Increasingly, younger Britons on both the left and right are united by wanting somewhere to live, and wanting it to be nice. They pointed out that the traditional communities which conservatives claim to support were basically 15-minute cities. After one Conservative MP claimed it was an international socialist plot, there was a lot of pushback from mostly younger, conservative-leaning commentators. The furore over the concept of 15-minute cities was one recent example. We’ve even noticed a shift amongst more committed devotees of the centre-right. When Sir Keir Starmer recently, and belatedly, promised planning reform, he was simply saying what you’d expect from the leader of a party that’s become the default option for anyone under 40. The biggest, most important debates in the UK, such as over housing and the British relationship with the EU, have a distinctly age-related component. In a now widely-cited piece, John-Ben Murdoch has explored how in the English-speaking world, the migration of voters from left to right as they get older has stopped with the millennial generation. The shift is probably most obvious in the UK. It is this debate, not only over what to do but whether to do anything, that will increasingly and more obviously come to shape Europe’s political direction in the future. This has been one away from a traditional left-right divide, towards one in Europe’s ageing societies between the young and the old, between people agitating for change and those who are comfortable with moving slowly, if at all. But there has been a tectonic shift in European politics. Political parties have, for the most part, stayed the same, and political debates frequently seem to have an infinite loop-like quality as we try to solve the last crisis when we should be preparing for the next. Looking at European politics can feel like a case of plus ça change.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |