The Rest is Politics (TRIP) podcast has launched a new mini-series, called The Gen Z Story. Hosted by journalist Vicky Spratt and TRIP co-host Alastair Campbell, The Gen Z Story pitches itself as an investigation into the struggles and situation of Gen Z.

The inaugural guest was none other than potential Labour leader Angela Rayner. TRIP co-hosts Campbell and Rory Stewart claimed they launched The Gen Z Story because they didn’t want to be like the other podcasts, ‘who talk about Gen Z without actually speaking to Gen Z’. Yet, with the exception of a few cherry-picked voice notes from listeners, this is exactly what The Gen Z Story did.

Indeed, Spratt, Campbell and Rayner mounted yet another patronising appeal to the ‘lost generation’. It reinforced the paternalistic perception of a generation of young people broken by perpetual crises. ‘There are no quick fixes’, Rayner asserts; decades of underfunding our institutions cannot be amended overnight. The problem, as she put it, is that young people are too impatient for change.

What Rayner doesn’t seem to grasp is that Zoomers, and many Millennials, find themselves in dire straits. Just 30 years ago, young people could make enough money to leave home, save and eventually buy property. They weren’t drowning in student debt. Travel was cheap and the consumer market was booming. There was a mood of national optimism in the air, too, with Britpop and so-called Cool Britannia.

Reality is very different for young people today. The optimism that accompanied Gen X-ers into the workplace has been replaced by a sense of gloom and stagnation. Gen Z have come of age amid a series of never-ending crises: unemployment, a housing shortage and a struggling economy. Instability has been the defining feature of their lives. To put this into perspective, 2015 marked the first year that the oldest members of Gen Z could vote; since then, we have had five prime ministers, a pandemic, two energy crises, and two near-brushes with World War III.

Rayner’s appearance on The Gen Z Story is no doubt an attempt to claw back younger voters for Labour. Until recently, Rayner’s party was easily the favourite among those under 30. Some 41 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds voted Labour in 2024. At the beginning of 2026, polling indicates that this has reversed dramatically. A mere 21 per cent of young people say they would vote Labour now. Thirty-seven per cent intend to vote Green.

The temptation of late is to criticise young people for their extreme politics – particularly young women drawn in by the radical left. But can we really blame them? This is a generation that feels as though it has lost everything it was promised. Gen Zers are criticised as work-shy, infantile and too obsessed with ‘progressivism’ to understand the value of tradition. ‘Why aren’t they getting married and having children?’ is the question posed over and over. Perhaps because many of them feel like they don’t have a choice. They didn’t ask to be unemployed. Many can’t even see a way to leave their parents’ home, let alone start a family of their own.

Infantilising policy decisions conjured up by governments both past and present have only exacerbated these issues. Increases in welfare, the minimum wage and renters’ rights may look like pleasant offerings, but they have increased young people’s dependency on the state. In the long run, they will only serve to disempower young people further, stripping them of what minimal agency they have left.

It should go without saying that most young people don’t want to be on unemployment benefits. They want to be able to use their degrees to get decent jobs and build a life for themselves. But the economic system lets them down time and time again. The idea that hard work provides a means to a better life no longer holds. And if working hard no longer provides a reliable path to security, it should be no surprise that young people are opting out, prioritising pleasure over independence, and accepting state handouts.

We are fed up with being told we are the future while being denied the means to shape or change our own lives – let alone change the world. And we are not placated by politicians like Rayner performatively pitying our plight. On the contrary, watching The Gen Z Story was a painful reminder of the weakness of our political leaders today. Labour in particular has an awful lot of work to do if it’s ever going to regain the trust of the young.

Emma Gilland is event coordinator for the Academy of Ideas and author of The Corona Generation: Coming of Age in a Crisis, written with Jennie Bristow and published by Zero Books.

Most people feel awkward when they realise they are somewhere they’re not wanted. But for a certain type of trans activist, the discomfort of others is the whole point.

Let’s be clear, Tiffany, the male trucker in a wig taking selfies in a ladies’ loo, is not there by accident. He is likely enjoying the provocation – willy-waving at women who are expected to shut up and take it. In some cases, these men are acting out ‘sissification’ fetishes, sexual humiliation games in which they are set tasks, sometimes by a dominatrix, such as applying lipstick or wearing sanitary towels in women’s toilets.

For over a decade, institutions abetted this behaviour. Business owners were worried about being sued or dropping down the Stonewall league table. Women brave enough to confront such men knew they might find themselves reported for a hate crime.

Most remain blissfully clueless about the fetishistic side to male trans identities. This happened in part because of 2011 guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) code, which said that in Great Britain, ‘transsexual people’ should be treated ‘according to the gender role in which they present’.

Now, there is no excuse for inaction. The EHRC’s updated code, placed before parliament this week, confirms that including men in women-only services ‘very likely’ constitutes unlawful sex discrimination. If a service is provided to both women and transwomen, it is no longer considered a single-sex service under the Equality Act 2010. The guidance also warns that including men in women’s spaces could amount to unlawful discrimination or harassment against female users. Similar principles apply to male-only services.

