Britain's in decline. Democracy has lost its way. It's no wonder so many of my generation believe it's time for a dictator.

My debut in The Daily Mail.

Young people in the UK – born, like me, in the 21st century – are constantly told how lucky we are to have ‘freedom’.

To our parents and grandparents, steeped in the baggage of the Second World War, ‘freedom’ is the ultimate democratic right.

But many in Generation Z can see that our ‘free’ society has degenerated into instability and uncertainty.

If ‘freedom’ means being unable to afford a home, to live in overcrowded and overpriced rented accommodation, to work soulless jobs in order to pay sky-high taxes, and to have no sense of belonging or identity, perhaps freedom is not what we need.

So it’s no shock to read that a recent survey commissioned by Channel 4 found that 52 per cent of Britons aged 13 to 27 have lost faith in democracy and would welcome a dictator – a strong leader ‘who does not have to bother with parliament and elections’.

A third of my generation believe ‘the UK would be a better place if the Army was in charge’.

Other polls have found that many of us are likely to back the death penalty, while a Mail on Sunday survey this week found that two-thirds of us favour castrating sex offenders.

These reports have caused much alarm among liberal commentators – for whom democracy and the social contract are sacrosanct.

They don’t want to face the brutal truth that the social contract has been ripped up by a political class that has long refused to put the interests of ordinary British people first, or to deliver on our repeatedly expressed wishes at the ballot box – on immigration, crime, tax and much else.

Drug use, shoplifting and defrauding the state go unpunished. Millions of economically burdensome migrants from places and cultures vastly different from our own are invited in, housed and fed at our expense – and we are attacked and slurred as bigots if we complain.

As for democracy, it’s obvious from the visible decline in our country – which worsened after the 2008 financial crash and which has accelerated under Keir Starmer – that it isn’t delivering the right results.

Our supposed parliamentary rule is either an illusion, an anachronism or, if it does exist, clearly not fit for purpose.

After Labour’s landslide win last summer, it rapidly dawned on many of us who had voted for the first time that we were essentially politically impotent.

We had participated in the ritual of an election to change the public face of the state, but voting has not made a tangible difference beyond some tinkering on tax and spend.

It certainly hasn’t improved our lives, and we have no genuine means of shaping our collective future.

As a result, young people are realising that electoral politics is essentially theatre. Televised debates, Prime Minister’s Question Time, interviews with candidates on talk shows – it’s all performative.

Read the rest here.