Rishi Sunak was confronted by a student who asked him why he “hates young people so much”.
Henry Hassell, a 16-year-old singer-songwriter, who lives in west Devon, posed the question on Wednesday while the prime minister was on a campaign visit to a local pub.
A child in 2020 will see a 400% increase in global heating. An adult over 55 will see none. Yet only one of the two can vote
I know this country needs a change, so I couldn’t help but be disappointed when I saw that the general election is going to be held on the 4 July – just two months from my 18th birthday.
Like many other young people across the country, I feel helpless when watching the actions of this government, knowing that I have no say over the decisions being made. Instead, we’re forced to watch older members of the public – especially the oldest, who turn out at the highest rate – cast their vote on what will ultimately impact us the most.
Beth Riding is an A-level student in Cornwall
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The ‘rule-breaking’ US drink has landed in UK supermarkets. But what makes this water so special?
What’s in a name? Well, if you ask the makers of the viral water brand Liquid Death, the answer is about $1.4bn.
Anyone with tickets to a festival this summer is likely to be struck by the canned drink with the alarming name that gen Z devotees are carrying around with them. But the trendy beverage is nowhere near as sinister as it seems. In fact, it’s just water in a can.
Forget the military, but working under supervision in the NHS, care sector or for a charity could be hugely beneficial for many
Rishi Sunak’s reinvention of national service is a desperate, last-minute election gimmick. But that does not make it a bad idea. If there is one phase in education across Britain that is way off course, it is the higher teens. Sixth-form, higher and further education are deeply reactionary, more plagued than ever by introverted academic syllabuses and obsessive testing. For decades it has eluded progressive reform.
Sunak’s idea of a year’s military training would be a costly waste. The army has said it does not want amateur conscripts. The defence of Britain against improbable attack requires highly skilled operatives, not trench-war cannon fodder. By all means recruit more of them, but polls show that barely 10% of young people would volunteer for war service and a third would resist formal conscription. Under Sunak’s plan, an overwhelming majority would choose the civilian alternative of spending one weekend a month for a year in a public or charitable service. Germany’s non-military alternative to national service – both it and military conscription were abolished in 2011 – was hugely popular.
James Cleverly has suggested recalcitrant teenagers could be working weekends as emergency health responders and special constables. How will the ambulance service deal with someone they must spend resources on training, who is unable or unwilling to contribute? Perhaps refuseniks can be press-ganged into building a wall along the Kent coast so we may make Britain great again.
After 14 years of youth bashing, the Tories’ plan to ‘toughen up’ British teenagers might be just what it takes to bring them all out to vote
When the Tories reach the very bottom of their bad ideas barrel, they come up with a dead rat plan for conscription. The notion is so decrepit that those old Sir Bufton Tuftons who used to rise in the Commons to declare national service had made them the fine men they were today are long retired and mostly dead, six decades after conscription ended in the UK. It’s that never-ending Tory cry of youth hate: cut their hair, square-bash some discipline into them, bring back the lash! “Toughen up teenagers,” declared the unlikely defence secretary, Grant Shapps. If Tory campaign managers still need to secure their over-80s core vote, they really are in trouble.
This dying gasp is the exemplar of their 14 years of governing. Everything has been performative – all about announcements, not reality, and moving on before anyone queries outcomes or value for money. National service swept all the Tory front pages: job done. Marching 18-year-olds into a compulsory year of service marks Tory high command’s final abandonment of younger voters. They and their media inhabit the oldie planet of the ancients, every year limping further away from modern life on earth. David Cameron’s legacy project, the National Citizen Service, had its funding cut by two-thirds after attracting a fraction of its expected participants despite devouring 95% of all the youth service funding.
Steve Baker says advisers came up with policy to bring back mandatory national service without agreeing it with ministers
The Conservative campaign pledge to introduce mandatory national service was dreamed up by advisers and sprung on candidates, a government minister has said.
Criticism of the headline-grabbing policy has centred on claims it was not fully thought through before being announced, while ministers said just two days before the announcement that a return of national service was not on the cards.
Forget looksmaxxing. Boys are now scentmaxxing. But some of the perfume influencers they follow leave a lot to be desired
You think teenage boys smell of Lynx Africa, musty trainer and gummy bear vape? In 2024, it might be Tom Ford Neroli Portofino or Acqua di Parma’s Sardinian juniper, because, according to the New York Times, they – and younger boys – are becoming high-end fragrance fiends.