Naturally, trans activists are in a lather about this. But then, when aren’t they? The Good Law Project’s trans-rights lead, Jess O’Thomson, complained that the EHRC code ‘treats trans people as a third sex, suggesting they should be made to use separate spaces – entirely ignoring the harm this causes, and human rights law’.

Let’s be clear, gender self-identification has never been legal in the UK. Last year, the Supreme Court finally delivered a ruling that confirmed this. But even after that judgment, many service providers have remained paralysed with fear. Duty bearers (ie, organisations responsible for upholding equality law) have spent months pretending to be baffled by the apparently impossible task of ensuring that men use men’s facilities and women use women’s. They claimed to be waiting on the EHRC guidance, and the minister for equalities, Bridget Phillipson, appeared too frightened of upsetting the trans-activist unions to lay it before parliament.

Surely anyone who cares about women’s rights ought to be broadly pleased that the EHRC’s updated guidance has finally been put forward. Yet it is hard to feel much beyond rage at the delay and cowardice that preceded it.

Phillipson sat on the revised guidance for eight months while organisations continued operating unlawful self-identification policies. During that time, she smeared the EHRC’s former chair, Baroness Falkner, for supposedly ‘grandstanding’. Yet Phillipson said virtually nothing about the people harmed by those policies. Not a word, for example, about the mentally ill female patient placed on a male psychiatric ward at the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust because she identified as male, and was raped within an hour of arriving there. Nor did Phillipson remind organisations continuing to operate gender self-identification that they were breaking the law and had a legal, not to mention moral, duty to stop.

The EHRC can’t be accused of rushing the guidance out. It undertook two public consultations and sifted through 50,000 responses. This is because it knew that whatever it said would be picked apart by gender obsessives, within and outside government, no matter how reasonable or evidence-based it was.

Yes, the guidance is welcome. But the fact that civil society opened the door to women’s wards, changing rooms and refuges to men remains astonishing. Managers, HR departments and public bodies behaved as though women’s rights were negotiable while the feelings of entitled creeps in lipstick were sacrosanct. The EHRC has finally spelled out, in painstaking detail, how the law must be enforced. That there are two sexes in law is about as obvious as the phallus on the Cerne Abbas Giant. The test for organisations is simple: are they more frightened of the sane majority, or of Tiffany the trucker and his fellow gender zealots?

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.

The levels of waste, incompetence and dysfunction inside parts of the modern British state are hard to fathom at times. It consumes extraordinary amounts of money, yet increasingly struggles to perform even its most essential tasks competently. Nothing better illustrates this state failure than HS2, Britain’s high-speed rail project linking London to Birmingham.

Originally proposed by Gordon Brown’s Labour government in 2009, the Tory-Lib Dem coalition confirmed the project was to go ahead in 2012. As it was described at the time, it was to be a high-speed train line connecting London to Birmingham with a Y-shaped section to Manchester and Leeds. The construction of the entire HS2 network was costed at £32.7 billion and was supposed to be completed by 2026 – ie, this year. Neither the projected cost nor schedule has been even close to accurate.

In fact, the UK government declared this week that HS2 will not be finished until possibly the 2040s, and that it could set the taxpayer back up to £102.7 billion. That’s over three times the original projected cost. And according to some sources, even that is a massive underestimate.

What’s more, the scope of HS2 has been massively scaled back since 2012. The northern and eastern legs of the route, taking it to Leeds and Manchester, have been scrapped – a move that has reduced the total length of the line by more than 50 per cent. HS2 will now be slower than promised, too.

With the financial sums involved in HS2 so large, it’s easy to become numb to them. So it’s worth putting the anticipated cost of the project into more comprehensible terms. Assuming it ends up being complete on time at its current proposed length of 230 kilometres, for £102.7 billion, the railway, including associated works like new stations and bridges, is expected to cost up to £446million per kilometre. That’s close to half a million pounds for every metre of track. That’s nearly £4,500 for every centimetre. Oh, and it will have taken over 30 years to finish, from inception to delivery. It beggars belief.

China, by contrast, built the entire Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway, spanning 1,318 kilometres, in marginally over three years between April 2008 and June 2011. To reiterate, that railway is more than six times as long as HS2’s route, was built for around four times less, at £26 billion. And its trains are faster, too.

Indeed, China has laid approximately 25,000 miles of high-speed track in under 18 years, almost enough to circle the globe. That’s far quicker than we’ve managed to build HS2, which will be under 200 miles long.

Of course, China does have a far larger workforce and is governed by a totalitarian regime. It enjoys certain morally questionable ‘advantages’ over Britain when it comes to undertaking immense construction programmes at breakneck speed. But China isn’t the only nation that is able to execute such schemes more rapidly than the UK – liberal democratic nations including France, Italy and South Korea have all built, or are in the process of building, high-speed train lines and for a fraction of the price.

