Society

For millennials like me, talkin’ ’bout our generation usually involves complaining. We Generation Zs – or zoomers – can’t seem to catch a break. Even before the pandemic, we were on track to be the first generation worse off than our parents since the Great Depression. It takes us twenty-somethings six times as long to save for a deposit as forty years ago. Having been told by Tony Blair a university education was essential, we leave, saddled with debt, to confront an over-stuffed and unwelcoming graduate market. After spending 2020 locked up against a disease that has a limited impact on young people, we face unemployment and decades of higher

Winchester University’s decision to splash £24,000 on a life-sized statue of Greta Thunberg – who needless to say, has zero connection to the city – was met with both outrage and hilarity. Outrage because since the effigy was commissioned in 2019, the university has enacted swingeing library cuts and two rounds of staff redundancies (despite the vice chancellor’s salary of £233,207). And hilarity because the statue looks rather more like an extra from the Hunger Games than the 18-year-old climate campaigner. Which might be part of the messaging, I suppose. Locals were less than impressed, mounting a brief campaign to replace it with a statue of the local Big Issue salesman.

Aimee Knight, previously known as Aimee Challenor, has been sacked by Reddit. But while Challenor has now gone, her reappearance in the headlines — and the way in which Reddit mishandled this story — is a revealing and disturbing insight into the transgender debate. It all began with an article I wrote for these pages on Green party gender madness in which I briefly mentioned Challenor’s suspension from the party in 2018. It was a scandal that Challenor did not wish to see dragged up. When a moderator of the popular UK politics community on Reddit shared that article, mentioning Challenor by name, the post was removed and the moderator banned.