According to research Britain’s under 30’s are more inclined to lean to the right politically…the BBC in its radio trailer for a programme on this thought this might be a bit of a problem and have set out to investigate.
Generation Right
It’s a commonplace thought that the young start their lives as idealistic left-wingers, only to become more conservative with age. But are today’s twenty-somethings going to debunk that as a myth? Extensive polling shows that in many respects, young people now are to the political right of their parents and grandparents when they were young. Their attitudes often appear characterised by a buccaneering individualism, a suspicion of collectivism and a greater scepticism towards the state.
Declan Harvey of Newsbeat and a team of young journalists examine the implications and ask what it might mean for the welfare state, social institutions and the political landscape in the future.
The programme is just an excuse to target all the favourite bête noires of the left…individualism, the consumer society, the right wing media…oh and thinks that the decline in ‘collectivist norms’ may also be to blame…since when has communism been the ‘norm’ here?….’here’ being outside the BBC bubble.
‘It looks at the possible suggested causes, from the impact of policies which have reduced the level of support young people receive from the state, media coverage of the benefits system, the general decline in collectivist norms since the late 1970s, the rise of the consumer culture, to the role of social media which put the life and social interactions of the individual at the centre of everything.’
The BBC is worried about the rise of what is obviously the next Hitler Youth who will abandon the vulnerable and workless to heartless payday loan companies, who will throw them out of social housing to live on the mean streets of London now lined with spikes to fend of the verminous homeless and it’ll be a toss up whether granny dies from lack of food or by freezing to death under this callous, uncaring, uncharitable regime.
Yes the BBC is concerned that the youth will vote for the ‘nasty’ Tories….who can doubt we will now see a raft of programming targeted at such ‘youth’ with the aim of re-educating them, with rebalancing their obviously juvenile and immature prejudices and encouraging them to look on life in a more humane, understanding and compassionate, left wing way.
In all seriousness the BBC has completely lost the plot. This is a highly political programme that insults, denigrates and maligns those with right wing views, treating them as if they are a problem.
What editor thought this might be a good idea in the run up to an election to be pumping out what amounts to left wing propaganda berating these young people for not taking the same line as the sanctimonious and self-righteous worthies of the BBC?
They are just stuck with their sixth form politics at the bbc aren’t they?
It even says in that piece that people mature from left to right wing politics as they grow up but somehow that doesn’t happen to left wing people in the media and arts bubbles does it……
The research itself doesn’t surprise me at all.
“suspicion of collectivism”
Entirely sensible to be suspicious, or rather terrified, of collectivism given the mega-deaths caused in its pursuit. (Not that the Hobbsbawn venerating BBC ever let that truth surface….
Secondly – Nazism was almost by definition a collectivist enterprise – it was all about race and nationality and it was intensely antagonistic to individuals. Also note mega-deaths associated with its vile world view
There has never been a successful socialist country – Name one. The BBC never does. Blair and Kinnock have done quite well and they still hang on to their money. In fact it is very difficult to explain what socialism is.
It might be worth asking famous socialists like Ken Livingstone, Diane Abbott, Tariq Ali, and other supporters of the socialist regime in Venuzuela, or contact the Venuzuela Solidarity Campaign. The problem they all face are the residual bourgeois values, held by uncooperative middle classes, and external plots encouraged by the CIA. Hence the need for censorship, ever increasing and autocratic power of the government, and longer working hours.
Socialism from Soviet Russia thru Mao to present-day Venezuela is never held under the spotlight by the BBC.
Unlike, say, Pinochet’s Chile.
Clearer proof of its institutional left wing bias you could not hope to find.
As Maggie said-socialism inevitably collapses once its paid shills run out of other peoples money.
1976, 2000, 2008 prove it all too well.
But still almost 50% of the Electorate don’t see it.
French youth denounce the sixties generation, who wanted freedom without responsibility. Generation Identitaire. No, you won’t see them on the BBC, not even their occupation of a mosque and occupation of the French Socialist Party HQ. Here is their declaration of war – arty perhaps, but from the young.
From their ‘manifesto’ they sound like FN storm troopers and as such are part of the problem not the solution.
