderful, dedicated and talented, but they lack the kind of skin in the game that democracies are supposed to generate, tying success to results. And with only a few cogs in a vast government machine exposed to the feedback mechanism of the electoral cycle, improvement is increasingly impossible. The mouthpiece-ministers take the fall for particularly egregious mistakes, but their replacements still have their schedules, speaking notes and briefing packs written by the same people, regardless of which party supposedly sits in charge.
Mouthpiece-ministers take the fall for particularly egregious mistakes, but their replacements still have their schedules, speaking notes and briefing packs written by the same people, regardless of which party supposedly sits in charge
In very real ways then, Britain has ceased to become a proper democracy, and is instead run by the unelected. And yet our own political class fare worse than the professional autocrats. China is outperforming and undercutting the West in many sectors – including in AI, where the US appeared to have confidently stolen a march. More benevolently, the UAE is increasingly attracting ambitious Brits with promises of safety, growth, and opulence increasingly denied them at home.
If we want young people to appreciate the superiority of democracy in a world where such alternatives exist, we should do two things. The first is to actually try some more democracy of our own. We need to strip powers from unelected regulators and quangocrats and vest them back in ministers directly. Let them sink or swim on what they can achieve in office, rather than hide behind layers of bureaucracy.
The second is to highlight the flaws in rival systems. Deepseek may be an impressive recent addition to the LLM market, but it can’t even talk about Taiwan or Tiananmen Square. Worse than this, prolonged exposure to Tiktok videos leads young people to have a more positive attitude towards the CCP. Switching off this Communist super weapon would do wonders for young people, not least by shutting off the pipeline of totalitarian propaganda and lies.
Britain isn’t alone in malign foreign actors manipulating our attitudes towards representative democracy, nor are we alone in the vacillating weakness of our leaders. But after the sock-puppeting of poor Joe Biden, it’s so invigorating to see Donald Trump return to power and clearly be in charge. He will sink or swim on his flurry of executive orders. Our governments should have the same confidence in leadership and then put themselves before the people. As another great Conservative leader, Margaret Thatcher, once said, : “We will tell the people the truth. And the people will be our judge”.
James Price is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute