A fissure between men and women is reshaping British politics

[IwantToRetire]

Among UK voters, gender is emerging as a new dividing line across political views and social attitudes – suggesting Britons are becoming more like Americans.
From https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/21/a-fissure-between-men-and-women-reshaping-british-politics/
Also in full at https://archive.is/z5qZd

Nost sure if this is the right link, but article says it is based on NatCen - maybe this? https://natcen.ac.uk/publications/demographic-divides-what-drives-attitudes-uk-and-us

Also, the fact there are many articles about this on the left and the right suggests it is not in fact being ignored. Although acknowledging a problem and fixing it are different things for sure.

This is a well recognised issue for which there is literally no credible strategy.
I agree with 1984Now it's an important and relevant issue.

https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/news/156024/forgotten-white-workingclass-pupils-let-down-by-decades-of-neglect-mps-say/#:~:text=White%20working%2Dclass%20pupils%20have%20been%20badly%20let%20down%20by,not%20achieve%20two%20strong%20passes.

The Education Committee’s report The forgotten: how White working-class pupils have been let down, and how to change it, highlights how White British pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) persistently underperform compared with peers in other ethnic groups, from early years through to higher education.

You're really reading too much into my comments. I'm stating that in the few dozen boys and young men I've spoken to, I'm not seeing any love for the left, not Starmer or Davey, certainly not Polanski or Corbyn Sultana.
I'm also saying there's quite a bit of anger in this cohort, many feel that they've been browbeaten by the whole wall to wall Adolescence narrative that young males as a whole have an endemic misogyny problem.
And I've read many blogs and articles right across the political spectrum saying white British boys of working class/poor families are performing very poorly, way behind girls and many other cohorts of boys.
If you want to ascribe a motive or bias to my comments, go ahead. Because I don't have an axe to grind, I think there are multi factoral reasons.
Interesting that you're not denying this cohort are doing badly, worse than many others. And we surely know that boys and young men are tacking right.
Certainly if I was at school today, forced to watch Adolescence with follow up discussions about the poor attitude of boys to girls that me and my mates didn't share, I'd be pretty miffed.

Thank you.

Just posted this on another thread. It shows the difference in political affiliation between young men and young women, UK is the last graph.

It s not really young men turning right, but not going more and more left like the women do.

Interesting. Maybe that indicates men are less suggestible, less easily convinced by all politicians, whereas women are falling for the Polanski schtick in a big way, and still think Labour have more answers for them, maybe Davey too, than the right.

The left exists historically as a defender of the oppressed. It’s their brand, the definition of oppressed have changed over time though.

Now that I am a lot more cynical, it’s like christianity. Starts by standing up to the oppressed, attracting women, but men grab the power for themselves and keep women firmly under their control.

That's a definite possibility, women and girls do seem to be more easily conned than the male of the species. We all have our blind spots, both men and women fall for rubbish, if the claims about Tate's influence on young men are to be believed, we got trouble on both sides. The influence the post-modernists have over women is more dangerous and corrosive, than individuals like Tate exert, even with SM.

This.

All parties serve male agendas, ultimately, given the society we live in and who has the power.

Meanwhile, men unabashedly support their own causes (whether stupid or otherwise), while women are generally like turkeys voting for Christmas, falling over ourselves to support whatever cause we're told is either 'kind' or 'empowering' without an ounce of critical thought as to how it will affect us and our daughters.

It's bloody depressing.

I genuinely think that Tate is either old news for young men, or was never the major influence we are to believe. Quite a few of the ones I talk to actually haven't heard of him at all, those that have view him as weird and too much into loving himself.
I'm not saying he hasn't played a role, but with the way the media go into firestorms when they choose to, and then totally ignore the wider span of terrible stories out there, it suits the media narrative to have a hate figure every so often that sells copy.
Please, ftr, before I get jumped on for being a Tate apologist, that's not the case. I just question the widely held conventional wisdom that he's the devil and has infected the minds of young men en masse.
There are bigger issues for boys and young men, more centered on their exposure to porn online and a constant narrative that they're an unreliable predatory group en masse, not Tate as some kind of toxic 21st century online influencer.
It wasn't long ago we were blaming Jordan Peterson for making right wing toxifying of men.

Isn't level of education a factor in voting as well? Shouldn't the number of women going down the postmodern rabbit hole via university be a concern. It would be interesting to know.
Maybe we should axe many of these courses. Why are girls still avoiding science and technology?
Sorry that's a bit incoherent,

Steven Bartlett called. He said 'hold my beer'.

and @Imnobody4

His podcast on male loneliness is a masterclass of of blaming women for the problems that young men face. It will help both of you polish your arguments whilst you stab women and girls in the back. For me personally, you can't polish a turd. YMMV.

YMMV. Seriously, is that your level. Everything that's wrong with the left.

I think this is a factor. Kids coming out of universities often seem to have been indoctrinated or radicalised into a very anti-intellectual progressive/neomarxist ideology. And a lot more girls are going to university, so it makes sense that they would be more affected.

I think too this dovetails into the agreeability issue. One of the reasons young girls do better in school is they are more easily biddable, on average, than little boys, they try and do the right thing and please the teacher. So they do a little better all along and in fact that often builds up into girls really dominating in schools by the teen years. And then those girls go to university where they are also agreeable and biddable, and the boys that are going also seem to have a similar kind of personality.

The boys I see who are bright but more disagreeable, more inclined to want to fight the man or have revolutionary instincts, which at the moment end up directed against the, sort of progressive consensus among the school and social leaders in society; and also the girls with that personality type, aren't as often going off to university.