Britain hasn’t always been in the painfully slow lane. In the past, major public works were often delivered far more cheaply and efficiently than they are today. The 118-mile Great Western Railway, completed in the 1840s, cost £6million to £7million – equivalent to perhaps several hundred million pounds in today’s money, not tens of billions.

HS2 is just the most high-profile example of the modern British state’s incapacity. There are numerous other infrastructure projects that have encountered similar problems. They have either stalled entirely or ended up coming in massively over budget and behind schedule.

Take the Lower Thames Crossing, the long-planned road tunnel linking Essex and Kent. The planning application alone ran to well over 350,000 pages and took years to process before construction even properly began. Huge sums have been spent on environmental assessments, consultations, legal-compliance exercises, regulatory submissions and procedural hurdles… and the crossing itself remains nowhere near completion.

Or look at Hinkley Point C, the nuclear power station in Somerset. When originally given the go-ahead in 2016, it was anticipated to cost £18 billion and open in the mid-2020s. Since then, that sum has risen to over £30 billion, while the completion date continues slipping further into the future.

Or consider the endless delays surrounding airport expansion, road upgrades, housebuilding and energy infrastructure. Britain increasingly appears to be a country that can’t get things done.

HS2 receives plenty of scrutiny, much of it entirely justified. But the deeper issue is what it reveals about modern Britain itself. We feel like a nation that has lost the ability to act decisively, its construction and infrastructural ambitions mired in a swamp of legal process, institutional inertia and ‘progressive’ dogma.

Indeed, the HS2 project team seemed most comfortable producing lengthy equality, diversity and inclusion reports than building anything. Because, as we all know, it’s impossible to build a railway unless the people doing the building have familiarised themselves with ideas of white privilege and gender identity.

HS2 captures well the absurdity and failure of the modern managerial state. It is a state that is happier binding itself in red tape and bureaucratic processes than actually building anything. And we as a society are paying the price.

Reform UK’s success in this month’s Scottish parliament election is proof that the political status quo, like in England and Wales, is crumbling. At last, Reform has given voice to the longing for a real alternative that challenges the sclerotic, anti-democratic nature of political life in Scotland.

As in England and Wales, Scotland’s populist surge coincides with the decline of the establishment parties. For Labour, the recent elections proved just another stage in its long death in Scotland. It picked up just 17 seats. To add insult to injury, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar lost his constituency seat, scraping a return to Holyrood via the regional list. The Scottish Tories, meanwhile, had their worst ever result, losing 19 seats and pushed into fourth place.

Despite winning its fifth consecutive election, the SNP is in dire straits. It remains dogged by allegations of corruption – namely, Operation Branchform, which last year led the former SNP chief executive and ex-husband of Nicola Sturgeon, Peter Murrell, to face court on embezzlement charges. The Sturgeon era, defined by its attacks on women’s rights and freedom of expression, lingers unpleasantly in the minds of many Scots. First minister John Swinney now heads up a government bereft of ideas.

This became painfully apparent in a lacklustre election campaign. Having overseen a deficit that has blown out to £26.5 billion, all the SNP could muster was a cap on grocery prices, free goodie bags to every primary school child and a minimum wage for comedians. It speaks to an exhausted political machine, running on empty after years of decline.

The SNP’s long dominance in Holyrood shouldn’t be interpreted as a sign of slavish loyalty on behalf of the Scottish people. It is much more a result of the anti-democratic character of the devolution settlement imposed on Scotland by New Labour than an accurate reflection of the country’s political beliefs. The electoral system in Scotland is significantly different from that of England and Wales. English council elections involve a straightforward majoritarian first-past-the-post system. In Wales, Senedd members are elected using a closed proportional list system.

Rather than combining the best elements of first-past-the-post and proportional representation, the Scottish system cancels out the democratic benefits of both. The result is a parliament that is neither proportional nor majoritarian in its make-up.

Given the barriers implicit in the electoral system, Reform’s breakthrough illustrates just what a complete game changer it can be in Scotland. Much like its success across England and Wales, Reform’s Scottish breakthrough has been 10 years in the making, giving voice to a populist desire for change that broke surface with the 2016 Brexit vote.

The EU referendum reenergised sections of the Scottish electorate, which became invested in defending the populist mandate. It was not for nothing that the Conservatives doubled their vote in Scotland at the 2017 General Election, winning 13 seats – their most seats since 1983 – despite refusing to make Brexit an election issue. Voters were searching for a vehicle to express their dissent.

For a decade, the Scottish establishment has conspired to ignore Scotland’s populist movement. Reform has now given it an electoral form.

Shortly after the election, Swinney claimed a second independence referendum would be necessary to ‘Farage-proof’ Scotland. That the political establishment should so openly declare war on the party that hundreds of thousands of Scottish people voted for, clearly illustrates that the cosy status quo engineered by devolution has been broken.

New battle lines are being drawn. Next May’s Scottish local council elections will be another chance to take the fight to the political class and drive home the populist message.

Dr Carlton Brick is a sociologist and researcher.