Article

Culture

Education

Politics

26 February 2025

6 min read

Does Gen Z crave the dictator?

If young Brits are turning away from democracy, here’s how to stop it.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A cat with a small black moustache marking snarls while sitting in front of a tablet.

Kanashi on Unsplash

I knew something was seriously wrong when I hosted a live interactive online assembly for a couple of thousand sixth formers last year. Given a range of emojis the one that was chosen most to represent how they felt about politics wasn’t a thumbs up, or sleeping face, - it was the pile of poo emoji. The vast majority also expressed a deep distrust in government believing they neither listened to nor cared about them. It was then that I realised democracy was in trouble—and not just on the global stage. Here in the UK, a deeply worrying trend is emerging: more than half of Generation Z (those aged 13-27) believe the country would be better off under a dictator.

Recent controversial polling from Craft, commissioned by Channel 4, reveals that 52 per cent of Gen Z believe the UK should be run by a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections. Even more alarmingly, 33 per cent think the country would be better off if the army were in charge. If that doesn’t make us sit up and take notice, consider this: nearly half (47 per cent) of Gen Z believe our society must be radically changed through revolution.

These numbers are staggering. For those of us who have grown up with a strong commitment to democracy, it is unthinkable that the generation raised with the most freedom, the most access to information, and the greatest digital connectivity could be so willing to give up their right to vote, protest, and hold leaders accountable. But before we rush to condemn, we need to ask the hard question: why do so many young people apparently feel this way?

A lost faith in politics

What if it isn’t so much that Gen Z has turned against democracy, but that they feel democracy has turned against them? Think about it. Their schools are crumbling. Their teachers are stressed. If they need mental health support or special needs support, they have either a long wait or a hard fight on their hands and probably both. If they want to go to university, they have to take on a debt that will last longer than the time they have been alive. And pity help them if they want to buy a house - statistics suggest they will probably have to wait until they are 33 years old to even think about getting onto the property ladder.

You might think that these struggles would force Gen Z to become more politically active. But this generation remains the least politically engaged group in the UK. Whilst it is true that currently many are too young to vote, there is also a large proportion who is too disconnected to see the relevance of formal politics. Voter turnout for young people has been abysmal in the last three UK general elections:

2015: 43 per cent
2017: 54 per cent (a temporary spike due to Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal)
2019: 47 per cent

Compare that to the 70 per cent plus turnout for over-65s, and the message is clear: young people aren’t voting, and in return, politicians aren’t speaking to them. Which only exacerbates the problem. Despite the Labour Party manifesto promise that they would introduce voting at 16, they seem to be in no hurry to introduce the reform.

While Gen Z engagement with traditional politics is low, their political leanings have shifted. Over the past two decades, Gen Z has moved slightly to the centre-left, while older generations tend to lean centre-right. Today, age is a stronger predictor of voting behaviour than social class, which is a dramatic shift from previous decades. Though Gen Z is more liberal overall, they are also more radical in their discontent—and that’s where the real danger lies.

When young people feel unheard, they don’t just disengage—they seek alternatives. Their frustration has left them susceptible to radical ideas and strongman narratives. While previous generations turned to grassroots activism, protests, and community engagement, Gen Z is more likely to be influenced by leaders they can follow online - like Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and Nigel Farage, who offer clear, confident, and often extreme critiques of the system.

The result? Despite strong examples in the positive activism of Greta Thunberg, Marcus Rashford and Malala who have used democratic means to make a positive difference, there is a growing number of young people who see democracy as weak and ineffective, and dictatorship as strong and decisive.

A wake-up call

But there is hope. By engaging young people directly there is an opportunity to change the trajectory. That’s what we discovered at our online interactive event for sixth formers. One of the most powerful voices at the event was Sophia, a recently turned 18-year-old Ukrainian refugee, who spoke about her experience fleeing war. She told her story of being separated from her father who was in Ukraine fighting for democracy. She shared how Ukrainians are fighting—not just with weapons, but with their lives—for the very democracy that young Brits are so ready to discard. Her message to British students was simple: “You don’t know how lucky you are.” She challenged them to see democracy not as a broken system, but as one that requires their participation to work.

It was a powerful moment. And it proved something vital: when young people hear real stories, from real people, they begin to see the consequences of the choices they are flirting with. As a result of that event, thousands of young people signed up to vote at the electoral commission.

Rebuilding trust in democracy

So what can be done? Here are three crucial steps.

Make politics relevant to Gen Z. Young people do care about issues like climate change, mental health, and social justice. But they are turned off democratic political solutions by the bureaucracy, mud-flinging and dragging timescales. By taking time to explain to them the processes, to involve them in the campaigns and to improve accessibility to politics and highlight the difference they can make, we may find that our most disconnected demographic could become democracy’s greatest asset.

Rebuild Gen Z’s trust in leadership. Scandals and dishonesty have left Gen Z cynical. We need leaders who are transparent, accountable, and willing to listen. We need parties who will do what they said they would do in their manifestos and on the doorsteps. We need Members of Parliament who are committed to spending time with the young people they are supposed to represent so that relationships of trust can be deemed possible again.

Empower Gen Z. There are initiatives out there—like our interactive live assembly and the G-EPIC project—that prove a simple truth: when young people feel heard, they engage. When they are inspired, they engage. When they are empowered to participate in the political process, they engage. Perhaps if we create more spaces for them to speak, lead, and act, they will step forward to shape the future.

History shows that democracy is never guaranteed—it must be fought for and protected by every generation. It also requires constant effort to ensure it serves all communities without scapegoating, persecuting, or marginalizing. And history warns us that without democracy, most dictators quickly become tyrants.

