Why Gen Z hates Britain

Patriotism is considered provincial

POPPY SOWERBY

Should we get there, it’s strange to imagine Gen Z in our twilight years. Will our women, scraggly stick-and-poke tattoos blooming over wrinkled arms, still call each other “diva” in their knitting circles? Will the men, swapping gurning to EDM for glacial aquarobics sessions in the local leisure centre, still have their mullets? Will everyone die from vaping at 50?

And, most unknowably, will we import our globalised, post-MeToo, post-BLM politics into the 2070s and beyond? I suspect not. The newest crop of pensioners, who came of age in the late Seventies and early Eighties, was as ever far more likely to vote Conservative than their younger compatriots in last year’s general election. Though each successive wave of bus-pass-holders is likely to be more tolerant — or less baffled, at least — on social issues, the inevitable slide Right is a product of shifting priorities, towards pensions, winter-fuel payments and the ability to secure a doctor’s appointment. Gen Z will not be an exception: a cynical view is that the politics of self-interest always supersede voguish causes, such as quibbling over the definitions of identity, as one heads towards the Stannah stairlift.

So what, then, will become of our most hot-topic political feeling: alienation? This is particularly apparent when it comes to questions of nationhood, as one shocking study conducted by The Times found last week. In it, we learned that just 41% of young people felt national pride, crashing down from 80% in 2004. A number of Gen Zs gave quotes to the paper about what can only be described as a sense of national cringe, with one 22-year-old woman reporting that, when she went abroad on holiday: “I sort of try to be quiet because I don’t want people to know where I’m from.” The vision of this young woman skulking around Seville, only communicating via gestures and whispers for fear of being outed as a tea-sipping, marmalade-chomping Brit abroad is really rather pitiable; after all, these are not sentiments shared by the throngs of Spanish teenagers who foghorn their way around central London every day of the week.

It’s mostly pitiable, though, because it carries a sense of being cowed. The real shamers are not, as our hushed holidaymaker might suggest, the locals in your quaint holiday destination of choice (only the French hate us so viciously as to make it clear to paying tourists) but our peers. I’m unsure how I would respond to a survey question posed in this way — “Would you say it is true or untrue that you’re proud to be British?” — because if we’re honest, saying “it is true” is freighted with the charge of being unchic. A straw-poll survey of a few of my peers threw up similar anxieties; most of the responses were sardonic, fixated on the coolness or otherwise of the British identity; “I would rather be French”, “Everyone’s ugly”. Others cringed at the “self-obsessed” nature of patriotism, with our national “small-man syndrome” speaking to a country in managed decline, harking back to its grand but irreplicable imperial past. The vision of a proud Brit conjures sunburn, obesity, baldness and racism — basically the satirical X personality Big Rob, who hails from “norf ingerland” and punctuates his bigotry with “simple as”. What horrified thinkpieces in the wake of The Times survey have missed is that there is a question within the question here: what we are really asking is not “are you proud to be British?”, but “are you by any chance an uneducated, unfashionable swine?”.

This elision is a huge problem. Firstly, it makes such surveys essentially meaningless; most Gen Zs, asked how being British fares compared with most other nationalities on specific issues, would answer positively — about our imperfect but at least democratic political system, our comparatively tolerant values, our creaking but free-to-use NHS, our distinct national sense of humour, and so on. And secondly, it sneeringly patronises those who do take the question at face value, and who answer earnestly that they are proud to be from the same place as the Industrial Revolution, the Beatles and Bakewell tarts. Yes, young people now are more concerned with the evils of empire — and our meddling in wars in the Middle East — than they were in 2004, when that comparison survey showed four in five were proud to be British. But I suspect these facts have far less bearing on the 2025 responses than the fact that, in a way that would be considered ridiculous 20 years ago, patriotic sentiment has become a marker of class: of course you, intolerant, pink and provincial as you are, are proud of being from this racist, rainy island. You don’t know what I know from my three years reading Noam Chomsky at Bristol, then smoking rollies outside my minimum-wage barista job in Clapton: that we suck and being proud is contemptible. Nigel Farage’s Reform has itself exploited this class-patriotism nexus by suggesting that effete, detached progressive elites “don’t care” about Britain; those progressives themselves would argue that bullish Right-wingers don’t care about anything else, a Little Englander stereotype dripping in disdain. Is it surprising that Gen Z are reluctant to pin their colours to the mast?

All this is to say that the terms of the question of national pride are not neutral: there is a right answer and a wrong answer, and the reputational stakes are increasingly high. The only way that the closeted patriot might circumvent social suicide is by cloaking their feelings in self-hating irony, as was on full display in that god-awful viral Guardian article about “Britishcore” in the autumn. This view holds that Britain should be proud of its quintessential shitness, and that arming yourself with twee Gavin and Stacey-esque patter might soften the blow of being on a perennially sinking ship.

But Britishcore’s hyperspecificity is also its downfall. If Gen Z’s patriotic apathy continues into old age it will not be because of deeply felt spite for British culture, but its having been swamped by globalisation. The Americanisation of youth culture — our politics, our tastes in food, even in the most extreme cases our accents, has reinforced a vassal-state mentality in which everything British is small, crap and has bad teeth; the glamorous, bombastic and earnest pull of American culture, and in particular its politics, has engaged its conservative youth in a new MAGA wave, in a way that would be impossible to replicate here.

A further reason why Gen Z cannot grasp nationhood is because we live our lives on the internet. Online worlds are more integral to youth culture than ever; they are not so much boundaryless utopias as separate provinces of vaguely American values, of hopeless materialism and obsession with individual identity. Why would Gen Z Britons feel particularly united with their countrymen when they spend half their lives clocking up screentime on American influencers via a Chinese shortform video app? It should not be surprising that they feel more connected with others of their generation of what we once called “digital natives”, who share their online slang, meme quotability and profound sense of alienation.

Life moving online also means we are unanchored from place: we work from home rather than schlepping into town centres to mix with our communities; many move abroad and retain remote jobs, ever more disconnected from hometowns. In this, again, national pride’s class valence matters: those in blue-collar jobs are moored alongside their fellow citizens, while the ever-growing tranche of corporate, remote graduate workers are bound only by the strength of their WiFi, having no need to get out of their silk pyjamas and talk to “real people”. They are sucked further into the monoculture of the internet, divorced from the office, tea-break canteen and post-work pub in which you develop local, then greater, loyalties.

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