Convenience Big Store: Why young Europeans are to the right of us Brits

7 January, 2022

Comment

Young people in Spain: not as woke as they look. Westend61/Getty

Why young Europeans are to the right of us Brits

If you're a young person anxious to know whether the "purity of your left-wing principles" will survive into middle age, says James Marriott in The Times, listen to what language is being spoken around you. If it's English, your "youthful socialism" has a better chance of remaining uncorrupted. In Britain, America, Australia and Canada, millennials are "defying ancient political laws" by failing to become more right-wing as they age. But elsewhere in Europe, the traditional "political migration" away from the left continues. The reason is that in our world connected by social media, the critical cultural divide is "language, not geography".

English-speaking Twitter is dominated by America's culture wars: everything from Black Lives Matter to Supreme Court decisions. Because of this, US "progressive ideas" have spread to us Brits and completely infiltrated our politics. But on the continent, where internet discourse is primarily non-English, they're spared the relentless US wokery, meaning commitment to "American morals" is much weaker. Younger French voters, for example, lack a US-style "progressive consensus": last year, 49% of 25- to 35-year-olds voted for the nationalist Marine Le Pen. This discrepancy is why Emmanuel Macron can rebut liberal ideas much more strongly, and why there's no need for a German word meaning "woke". As the former Portuguese diplomat Bruno Macaes puts it, "American and European civilisation are diverging"; the US is pioneering a new, woke culture that is "incomprehensible" to much of the non-English-speaking world. Our shared language means that "we in Britain are along for the ride".

Heroes and villains

Taking a relaxed approach to surgery in the Channel 4 comedy Green Wing (2004)

Villains

British surgeons, who are getting rather slapdash. The number of "foreign objects" left inside patients after operations hit a record 291 in the year from 2021 to 2022, up from 156 two decades earlier. Swabs and gauzes are the most common items sewn up in patients, but scalpels and drill bits have slipped in too.

Hero

Joe Biden, whose dodderiness might prove a geopolitical masterstroke, says Freddy Gray in The Spectator. The president has updated the "Mad Man" approach to diplomacy – which keeps adversaries guessing with irrational behaviour – with a similar "Senile Man" style: repeatedly promising that America would defend Taiwan in an attack from China, for example, remarks which his aides keep having to roll back. "It's brilliant and terrifying at the same time."

Villain

Italy's culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, who this week condemned the way foreign (especially English) words are infiltrating the Italian language, but did so while labelling the practice as "snobismo, molto radical chic" – snobismo coming from "snobbery", radical being directly English, and chic French.

Villain

Best-selling Canadian author and psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has committed what one columnist calls the "very 21st-century crime of tweeting the wrong opinions". These include defending the anti-vax Canadian truckers, calling Justin Trudeau a "puppet" and referring to the transgender actor Elliot Page by the pronoun "her". Ontario's College of Psychologists has ordered Peterson to undertake a social media "coaching program" if he wants to keep practising in Canada.

Property

THE APARTMENT This two-bedroom flat occupies the top two floors of a Victorian terraced house in Highgate, north London. It has an open plan kitchen, living, and dining room with an expansive window offering views of leafy treetops and filling the space with natural light. There is also a private roof terrace, and the property is a short stroll from Hampstead Heath and Highgate Underground station. £700,000.

Inside politics

Constant self-invention: George Santos. David Becker/Washington Post/Getty

Santos's lies are no surprise

George Santos, a recently elected Republican congressman, is a full-fat "fabulist", says Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post. The 34-year-old has been exposed for not only fabricating his education and work history, but also lying that he had Jewish grandparents who survived the Holocaust. Yet for all the Democrats' pearl-clutching, Santos has nothing on America's "fabulist-in-chief": Joe Biden. In his 1988 presidential campaign, the then-senator infamously stole, almost word for word, a speech by Labour leader Neil Kinnock, "adopting Kinnock's family history as his own". He has also lied about graduating "with three degrees from college"; about being arrested in apartheid South Africa on a visit to Nelson Mandela; about being detained at a civil rights march; and about being shot at in Iraq.

This constant self-invention works in America, says Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times, because it's a country that deeply believes "you can be whoever you want to be". As one commentator has put it, American life "continuously emphasises its own artificiality in a way that reminds participants that, deep down, they are experiencing a story" – no surprise, given the country invented the movie business. As my grandmother, who accompanied her husband on business trips to the States, always told me: "Darling, every American thinks he is playing the starring role in a film about their own life."

Noted

It turns out that heavier, potato-shaped stones are better for skimming across water than the thin, flat stones that everyone spends hours searching for. Boffins say it's because larger rocks can give a "super-elastic response": they don't bounce as many times, but because they press into the water more deeply and for longer, the resulting force often causes a single "mega-bounce" that launches the object further. "There's this almighty leap out of water," a skimming scientist from Bristol University adds. "It changes the game."

Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share

Share on WhatsApp

Share via email

Zeitgeist

The language of officialdom can provide a lot of fun, says Johnny Grimond in The Oldie. Some pompous officials clearly think important messages warrant long signs. Take the instruction "Please use the handrail provided". What's the "provided" doing? How could anyone use the handrail if it weren't provided? "Other officials think it's cool to be crisp." Perhaps Dominic Cummings, architect of the Vote Leave favourite "Take back control", was also responsible for the British Transport Police's "See it. Say it. Sorted." That moronic mantra must be aimed at those who would otherwise remain inert while gazing at a sputtering bomb fuse, rather than invoking some unnamed deity that would somehow result in the device being immediately disabled.

Life

Christopher Furlong/Getty

"Whispers and politicking" at the Vatican

"Airlines usually upgrade cardinals to first class and offer them champagne," says Catherine Pepinster in The Guardian. When the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church flew into Rome for this week's funeral of former pope Benedict XVI, the prelates probably chose to "forgo the fizz as a sign of their mourning". But it's hard to imagine they have also refrained from the "whispers and politicking" that typically happen at such gatherings. Chance are, the whole thing resembled "an episode of Succession".

Benedict's resignation in 2013 means there is no need to appoint a new pope. But 86-year-old Pope Francis is frail: he recently underwent bowel surgery and needs a wheelchair for public appearances. And many of his reforms, such as his acceptance of indigenous culture blending into Catholic ritual, have angered traditionalists. So a lot of cardinals will already be scheming to replace him. The official line is that when prelates enter the conclave to elect a new pope, the Holy Spirit "guides them in prayer to find the right candidate". But in truth, the job is secured through political-style "lobbying" – for which Benedict's funeral offered the perfect opportunity.

Weather