Generation Identitaire
We are the generation of those who die for a look askance, refused a cigarette or a style that bothers.
We are the generation of the ethnic divide, the total bankruptcy of living together, miscegenation imposed.
We are the generation of double punishment: condemned to bail out too generous social system with others to continue to be with us.
We are the generation victim of the May 68. From one who claimed to want to emancipate ourselves from the weight of tradition, knowledge, and authority to school but was first emancipated from its own responsibilities.
We closed your history books to find our memory.
We stopped believing that Kader could be our brother, our planet and humanity town our family. We discovered that we had roots, ancestors, and therefore future.
Our only legacy is our land, our blood, our identity. We are the heirs of our destiny.
We turned off the TV down to the streets again. We painted our slogans on the walls, chanted “Youth in power” in our megaphones, waved our flags up high hit lambda. This lambda adorning the shield glorious Spartans is our symbol. You do not understand what it means? It means we will not back down, we will not give up. Tired of all your cowardice, we deny any battle, no challenge.
You’re Thirty Glorious, PAYG pensions, SOS Racisme, “diversity”, family reunification, sexual freedom and bags of rice Bernard Kouchner. We have 25% unemployment, the social debt, the explosion of a multicultural society, racism, anti-white, broken families, and a young French soldier who died in Afghanistan.
You will not have us with a condescending gaze of youth employment and a pat on the shoulder for us, life is a struggle.
We do not need your youth policy. Youth is our policy.
Make no mistake: this text is not a simple manifesto is a declaration of war.
We are tomorrow you yesterday, we are the unique identity generation.
Never mind, Mum and Dad will carry on indulging you.
“This is a highly political programme that insults, denigrates and maligns those with right wing views, treating them as if they are a problem.”
Inhabitants of reality might like to reflect that this verdict is entirely uninformed by any knowledge of the contents of the programme, which will not be broadcast for another five days.
Good point.
No doubt Alan also reviews books he has not read, films he has not seen and music he has not listened to.
Justathought
I imagine your reality is not unlike one inhabited by Bear Grylls or that of the Truman Show….a life lived in the Bubble unrelated to real life.
As for ‘entirely uninformed’….er…apart from a trail on the radio which said such right wing views might be a problem and …oh yes..the extensive blurb that goes with the programme.
So other than that you’re absolutely right….I have absolutely no idea of the contents of the programme, the ideas and concerns of the makers of the programme, nor the concept and intentions behind it.
It is in fact that very concept of the programme that is being objected to…so no need to have seen it yet…..which you could tell by actually reading the post I suppose never mind the fact that the programme hasn’t been broadcast yet……just why does a right leaning youth scare the BBC so much that they have to examine it…and when they finally declare a verdict…what then? Because we all know what the verdict will be.
The BBC will declare there is a ‘problem’ and programmes aimed at the ‘youth’ will be shaped to make them more cuddly and liberal.
Thank you for clarifying. Clarifying that because you’ve made up your mind before actually hearing what’s in the programme, your opinions when you’ve heard it will be worthless. The definition of ‘prejudice’, in fact. There is nothing in the description that faintly justifies the dramatic vocabulary you employ. The description of what it actually means to have right wing views (buccaneering individualism, a suspicion of collectivism and a greater scepticism towards the state) is a pretty good encapsulation of everything that’s good about classical liberalism.
“This is a highly political programme that insults”
– evidence? you have none
“denigrates”
– ditto
and maligns those with right wing views, treating them as if they are a problem.
– your words, not those of the programme, which nobody has actually heard yet.
The word ‘scare’, which you have used several times, is your own fabrication.
Now I know it’s fine to write a review of a radio programme that I haven’t heard, I’m going to go on Amazon and review some novels I haven’t read. After all, I’ve read the blurb and I hate the publisher, so it’s bound to be shit.
I heard a trailer – and it sounded surprised that young people could possibly be inclining to the right.Indeed that appeared to be the whole purpose of the programme – exploring this strange new phenomenon.
No doubt, in the interests of balance, the BBC will investigate the left-wing ethos of our education system, from multiculturalism to global warming.
Let us know when it’s scheduled, ‘Just a Thought’.
