Fleur Butler: How cultural icons are radicalising a generation of girls – straight from the populist playbook

Fleur Butler, OBE is Director of Development for the Conservative Women’s Organisation, has sat on the National Convention and is founder of a new think tank, Resourceful Women. 

At the start of this year I read two striking pieces on the shifting female vote, both drawing on research from King’s College London showing young women’s accelerating move to the Left.

Yet while a handful of female journalists are sounding the alarm, mainstream commentary remains fixated on boys, leaving girls, once again, ignored, sentimentalised or misread by the very institutions that claim to analyse them.

In the New Statesman, ConservativeHome columnist Scarlett Maguire emphasised loneliness and economic anxiety of young women; In the Telegraph, Zoe Strimpel stressed the young women’s ideological certainty to the point of destroying the world they inherited. Both point to the same conclusion: the most consequential political shift is happening among girls, not boys.

The data backs this up. In Britain’s 2024 election, most young men still voted for parties of the Left despite the panic over “right‑wing boys”. The widening gender gap is driven far more by women moving Left than by men shifting Right.

This cuts against the story our commentariat prefers. We are repeatedly told that young men are the epicentre of radicalisation, volatile, misogynistic, one podcast away from extremism. Not only is this narrative misandrist; it obscures the sharper electoral point. After all, misogyny and hate have never belonged solely to the Right.

Politicians misread the generation now coming of age at our peril which leads to a dangerous asymmetry: political anxiety fixates on young men, while an equally powerful shift among young women is treated as a virtue by the left, or as merely non winnable votes by the right. The commentariat fails to see that populism, Left or Right, draws on the same emotional architecture.

A better understanding of how populism actually works is needed rather than focusing on each sex as different. Populism rises foremost with economic insecurity as a vital precursor to radicalism. The shockwave from the 2008 financial crisis still shapes politics today. Populist parties thrive in places that feel “left behind”: eastern Germany, de‑industrialised America, Britain’s Red Wall and coastal towns. National growth can look healthy while local prospects remain bleak.

The economic divide is generational as well as geographical. Older voters are more likely to own homes, carry little debt and enjoy secure pensions. Younger people face high rents, precarious work, and a cost‑of‑living squeeze that feels permanent. But material anxiety alone doesn’t explain why discontent turns populist.

Populism is agreed to contain three further ingredients beyond economics. First, “the people” are being betrayed by a corrupt or self-serving elite. Second, the problems are actually simple; complexity is a trick used by insiders and the “elite” to avoid action. Third, the movement uniquely understands both the diagnosis and the cure, often delivered by charismatic figures fluent in the media of the day. Without this framework, you just have normal ideological disagreement.

Where the debate goes wrong is in ignoring the final element. The cultural pull within populism. The Right’s tropes: borders, belonging, law and order, tradition, are endlessly dissected as dangerous and nativistic. The Left’s, by contrast, are treated as neutral or economic, rather than ideological.

They shouldn’t be. The Left has its own siren song. Kindness, fairness, compassion and collective responsibility sound unimpeachable, but they are not neutral sentiments; they are powerful moral levers. When movements insist that “good people” must back sweeping redistribution or punitive taxes to prove their virtue, they are doing cultural politics every bit as much as those invoking flag or faith.

This is where the gender story becomes uncomfortable for politicians. There is a political sexism on both the left and right that ignores the female cultural tropes. Young women are still raised, subtly but persistently, to be good, thoughtful, caring. Movements that present themselves as vehicles for care and justice speak a language that feels familiar and affirming.

That doesn’t make those movements wrong. But it does make them populist when virtue is paired with a simple tale of corrupt elites versus economic salvation. And it makes them sexist when they expect women to be kind, compassionate and endlessly responsible for saving the world before themselves.

Modern university life reinforces this shift. YouGov’s 2024 data shows 66 per cent of graduates backed progressive or liberal parties. Among those with GCSEs or below, only 41 per cent voted Left, while 54 per cent voted Right, with Reform UK taking a striking 31 per cent. University education has become one of the strongest drivers of left‑wing values. And because graduates disproportionately staff elite institutions, from the civil service to NGOs and cultural bodies, they also shape which moral languages are treated as authoritative. At university there is also a liberal gender divide. University statistics show that most females choose liberal or caring areas of studies, while more males go for stem subjects.

Higher education is full of new ideas around promises of autonomy and liberation from traditional constraints and perfect designed economic systems, but it often erodes older cultural roles, marriage, family, community care, and the vagueries of market systems, without offering fully formed alternatives.

That isn’t illegitimate, but it does limit how political problems are framed in education and which solutions feel instinctively right. According to the Adam Smith institute only 12 per cent of academics support right wing parties, implying an homogeneity that limits thought when understanding solutions. The idea that progressive politics are inherently better is one of the great unexamined assumptions of our time. It is a dangerous comforting myth that left wing ideas are virtuous and the right wing ideas destructive. It allows commentators to praise female radicalisation as enlightenment while treating male radicalisation as deviance.

And for this generation brought up on social media with algorithms  designed to turn up the volume, who are fed a diet of outrage, emotional certainty, and echoing reaffirmation, for them moral clarity travels further than ambiguity. Nuance does not trend.

Young men find influencers offering strength, status and grievance. Young women find equally potent narratives of care, justice, freedom and collective redemption through attacking the old uncaring institutions. Both are offered belonging, both are told the system is rigged by the elite, both are promised agency. Why would we expect moderation to thrive in there?

The results of these influences on their personal choices is tragic.

This generation forms fewer long-term relationships, reports higher loneliness and feels deep uncertainty about family life and fears the economic future. Populist politics becomes not just better politics but a promise of recognition.  But all studies show populist governments do not have better economic outcomes, and the choices of women are more limited by overarching populist governments than in capitalist democracies.

If we cannot admit that young women might be susceptible to moralised political messaging in a way that is harming them, as we do young men, we cannot begin to understand the scale of the populist shift underway. Populism does not become non-populist because it speaks the language of empathy.

Boys and girls are both signalling distress. The howl sounds different, but the underlying drivers of financial insecurity, loss of cultural faith in institutions and the lure of simple virtue as the answer against a corrupt elite  are remarkably similar across the democratic Western world. All mainstream political parties who wish to steer our country need to understand the desperate need for policies that help the next generations to thrive.

Both groups are, in truth, drowning rather than waving banners and politicians of both the left and right, in their fixation on the “boy” problem, are ignoring the radical left journey of our girls at our peril.