This TikTok-fuelled trend is the boy equivalent of 12-year-old girls dropping fortunes on unnecessary retinoids, but apart from the expense (you’d need an extra-lucrative paper round to finance this hobby), it feels cheerier than an obsession with nonexistent wrinkles. Lads who just want to smell nice debating aldehydes, vetiver heart notes and the sillage (lingering scent trail) of fragrances created by or bearing the names of extremely successful gay men? That feels like a breath of fresh (OK, heavily scented) air compared with the fetid misogynistic manosphere they’re also exposed to.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Labour lambasts youth policy as ‘desperate and unfunded’ and designed to make youngsters fix government-created problems
Rishi Sunak has announced that a future Conservative government would bring back mandatory national service, as he attempted to reignite his election campaign after an error-strewn start.
Under the plan, which appeared to be his latest attempt to reduce Tory losses by winning over voters drifting to Reform UK, the prime minister late Saturday said that every 18-year-old would have to spend time in a competitive, full-time military commission or spend one weekend a month volunteering in “civil resilience”.
Sixteen- and 17-year-olds could be given the right to vote if Labour wins the general election, Keir Starmer has confirmed.
“If you can work, if you can pay tax, if you can serve in your armed forces, then you ought to be able to vote,” the Labour leader said while campaigning at a football ground in the West Midlands.
Young children often love wildlife and nature but find them boring, uncool or ‘icky’ in their teens
From sniffing dandelions to prodding frogspawn and chasing butterflies, young children are often automatically and unashamedly drawn to nature. Then a chasm opens. During adolescence, many declare wildlife boring, “icky” or uncool, while the allure of social networks and fast fashion intensifies, alongside mounting pressures to conform to the norms of increasingly nature-blind communities.
In an era of climate breakdown and ecological collapse, the teenage slump in connection to wild nature is not just unfortunate, it is deeply perilous. Right now, we need to be nurturing fierce, clued-up generations of young adults, equipped and empowered to fight tooth and claw for the biosphere that supports all our lives. The rewilding movement, with its proactive, hope-infused ethos, offers inspiration and practical solutions to reconnect teenagers with nature and inspire them to demand a wilder, healthier future.
Plaintiffs claim $38.7bn gas export project, which would triple state’s greenhouse gas emissions, infringes constitutional rights
Eight young people are suing the government of Alaska – the nation’s fastest-warming state – claiming a major new fossil fuel project violates their state constitutional rights.
The state-owned Alaska Gasline Development Corporation has proposed a $38.7bn gas export project that would roughly triple the state’s greenhouse gas emissions for decades, the lawsuit says. Scientists have long warned that fossil fuel extraction must be swiftly curbed to secure a livable future.
This story has been updated to add comments from Taylor and Fitzpatrick.
What am I doing with my one wild and precious life? Struggling to follow fast, frantic cookery instructions and developing a whole new swearing habit
I have been following the rise of the bao bun very keenly – the pallid little puffballs are enjoying a boom in Britain’s snack sector – on account of the fact that I learned to make them myself. It took me a long time and made me question a lot of things, including my soundness of mind. For anyone without teenagers in their house, there is a new frontier in knowledge exchange, which is the TikTok recipe. It’s like a regular recipe, except with a twist: it’s also like the world’s hardest IQ test.
The posters are mainly American and the dishes are mainly Korean (or air-fryer-based). The TikTokkers will tell you in broad terms what the ingredients are, but incredibly fast and often with swearing. Think of the craft segments on Blue Peter – painstakingly described, with one they made earlier – then make it 150 times faster and much bluer.
The proportion of employed young people living with their parents in the EU have risen significantly in recent years, data from an EU agency shows, with Ireland outstripping other nations amid an acute housing crisis.
An analysis of Eurostat data shared exclusively with the Guardian found that on average across the bloc, the proportion of 25- to-34-year-olds in employment living in their parental home had risen from 24% to 27% between 2017 and 2022.
The Christian Legal Centre is behind a number of end-of-life court cases that could be ‘prolonging suffering’, according to doctors. Josh Halliday reports
Medics treating critically ill babies and children are citing instances of “considerable moral distress” that they say is being caused by the actions of a rightwing Christian group involved in several end-of-life court cases.
The Guardian’s north of England editor, Josh Halliday,tells Hannah Moore that while the Christian Legal Centre is not be a household name it has become highly influential in high-profile end-of-life cases in recent years.
For her debut book, the Irish photographer Eimear Lynch travelled around Ireland to photograph groups of girls immersed in the, often lengthy, ritual of dressing up and applying their makeup together
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