Young people can inherit the earth, but not until they grow up

Greta Thunberg is cross with world leaders at COP26 because they haven’t done what she told them to do. The summit, she said, is a failure, and politicians are passing the responsibility of saving the planet to young activists like her.

While this verdict seems ungrateful to those at the top table, including Boris Johnson and Prince Charles, who worshipped at the Greta altar in Glasgow, we should all be relieved that the adolescent Swede has little sway over actual policy.

If she had been inside rather than outside the tent, the rush towards net zero, already likely to exact a heavy price, would have been far more reckless. That’s what you get when you let idealistic youth dictate the agenda. Every new generation obviously knows better than its elders, but in the past, they have not been taken so seriously.

Today, there has been a shift. Beyond the climate debate, many stupid decisions are being made in many spheres – academia, the arts, publishing, the BBC – because the grown-ups seem to be terrified of the young. 

Those of us who had our radical phases in a bygone age, and were either patronised or punished, can only look on in awe at how young people now call the tune. Nowhere has this been more evident than in our universities, root of the cancel culture that has become a full-blown culture war. 

Students are by definition on a learning curve, but where campus was once a relatively safe space for them to make their mistakes, it is now a crucible that can end adults’ careers. The student union president at Southampton University who vowed to remove a First World War mural because it featured only white men demonstrates the sheer silliness of student groupthink.

But it can have sinister consequences too. 

Edinburgh academic Neil Thin, who opposed the renaming of the university’s David Hume Tower, was suspended after a third-year created a template for students to register complaints of racism, triggering an investigation. Although eventually reinstated, Thin’s bosses had bowed to the undergraduate witch hunt, effectively finding him guilty until proven innocent.

Kathleen Stock was hounded from her job at Sussex University last week after a campaign of harassment by students, who accused her of transphobia. Over three years ago, the philosophy professor warned that Facebook groups were being used to coordinate activity against her and said she knew of “at least a dozen cases of students complaining to university managers about lecturers’ alleged transphobia”. 

“This is a disaster. We desperately need scrutiny of emerging social, legal, medical, and sports policies in this area,” she said in an interview with the Times, but university bodies are running scared of juvenile lynch mobs.

Before Stock, the most famous victim of transgender censorship was JK Rowling who, ironically for the best-selling children’s author in history, was also shafted by the young. Staff at her publisher Hachette refused to work on her children’s book last year because she defended women’s rights. Those up in arms were reportedly very woke and mainly young.

The child actors made stars through the Harry Potter franchise, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, also disowned Rowling. Hachette chiefs stood by her, arguing that “freedom of speech is the cornerstone of publishing”, but other organisations that should know better have capitulated to underage angst.

They include Oxfam, which dropped a Wonder Women Bingo game celebrating Rowling after trans protests; a school in Sussex that abandoned plans to name a house after the writer because she was “no longer an appropriate role model”; and the Leaky Cauldron, the biggest Harry Potter website, which urged fans to stop buying Rowling’s books. Rowling can afford to take the hit but kowtowing to young people, is tantamount to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

The Old Vic has just cancelled its production of Into the Woods after staff objected to the director (and former Python) Terry Gilliam’s views on – you guessed it – transgender issues. The arts writer Ben Lawrence accused the millennials in arts companies of “a brattish sort of carping”, with senior staff “sighing like indulgent parents”.

Theatres, and the arts in general, don’t have the funds to put ideology before business, Lawrence argued in the Telegraph, and those in charge “need to take the reins back off testy, tantrum-prone toddlers”.

And so does the BBC management as it addresses criticism over impartiality and the tendency among some employees to confuse campaigning with reporting. “According to one senior executive, a significant number of editorial staff, most but not all young, are reluctant even to quote or broadcast people saying things those staff disagree with, especially on topics such as race and gender,” wrote James Kirkup in the Times this week.

An older, wiser BBC chap, Huw Edwards, has condemned the “censoring” of history after the portrait of a slave owner was taken down by National Museum Wales. Sir Thomas Picton should remain on display as “a reminder to Wales of an aspect of its past, no matter how disgraceful,” said the veteran newsman.

But, too late. The museum’s director of collections Kate Davies had already taken her instructions from a bunch of kids: “We wanted to work with young people for them to decide how they wanted to reflect on that history and how they want to interpret that portrait,” she said.

This belongs in the “has the world gone mad or have I” basket. I love young people; I have two of them in my immediate family. But I don’t want them to rule the world, not yet anyway.