All of which means that we are seeing many more high achieving types of girls, very focused on marks and results and social approval, going to the place that seems focused on passing on this worldview.

Except, again, more young men in the UK say they will vote Green than say they will vote reform. Admittedly young women are more likely to vote Green than young men are. But it doesn't fit with what you are saying.

Honestly, I think it's because they find them less interesting. I think, on average, women enjoy working more with people, compared to men.

I now work in a female dominated profession, but it's noticible that within that, the people who work on the technical services end are male dominated. And 90% of the time, they don't enjoy working with the public, or even other people at all. While enjoying working with people is ta major reason the bulk of people get into the field as a whole.

Lots of overlap of course but I think it's the main reason for the difference in outcomes.

I'm not blaming women for anything. If you want to attack me, fine, but at least attribute stuff to me accurately. I've lost work defending women over trans activism, I'm hardly anti women.
I can be anti Tate and his poisonous views while considering him a bit of a folk devil amplified by the media. I actually talk to lots of young men, and a fair number of under 18 males, and Tate is in the forefront of very few of their minds.
Porn? That's another matter.
And the plummeting of outcomes for white British boys/young men of working class/poor families started prior to the Tate phenomenon.
But if you think I'm defending Tate or Incel culture, don't let me stop you.

That's if they vote at all. Remind me how many impassioned 18-24s actually bother on the day of the GE? It's the 55+, esp 65+ who get out to vote.
The new 16-17s cohort, will they also bother to vote?
If the 16-24 cohort really do come out in droves at the next GE, and tack mostly to the Greens, then it's game on.

Yes indeed, I've just left an alternative reply, but yours is a bit more, um, pithy, lol.

I think maybe I was still angry about Trump's comments and the way Farage and the "patriotic" right will continue to ooze up to him. Look at it this way. Farage/Trump/Musk/your average angry male podcaster have never:

• fought in a war
• seen people they care about die in war or been injured themselves
• Struggled with sub standard housing
• Struggled with sub standard education
• Not had space to do their homework
• Not had outside space to burn of energy during school hours
• Had youth groups closed down
• Had to work in jobs where health and safety is cut to make more profit for the owner

As a result they get very angry about the Barbie movie and "woke" TV because watching an advert they don't like or having someone not laugh at their sexist jokes is genuinely the worst thing that has ever happened to them. And they lack the imagination to believe others have it far worse. This is NOT true of most men. Especially of working class men. It is true of the self appointed voices of those men. Farage etc will happily talk about young men feeling aggrieved. When "owning feminists with facts and logic" the poor educational outcomes or the fact that men are disproportionately injured in the workplace might be mentioned by alt right podcasters. But when you look at the policies they actually support- it's things like less public spending, less working safety regulations, less unions. All things that would make things worse for working class men but better for the very rich like Elon Musk.

That's what I mean by force teaming. I suspect a lot of the "alt right" podcasters or Elon Musk arent even aware of it because their lives are so privileged and they are so blind to the privilege. They think their own resentment at being labelled as privileged compared to other groups makes them the same as men who actually have real problems.

So it's not that young men don't have problems. They do. It's that those problems aren't likely to be solved by the far right. And,.astonishingly, 86% of young men in the 18-25 age group also dont think they will. That doesn't mean 86% are happy with everything. You are the one trying to tie real grievance to automatic support for the right. When the facts don't show that at all. The 14% of young men who like Farage aren't the only ones that matter, and they aren't the flag bearers for male rationality or resentment.

Recognising that something can be read more than one way isn’t 'lefty' it’s just being accurate.

The irony of your response seems to have gone over your head.

You mistake pithy for ironic Keep up the good work 💩polishing though.

But that's the whole culture war. You could say Zoomers and Millennials obsessed about woke, trans rights, BLM etc, also haven't fought in any ways, had any real hardship. Indeed the whole of Western social justice activism is heralded by young people who were born after the Suffragettes campaigns, Stonewall riots, Vietnam/civil rights, Section 28 demonstrations.
That's why there's a new term for the angry disaffected terminally online Right young men, the "Woke Right".
Despite me being a Right voter, and open to Reform sealing the deal with me, I'm as allergic to the likes of Tate and Fuentes and Tomlinson trying to create a doom narrative.
At the same time, young males are being told by so many in the media that they are a misogynist generation, in my mind the "Adolescence" Generation criticism may be more relevant to pushing them Right...you won't find Farage slating these young males.

But beyond the whole "culture war" are real problems. Such as the ones I listed.
As a millennial woman, I have no experience growing up as a young man in poor quality housing, with a not great education system, worried I won't ever be able to afford a house despite working my guts out. I only have experience growing up as a young woman in poor quality housing with a not great education system worried I won't ever be able to afford a house. I care about those things. I also care about mysogyny and violence against women. Talking about violence against women doesn't mean the other stuff doesn't matter. But there are some people to whom the other stuff ONLY matters when violence against women is mentioned. Then it's all "we can't discuss sexual violence because it will upset the young men". It's cheaper than invading Venezuela I guess.

I have no idea what your background is. But you seem very angry about the online culture war stuff yourself (you brought it up) and find it hard to believe people might have other reasons for voting. Which suggests to an extent you are either very privileged or yourself more affected by online issues than real problems

Lots of millenials and zoomers HAVE fought in wars by the way.

A quick look at the chart shows that; Over 50 age group adding together Conservative and Reform accounts for over 50% of the voters.
Small wonder the Labour Govt wants to postpone any election where possible.