School indoctrination is turning British youth woke – and Tories remain silent

Britain is becoming more illiberal and unpatriotic as today’s increasingly woke young people become voters.

What I term cultural socialism – the desire to engineer equal outcomes and protect minority identity groups from psychological harm – all too often takes priority for Gen-Z and Millennials over historic British values such as freedom of speech, objective truth and attachment to the nation’s historical accomplishments. Contrary to the fairy tales Conservative politicians tell themselves, these young people will not change their views as they pass through milestones like taking a job, owning a home, or having children. The woke revolution is cultural, not material.

Consider the findings of my recent Policy Exchange reports on the politics of young Britons and public opinion on culture war issues. Among survey respondents under 26, more were opposed to than supportive of the vice-chancellor of Sussex University’s defence of the academic freedom of gender-critical philosopher Kathleen Stock, who was hounded by a mob of campus trans activists. This age group is evenly divided between those who want J K Rowling dropped by her publisher and those who think she should stay, or between those who want Churchill’s statue to be removed or for it to remain in Parliament Square. By contrast, those over 50 support Rowling and Churchill by an overwhelming 85 to five margin.

Young people are influenced by social media, but schools play an important part in reinforcing woke beliefs. A clear majority of British schoolchildren are being indoctrinated with cultural socialist ideas. Among the 18-year-olds I sampled, 63 per cent were taught or heard from an adult at school about at least one of “white privilege”, “unconscious bias” or “systemic racism” – three concepts derived from critical race theory. If we include radical feminist ideas such as “patriarchy” or the idea of many genders, this rises to 78 per cent. Those who have been taught more of these critical social justice (CSJ) ideas are more likely to favour political correctness as a way of protecting disadvantaged groups, rather than viewing PC as stifling free expression.

Those young people who dissent from orthodoxy do so at their own risk, and the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) agenda forces them to self-censor. A majority of Right-leaning young people who said they were taught at least three of five CSJ concepts worried about being expelled or punished for voicing their opinions. Nearly half of Right-leaning employees under 35 who have taken diversity training worry about being fired or losing their reputation.

Peer pressure is often immense, adding to institutional sanctions. The vast majority of young people support Remain, and only a third of Remainer youth say they would date a Leave supporter. Those who discriminate in dating are also far more likely to discriminate in hiring. Eight in 10 young Remainers who say they would be “very uncomfortable” dating a Leaver say, all else being equal, that they would favour a Remainer over a Leaver for a job.

As Ed West remarks in his book Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, there is a powerful anti-Tory youth culture, reproduced in the media and education system, with the momentum of two decades behind it. This outlook has turned more strident among the under-25s as politics becomes moralised into a cosmic struggle between good and evil. No wonder the 2019 election revealed an unprecedented 43-point partisan gap between the voting patterns of the over-65s and under-25s.

This is not about “generation rent” failing to achieve middle-class material goals like home ownership or a family. Neither housing tenure nor marital status makes much difference to attitudes toward free speech or the British past when you control for education, age and other factors. While there is evidence that people shift 20 points to the Right over their lifetime, this is nowhere near enough to make up for the Tories’ current deficit among those under 35. Complacent Conservative strategists who think today’s young people will magically return to the fold once they pay tax, get a mortgage or have a family are in for a rude awakening when, in two decades, they become a natural opposition party like Canada’s Conservatives.

My work shows that the public opposes wokeness by more than two to one across 25 issues, and these questions split the Left while uniting the Right. Yet the Tories seem incapable of tacking the spread of cultural socialism in schools, the NHS, the police and civil service. Conservative MPs lack both the conviction and courage to act, unlike their US Republican counterparts like Ron DeSantis. Too many are business liberals who pray at the altar of economic dynamism and care little about the country’s culture and traditions. This is reflected in the unprecedented net migration figure of over half a million and the years-long inattention to the flow of asylum seekers crossing the Channel.

If most Britons no longer believe in freedom of speech or scientific reason and view our past as a racist nightmare, this is not some “culture war” sideshow. It undermines the very essence of British civilisation.

Eric Kaufmann is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange and professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London