Young Men to Reform and Restore Britain, Young Women to the Greens. Why?

As a valid generalisation, British politics in the mid-2020s reveals a stark and accelerating divide among the young. Polling from YouGov and others at the start of 2026 shows the Green Party commanding 37 per cent of the under-30 vote overall, surging to 44 per cent among women aged 18-24 compared with just 30 per cent of men in the same cohort. By contrast, Reform UK and its newly minted offshoot Restore Britain share  platform of secure borders, national pride and rejection of “woke ideology” draw disproportionate support from men under 30. Onward’s 2025 polling of 16- to 40-year-olds found Reform leading among men aged 16-25 with 31 per cent, while the Greens polled at 25 per cent among women of the same age. Post-2024 election data confirmed the pattern: young women were twice as likely as young men to back the Greens (23 per cent versus 12 per cent), while young men were twice as likely to choose Reform (12 per cent versus 6 per cent). This is no statistical blip. It is the visible fracture line of a culture war that has left white working-class men in particular feeling demonised, marginalised and written out of the national story.

This divergence is not mysterious. It is the predictable backlash against an ideology that has spent two decades framing whiteness, masculinity and British nationhood as original sins. The institutions that shape the young – schools, universities, the BBC, social media giants and the civil service – have been captured by a worldview that equates British history with oppression, traditional masculinity with toxicity and any concern about mass immigration with racism. White working-class boys, the demographic least likely to attend university (therefore the least brainwashed) and most exposed to the sharp end of open borders, have absorbed the message that they are the problem. Their response is a turn towards parties that refuse to apologise for Britain’s existence. Young women, by contrast, have been marinated in the same ideology but experience it as validation: a moral crusade that flatters their empathy, elevates climate alarmism and ‘social justice’, and offers a politics of compassion without the grubby realism of economics or security.

The alienation of young white working-class men is not abstract. Deindustrialisation hollowed out the heavy industry where their fathers and grandfathers built ships, forged steel and mined coal. Successive governments, Labour and Conservative alike, replaced those jobs with low-wage service roles increasingly filled by cheap migrant labour. Net migration hit record highs under both main parties, yet any working man who pointed out the downward pressure on wages, the strain on housing or the grooming scandals in Rotherham and Oldham was branded “far right”. Restore Britain’s manifesto, low tax, small government, secure borders, traditional Christian principles and free speech, speaks directly to men who have watched their communities change beyond recognition while being told their discomfort is bigotry. Reform UK’s appeal taps the same vein: unfiltered talk of immigration, free speech and national decline. These are not “angry young men” in the media caricature; they are rational actors who see a political class that lectures them about “privilege” while their own prospects shrink.

Universities amplify the insult. Young men are now a minority on campus, where courses in gender studies, critical race theory and decolonisation portray the British Empire as an unmitigated evil and “whiteness” as a structural advantage. Working-class lads who never went to university encounter the same narrative through schools, councils, the NHS, even the armed forces. Diversity quotas, unconscious-bias training and “equity” policies explicitly disadvantage them. When a white boy from a sink estate is told he must “check his privilege” while his female classmate is encouraged to see herself as a victim of patriarchy, the hypocrisy is glaring. Rational analysis cuts through the cant: this is not progress; it is reverse discrimination dressed in the language of justice. Men under 30, especially those without degrees, have noticed. They flock to Reform and Restore Britain not out of hatred but out of a basic desire for fairness, belonging and a country that puts its own people first.

Young women under 30 have taken the opposite path, and the reasons are equally rooted in the cultural capture of their generation. The Greens’ surge among them is no accident. Zack Polanski’s rebranded party offers a perfect blend of climate catastrophism, open-border compassion and identity politics that aligns with the worldview taught in sixth forms and lecture halls. Women outperform men at GCSE and A-level; they dominate humanities and social sciences degrees. There they absorb the idea that the planet is in peril, borders are immoral and Britain’s past is a catalogue of shame. Social media reinforces it: Instagram and TikTok algorithms feed girls endless content on Gaza, the climate emergency and “toxic masculinity”. The result is a politics of feeling over facts. The Greens promise to tax the rich, nationalise utilities, legalise drugs and dissolve borders in the name of “eco-populism” and global justice. For young women who have grown up in relatively insulated middle-class bubbles, this feels virtuous. They do not yet pay the bills for net zero, queue for NHS appointments strained by mass migration or worry about knife crime in the way young men on council estates do.

Psychological and biological differences probably play a part too, though the woke establishment denies them. Decades of research in evolutionary psychology show men tend to be more systemising and threat-sensitive, attuned to group competition, resource scarcity and invasion of territory. Women, on average, score higher on empathy and nurturing. Woke ideology weaponises the latter while pathologising the former. Climate activism becomes a moral extension of care; concern about immigration is reframed as lack of empathy. Add the collapse of the family, with rising single motherhood, declining marriage rates and fatherlessness, and young women are left without the traditional counterweights of male realism. They turn instead to a Green Party that offers sisterhood, moral superiority and a future in which feelings trump hard trade-offs.

The sexes are moving apart because the culture has told them diametrically opposed stories about Britain. For young white working-class men, every institution screams that they are over-privileged relics of a racist, sexist past. Their wages stagnate, their communities fracture under demographic change and their speech is policed. Reform and Restore Britain offer the simple, sane response: Britain belongs to the British. For young women, the same institutions affirm their victimhood and moral insight. The planet needs saving, the borders need opening and the patriarchy needs dismantling. The Greens provide the outlet.

This divergence is not healthy. A nation cannot thrive when half its young citizens reject its history and the other half feel rejected by its present. The anti-woke insight is that wokeness itself created the fracture. By prioritising group grievance over individual merit, by pathologising the majority population and by subordinating national interest to globalist pieties, it alienated the very people it claimed to uplift. White working-class men did not choose marginalisation; they had it imposed upon them by a political class that sneered at their concerns while importing voters to replace them. Young women, meanwhile, were flattered into a politics of performative virtue that ignores the real costs of unlimited compassion.

The implications are profound. A permanent gender split in the under-30 cohort threatens social cohesion, family formation and the very possibility of a shared national identity. Parties like Reform and Restore Britain will continue to consolidate male support by speaking plainly about immigration, free speech and sovereignty. The Greens will hoover up female votes with ever more radical environmental and identity demands. Britain’s ruling class, still wedded to the diversity cult, responds with more lectures on “far-right extremism” rather than addressing the legitimate grievances of its own young men.

The solution is not to pander or to mirror the left’s identity politics with a male version. It is to reject the entire woke framework. Restore a politics that values merit, borders and Britishness without apology. Teach history honestly, not as a morality play. End the demonisation of the white working class. Recognise that men and women are different and that a healthy society needs both. Until that happens, the sex schism will widen, and Britain will pay the price in fractured families, resentful young men and a politics increasingly detached from reality. It’s almost as if it were planned.

The young are not the future in some abstract sense; they are the nation in embryo. If half of them feel the nation no longer belongs to them, the consequences will not be confined to polling booths. From an anti-woke perspective, the flight of young men to Reform and Restore Britain is not a problem to be solved. It is the healthy immune response of a people who refuse to be erased. The real insanity is the ideology that made such a response necessary.