Gaby Hinsliff's Blog, page 7

‘Nigel Farage feels real’: why young British men are drawn to Reform

Once, anti-establishment youth disillusioned with mainstream politics headed left. Now increasing numbers are tilting right. Why?

Josh is 24 years old and works as a carer. It’s not easy work, but he prefers it to his old job in a supermarket: most of his clients are elderly and “just want someone there with them, because they’re lonely”. In his spare time Josh used to be into boxing. But lately he’s got into politics instead.

Like many of his gen Z contemporaries, he’s thoroughly disillusioned with the mainstream kind. “The two parties that have been in power for 100-plus years have done nothing. The economy’s a mess,” he scoffs. But if he sounds like the kind of anti-establishment young person who once rallied to the radical left, Josh’s frustration has taken him in another direction. An ardent leaver in his teens, who backed Boris Johnson in 2019, he now belongs to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

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It’s the age of regret: gen Z grew up glued to their screens, and missed the joy of being human | Gaby Hinsliff

A generation who came of age online now feel deprived of real connections. The upside is they are doing something about it

It’s the love-hate relationship that defined a generation. We think we know all about teenagers and the phones to which they’re so umbilically tied: sleeping with them under the pillow, panicking at the prospect of ever being denied wifi, so glued to the screen that they’re oblivious to the world unfolding around them. Yet the first generation to have never really known a life without social media – the drug that primarily keeps them coming back to their phones for more – is now grown up enough to reflect on what it may have done to them, and the answers are almost enough to break your heart.

Two-thirds of 16- to 24-year-olds think social media does more harm than good and three-quarters want tougher regulation to protect younger people from it, according to polling for the New Britain Project, a thinktank founded by a former teacher, Anna McShane. Half think they spent too much time on it when they were younger, with regret highest among those who started using social media youngest. And most tellingly of all, four in five say they’d keep their own children away from it for as long as they could if they became parents. This isn’t how anyone talks about something they love, but how you look back on a relationship that was in retrospect making you miserable.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Labour has humane and popular plans to stand up for UK workers. Why dilute them? | Gaby Hinsliff

Angela Rayner’s employment rights bill is precisely why many voted for this government. Why be embarrassed about a defining policy?

One step forward, two steps back. Angela Rayner’s employment rights bill is back in the Commons this week, stuffed with ideas for improving everyday working life: that’s the big step forward for a government that was elected on a promise of radical change. The weekend headlines, however, were all about what won’t be changing after all. The so-called right to switch off – an early Rayner idea about legislating to prevent employees being pestered by out-of-hours calls and emails, which was already presumed dead due to not being in the bill – was ritually killed off once again for the Sunday papers, with a briefing that it still won’t be in the bill after fresh amendments are tabled on Tuesday.

Presumably the idea was to reassure businesses fearful of extra regulatory burdens, on top of the looming April hike in employers’ national insurance. But since it’s the tax rise they’re really worried about, in practice it offers minimal reassurance while generating hostile headlines about a supposed humiliation for Rayner (despite Downing Street’s best efforts to convey that the prime minister has never been closer to his deputy, a former care worker who is one of vanishingly few senior politicians to have done low-paid, insecure work herself in the past). The wary, almost apologetic way the government keeps approaching this admittedly complex bill suggests it’s still not entirely sure of its ground – and that makes its opponents scent blood.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Trump and Starmer sat side by side – and the gulf between two nations seemed wider than ever | Gaby Hinsliff

The US president’s day of diplomacy involved an alleged rapist, a claimed trafficker and then Britain’s PM. It said everything about our new era

Shortly after Keir Starmer arrived in Washington to fight for the future of Europe, two men who make a mockery of everything he stands for touched down on American soil. The toxic YouTube influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate have spent years under investigation in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking, which they deny, Andrew is now wanted by British police over allegations of rape, and both brothers for tax evasion in this country. But to MAGAworld they are martyrs, unjustly persecuted abroad for the crime of saying what they think on the internet.

Sitting beside Starmer, Trump protested that he knew ‘nothing about’ the Tates’ triumphant homecoming, though it follows reported US diplomatic pressure on the Romanian government to lift its travel ban and Andrew Tate has bragged of his friendship with the president’s son. But it was a small, stark reminder of just how far apart our two continents have become. It’s freedom of speech that reliably seems to galvanise Trumpworld, not the freedom of millions of Europeans to live in peace along Russia’s borders; as the president breezily told his cabinet this week, “we’ll have Europe take care of that”. Yet on the crucial question Starmer brought to Washington - of whether America will in turn take care of its old allies, offering the military backup without which its forces will be dangerously exposed - the best that could be said for Trump’s answer was that it wasn’t the anticipated outright no, and even that may come with trade-related strings attached.

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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Ungovernable by Simon Hart review – House of ill repute

Jaw-dropping revelations from a Conservative former chief whip call into question not just the system, but his own judgment

In the small hours of the morning, the phone rings beside Simon Hart’s bed. On the line is a drunk Tory MP, claiming to be stuck in a Bayswater brothel with a woman he thinks might be a KGB agent, who has just demanded £500 “and left me in a room with twelve naked women and CCTV”.

It sounds like something from The Thick of It, but for the chief whip to the last Conservative government, calls like this were all part of a day’s (or night’s) work.

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Let’s not leave the baby-making debate to Musk and Vance – the left has a stake in this too | Gaby Hinsliff

Rightwingers calling for higher birthrates may be disturbing, but having children is the ultimate gesture of confidence in the future for us all

Roses are red, violets are blue. Rightwing politicians around the world want women to have more babies, and if you find this idea the opposite of romantic – well, me too.

Pronatalism’s cause is not exactly helped by having as its best-known figureheads JD “childless cat lady” Vance and Elon Musk, seemingly on a personal mission to reverse what he calls the “underpopulation crisis”. Even Nigel Farage, a twice-divorced father of four who takes the firmly libertarian view that private lives are no business of the state, squirmed when tackled on the subject this week, before eventually venturing that the west had “kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture” and that “of course, we need higher birthrates, but we’re not going to get higher birthrates in this country until we can get some sense of optimism”. But do progressives, who are after all supposed to be in the optimism business, have a stake in the baby-making debate too? A new collection of essays published this week by the cross-party Social Market Foundation (SMF) thinktank argues that they should.

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What role could the UK play in ending the Ukraine war? – Politics Weekly

Donald Trump’s plans to end the war in Ukraine have taken centre stage this week. But, with Ukraine excluded from US-Russia talks, could they really accept what might be on offer? And what role will the UK and Europe play?John Harris hears from diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour and columnist Gaby Hinsliff about what a resolution could look like

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This is Farage’s moment of reckoning: he can choose British voters – or Putin and Trump | Gaby Hinsliff

The Reform leader and Kemi Badenoch have struck the wrong alliances at the wrong time. Ukrainian sovereignty is a cause close to rightwing hearts

Timing is everything in politics. So when the leader of the opposition realised she was due to be making a speech heaping praise on Donald Trump, just as the president plunged her own country into a national security crisis, you might think even she would have hesitated.

But seemingly nothing can keep Kemi Badenoch from a culture war, not even the threat of an actual war. So, at a rightwing conference in London on Monday morning, she duly ripped into corporate diversity policies, climate activism, Keir Starmer taking the knee four and a half years ago, and various other imagined threats to western civilisation that are not forcing Britain to consider deploying troops against them, before concluding triumphantly that when people ask her what difference a change of leader makes, her answer is, “Take a look at President Trump.”

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist

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The US has sold Ukraine down the river – and shown Britain what ‘America first’ means in practice | Gaby Hinsliff

A superpower that once built alliances across the west is dramatically reorienting itself – and so too must its former allies

Wrapped in a flag and clutching a beer, Marc Fogel looked understandably overwhelmed. The 63-year-old teacher from Pennsylvania was safe at last, freed via prisoner exchange from the Russian jail where he served three and a half years for possessing the marijuana his family says he took for back pain. His homecoming this week was just the kind of heartwarming scene Donald Trump needs to show ordinary Americans that cosying up to Vladimir Putin’s murderous regime could pay off, and the president himself said he hoped it marked “the beginning of a relationship where we can end that war” in Ukraine.

Or to put it another way, hours later his new defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, was in Brussels dictating the effective terms of Ukraine’s surrender, over Ukrainian heads and on terms that a former head of MI6 has called a “golden opportunity” for Putin to walk away.

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Is the assisted dying bill doomed? – Politics Weekly UK

The spotlight was back on the assisted dying bill this week after it was revealed that the requirement for a high court judge to decide on cases was to be scrapped. Those in favour of assisted dying say the change will make it safer, but does it undermine trust in the bill? Gaby Hinsliff, in for John Harris, talks to our deputy political editor, Jessica Elgot, about the changes, and asks Kit Malthouse and Jess Asato – MPs on different sides of the debate – what happens next

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