The challenge before us is urgent: we must help Generation Z recognize the power they hold to shape their world—before they surrender it to leaders who would take that power away from all of us.

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Article

Art

Culture

13 August 2025

5 min read

Emily Young: the sculptor listening as the still stones speak

Unlocking the stillness, from underwater sculpture to St Paul's Cathedral

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A sculptor works on a carved face emerging from a stone larger than her

Young creating.

Emilyyoung.com

As a painter, Emily Young says she worked relatively quickly in her distinctive surreal style featuring penguins and figures with penguin heads. When she came to sculpture in the 1980s, what she most appreciated was the resistance she felt as she worked, meaning that she ‘had to slow down’ and ‘be super careful’. Right from her first works as a sculptor, the stone was speaking to her, teaching her the value of stillness.

The stones with which she works still speak to her. The stone ‘tells me what it is willing to do’ and ‘lets me know exactly what it can and cannot do, and I work with that’. ‘The stone’, she says, ‘leads me through into this zone where we’re working together’. Ultimately, she says, ‘what I’m showing is that the relationship between a human and the planet can be very, very respectful, and very, very beautiful’. In this way, she uses the beauty, history, and energy of stone to connect people to the natural world.

Her respect for the stones is, in part, because she moves ‘through layers of history in the stones’. Because of their age, stones bring ‘messages to us from a time before culture’; ‘nature has been making stones’ for millions of years meaning that ‘they are from deep time’. This is the ‘stillness of stone compared to me as a short-lived human being’. Her work, therefore, involves ‘throwing something out there that is more enduring than soft humans’.

Her most recent exhibition was entitled ‘Comparative Stillness’. This title was chosen because the way the faces and the bodies she carves ‘always come out, there’s peacefulness there, there’s stillness’. ‘If you sit in this stillness of the stone’, she says, ‘you can find a great joy and a great peace’. She has asked herself, ‘What is it that I’m doing when I’m carving a human head out of stone?’ Her answer is that she is ‘finding an essential core of being alive that has in it, stillness’. ‘It’s the stillness that I’m after’, she says, and ‘out of that stillness come good actions.’ As a result, she says, ‘what I’m completely dedicated to now is to show that we do have access to that stillness and it could be our saving grace’. Everyone, she thinks, ‘should have quiet, kind symbols of internality around them’.

Describing her symbols, she says that: her discs are translucent, holding light within while symbolising the wholeness of the universe; her heads are never of particular people and are embodied consciousnesses with a sweetness to their closed eyes; and her torsos show the beauty and vulnerability of the female form which holds the capacity to create life.

The ‘quietness inherent in stone can also found in our consciousnesses’, which is why she speaks of her stone heads as ‘embodied consciousnesses’. She thinks that religion leads towards this same stillness and, therefore, thinks her art is doing a similar job to that which religion does, ‘trying to give value to people’s lives, what you can and can’t do’. Christ, she says, ‘is a particularly fine example of a teacher’. Her works ‘seem at home within the quietness of churches’ because ‘churches are places that have something of time, deep time’. She has made many sculptures for ecclesiastical settings, including St Paul’s Churchyard and Salisbury Cathedral, while exhibitions of her work have been held at St James Piccadilly and St Pancras New Church.

When I met her, she was in London for the McDonald Agape Lecture in Theology and the Visual Arts 2025. ‘Theology and the Visual Arts: Firming Foundations; Firing Imaginations’ is a five-year project to strengthen the foundations of Theology and the Visual Arts as a discipline within academic Theology, and help to shape its future. The project’s work is showcased to a public audience through major public lectures in an internationally renowned arts venue.

This year’s lecture put Young in dialogue with US painter, Genesis Tramaine, an expressionist devotional painter deeply inspired by biblical texts. Like Young, Tramaine also creates monumental heads, and both speak of being led as they create their works; Young, by the stories in the stones, and Tramaine, by the Holy Spirit following prayer, worship and study of scripture. By being led in their work, both essentially agreed that, as Tramaine put it, you can't be present when creating, instead you ‘have to trust yourself to the process, surrender, and play in the space’. Whether creating the heads of angels or of saints, both are depicting ‘messengers from heaven’.

The good actions that have arisen out of stillness for Young include a project to re-diversify the Maremma seabed in Casa dei Pesci. The seabed in this area, as also in many other places, is being destroyed through illegal fishing by dredger trawlers which destroy the seagrass meadows that are the breeding grounds for marine life. A local fisherman Paolo Fanciulli decided to address the problem by asking artists, including Young, to sculpt huge blocks of Carrara marble as, once these lie on the seabed, they make it impossible for the dredger trawlers to operate in the area. 29 sculptures, including four Stone Guardians by Young, form the Talamone Underwater Museum, which has seen ‘the trawlers go away’ and ‘the seabed diversify’ once again.

Young also creates large sculptures in the grounds of Convento di Santa Croce, the ruined monastery in Tuscany where she now lives. She says she has ‘been quiet’ and ‘become reclusive’ living there because the place itself is ‘really peaceful and quiet’ with a ‘handmade stillness to everything’. When the rains come, ‘bits of the steep hills fall away’ revealing ancient stones formed of volcanic materials, while caves which had fallen in on themselves have filled up with rainwater creating over time ‘a layered geology’. In this way in this area, ‘the earth is giving great stones to work with’.

In this delightful, giving place of stillness, she can sit quietly, prayerfully. She notes ‘how difficult it is to find a place of stillness today because of the ‘cacophony of distraction’ we all experience. Her aim is to show the way we are ‘wasting the gift of life’ and to reveal ‘our one consciousness’ in the stillness of stone.

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