The right finally discovers that life sucks for Millennials, but guess who they still blame

Well, well, well, if it isn’t The Right suddenly noticing that millennials aren’t all avocado-stuffed snowflakes swanning about in oat flat whites and moral certainties. According to The Critic – a publication so right-wing it makes Jacob Rees-Mogg look like a performance artist in drag – young people are struggling. Struggling, I tell you. Nicolas, 30 ans, is in a flatshare. Drinking tepid £7 IPAs. Paying taxes and not seeing the benefit. Who could have caused such a tragedy?

In a piece that reads like Domminic Cummings doing stand-up at a Clerkenwell supper club, The Critic introduces us to poor Nick, a white-collar London professional earning just enough to pay for everyone else’s lifestyles.

This includes Karim, the Somali drug-dealing rapper (yes, really, they went there, with the heavily racially coded name and all); Simon and Linda, those parasitic pensioners with triple-locked cruises and four BTLs in Tooting; and, naturally, the Great British Aid Budget, which apparently is single-handedly hoovering up Nick’s salary and funnelling it to interpretive dance workshops in Mogadishu.

Empathy for millennials

Now, let’s be fair: the piece does at least acknowledge that Nick’s woes are not the result of laziness, fecklessness, or spending too much time making beaded bracelets in Ibiza. No, the article actually suggests he’s being shafted. Not by bad decisions or excessive brunch, but by a rigged social contract that’s got him trapped between spiralling rent, student loan repayments, and high marginal taxes.

This, from The Critic! A magazine that usually reacts to empathy for millennials like Dracula to garlic bread.

This being The Critic, once the violin solo ends, the real agenda kicks in. The villains of the piece aren’t just Simon and Linda, whose decade-long property binge now entitles them to life off the wages of others whilst calling them lazy. No – the real enemy is Karim, who smokes weed, sends money to Somalia, and – worst of all – has not read Jordan Peterson.

Is a shift coming?

It’s all very neat. The narrative, not unlike the inside of Simon and Linda’s rental property, is carefully staged: boomers are gently chided, but never truly blamed. Immigrants, benefit claimants and the international development budget are trotted out as easy scapegoats. You know, the usual suspects. It’s less Rawlsian philosophy and more a Daily Mail comments section pretending to be a hard look at the problems facing young people.

Still, this sort of article is interesting, not because it’s right (it isn’t right about aid and benefits being the source of Nick’s problems, although it has some surprisingly valid points about buy to let landlords), but because it shows something is shifting.

The right is waking up to the fact that their future electoral prospects die with the next hip replacement. They’re starting to realise they’ve spent a decade alienating the very generations who, one day, will hold the balance of power.

Who is to blame?

That should be ringing alarm bells over at Labour HQ. Assuming anyone can hear them over the sound of Keir Starmer earnestly repeating “economic stability” and “tough choices” into a mirror.

While the left dithers, the right is laying the groundwork for a new, seductive narrative: Yes, young person, you are screwed, but don’t worry, we know exactly who to blame. Immigrants. Wokery. Overseas aid. Never, ever Simon and Linda’s untaxed housing empire.

It’s emotionally satisfying, narratively clean, and politically potent. In other words, it’s the Reform Party’s raison d’être.

The left’s natural ally

Meanwhile, Labour continues to court the ghost of Peter Mandelson’s swing voter: a mythical 68-year-old homeowner in Nuneaton who’s worried about Labour hiking his taxes and still undecided on Brexit. In doing so, they’re leaving behind people like Nick or Maddy (someone I have written about before). Maddy is young, educated, working hard in the capital, and still one bad paycheque away from having to move back in with her parents in Market Harborough.

Maddy isn’t on benefits. She isn’t a landlord. She’s not asking for much. But her rent is 65% of her salary, her pension is a joke, and her Hinge date last week ended with a £58 tab and the realisation she’ll never afford a one-bed flat.

She’s the left’s natural ally, socially liberal and economically left, and they’re ignoring her. Labour would rather win the votes of angry former Tory voters in Essex than young people (by which I mean anyone under 45) in London.

A new social contract

The right has started to notice and if the Tories or Reform ever work out how to weaponise Nick’s discontent without touching Simon and Linda’s cruise fund, then the left is in for a very rude awakening.

The social contract is breaking and the only ones writing new terms are the people who lit the match in the first place, but sure, tell us again how tuition fees are a distraction.