Generation Right.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b046kr4j
The pre-programme spiel by the BBC says:
“Extensive polling shows that in many respects, young people now are to the political right of their parents and grandparents when they were young. Their attitudes often appear characterised by a suspicion of collectivism and a greater scepticism towards the state”.
And..
“Declan Harvey, a reporter on Newsbeat, and a team of young journalists examine the implications and ask what it might mean for the welfare state and the political landscape in the future.”
It is the BBC spiel, no one else’s and it certainly sounds to me like they are worried.
Or will there be a programme soon critically analysing how the left and the socialist experiment not only in this country but across the world has not produced one successful country? The opposite in fact it has killed millions.
It is so good that the young, despite the indoctrination by socialist teachers, unions, the idiotic Labour party and the left wing nut jobs at the BBC, are now thinking for themselves and realise that only free enterprise will bring them success and fulfilment without robbing the tax payers.
Looks like “buccaneering individualism” didn’t fit the narrative so that was quickly scrubbed. Funny that.
Maybe the young generation is realising that the older ‘me’ generation has already spent future income. The old with their mortgages paid off, index linked pensions, winter allowance, free travel etc. The young with a rising pension age, no hope of owning a home, defined benefit pensions, student loans, colossal government debt to be serviced etc. What might happen eh?
’Maybe the young generation is realising that the older ‘me’ generation has already spent future income. ‘
That suggests the ‘older generation’ somehow manipulated the economy to suit its own greedy ends. How so? And what did we spend this ‘future income’ on because I sure did miss my share. Or maybe you’re confusing it with Brown’s debt pile which went on public sector wages and non-jobs and left us without so much as decent roads to drive on?
All I can remember is not living in a house with a fridge in it till I was 22, 23 for a phone, 32 for a shower and I was 42 before my wife and I took a foreign holiday together, 47 before we had what you could call by modern standards a new kitchen. We were both taught to live within our means, not take on loans we couldn’t afford, always have breathing space in our budgets and save for a rainy day. We took the kids on holiday to Wales and Cornwall and taking them out for a meal was a rare treat – a couple of times a year – not the norm as it seems to be now. We have been in the same house for 32 years so go do the maths on a 25-year mortgage.
As for the ‘younger generation’, look around the shops, coffee shops and café bars of a weekend in any city centre: they’re not full of baby boomers – they’re too shagged out after a week of childcare, chasing around after aged parents and managing budgets so they can help their kids and grandkids out financially. Look around and see who’s carrying the takeaway coffee, or sandwich or packaged meal because, well, they’re part of life’s essentials, aren’t they? And financing a gap year is much more important than paying off a student loan ‘cos a gap year is, like, a right innit?
So, final salary pensions:
’The decision to remove the so-called dividend tax credit has been largely blamed for the demise and closure of many final salary pension schemes.
Up until the 1997 Budget, pension funds received a tax credit of 20 per cent on dividends received from British companies. This was to offset corporation tax already paid by companies on their profits. Dividends were assumed to be net of income tax, but pension funds were exempt so received money back as a tax credit.
The then Chancellor Gordon Brown cancelled the dividend tax credit on company pensions in 1997 and this has had a devastating effect on many people’s retirement pots.’
So don’t blame Brown, blame the ‘older generation’, eh? You might as well blame Cammill Laird for the sinking of the Titanic.
The ‘me generation’ – convenient scapegoats for have it all today, borrow and spend like there’s no tomorrow, young victimhood Britain.
I should hope the young are changing. The English face an existential threat and in any healthy society this leads to an outbreak of reality.
Liberalism is now too discredited to survive much longer. Look at what liberal intervention has achieved in Iraq!
Heh heh. In the 90s, I went to a ‘Logan’s Run’ themed 30th birthday party for a friend in the US where everyone turned up dressed in satin like these ponces with little red discs glued to their hands. Quite funny.
Just to take issue with you again Alan, Hitler & the SS were very much of the left, and no one at the time would have ever thought of them being right wing.
This arose when he invaded Russia, and everyone knew that Uncle Joe Stalin was left wing. They just couldn’t understand the concept of two left wing constructs at war with each other, and so they looked for the opposite to direct their hate.
But look at the history. Hitler was a member of the German Workers party before changing its name to the National Socialists (the clues in the name!).
Benito Mussolini had his roots in the Italian Labour Party, and Oswald Moseley was a Minister in the Labour government before forming the British Union of Fascists !
The same with todays BNP, which apart from having a different target for its hate than the fascist left, has very similar political beliefs.
Being right wing for me means being a free market libertarian. Small government, low taxes, fewer laws, people standing on their own two feet, and taking responsibility for themselves.
Nothing to do with the picture painted of uniformed thugs, and millenarianism.
“…But look at the history.”
Alas, too few ever do. I doubt that schools ever teach the socialist origins of the Nazi Party, nor of Hitler’s socialist convictions and his dreams for a ‘collectivized Europe’ united beneath a Nazi flag; a mega state governed from the centre under which all were to be subsumed, beaten down and enslaved to the glory of the Greater Reich.
You are correct to highlight not only Nazism’s socialist origins, but also Mussolini’s deeply-entrenched socialist beginnings (he was the editor of Italy’s leading socialist newspaper for many years).
Somehow – and having read many histories of the period I still cannot understand why – progressive cowards and liars have decided Nazi Germany was a ‘right wing’ construct. This is entirely inaccurate. Nazism was fascism of the Left; it started as a socialist worker’s movement and until his dying day Hitler insisted on its socialist, agrarian aims. Nazism wasn’t communism, but just like Stalin’s murderous doctrine, it emerged out of the deeply-held socialist convictions of its ideologues.
In the end, after careful analysis of the facts, we see that the Axis powers were all politically aligned; and all three dragged the rest of the world into the horrors of WWII.
Generations have been lied to – something that liberal left fascist apologists on the BBC and in the msm everywhere are more than happy to continue doing.
You only have to read Mein Kampf to understand the collectivist ethos of the Nazi party. How anyone could conflate it with conservative views is beyond me.
Thoughtful You take things too seriously. You should read this site more often.
‘A new book by authors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldrige uncovers the secret war-time story of how the RAF dropped leaflets instead of bombs.
According to the book, Nazi officials decided that they would not give any publicity to the Beveridge Report, even though one suggested ‘our enemies are taking over national socialist ideas’.
Our national socialits ideas’? But we’re always told that the Nazis, the National Socialists, weren’t socialists. They were obviously deluding themselves then.
The Nazis were socialists, Labour are socialists….might explain why Labour were so keen to fling open the borders and let half of Europe march in here….success at last!’
Reference by me to Nazis being rightwing is simply parodying the BBC’s favoured narrative of the ‘Right’.
Take an overall view of a post, the narrative intent, and don’t cherry pick individual words to take issue with. The words are there for a reason.
If the BBC attacks it then it is right wing. Simple enough?
Hasn’t heard the programme, and the description given doesn’t anywhere say ‘the BBC thought this might be a bit of a problem’.
So that’ll be another fail Alan. You’re rubbish!
This is going to be good: a bunch of media liberals sitting around talking about ‘the right’.
It tells it’s own story. Add up UKIPs support to the Tories (both ‘right wing’ in BBC terms) and half the country is on the right but our State broadcaster still reports on them like a Victorian explorer talking about his experiences with a tribe of New Guinea cannibals.
Having seen the leftist brainwashing my children and grandchildren have had to endure through our glorious education system manned by unionised teaching ‘professionals’ who in the year 2014 still can’t come to terms with the concept of performance-related pay, it is nothing less than miraculous that any of them should end up leaning politically to the right.
Plus under the 13 years of Socialist UK Government send our Nations academic achievements plummeting down the world rankings from being in the the top 10 to now in the late 20s
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25187997
Speaking as someone under 30, I suspect it may have something to do with growing up in the loving embrace of New Labour’s PC MC socialist utopia.
I believe labour’s education system has backfired. Kids today are tested more at a national level at an earlier age. SAT scores did not exist back in my day, they were only ever mentioned in American movies.
So after 10+ years of having exams rather than the old school tests, this will make children more competitive, a bit more mean and nasty. Great fodder for future right wing votes.