Graham, who works in the transport industry in the Midlands, noticed a big change in his mother during the Covid pandemic. “I remember walking home from work one day and I got this phone call and all of a sudden she was listing off these conspiracy theories at me.” He now realises how much time she was spending online, on her phone and iPad, cut off from friends, family and the church life that had always been so important to her.
Five years later, Graham’s mother, who is retired and in her 60s, supports the hard-right agitator and convicted criminal Tommy Robinson with what her son describes as a religious fervour. She has told him Keir Starmer is a communist trying to “replace us all with Muslims” and Covid was a hoax. He says she spends hours on social media and uses her TV only to stream YouTube videos.
“I went to see her a few nights ago and everything started off as normal and then the conversation just switched,” Graham says. “All of a sudden it was about Muslims in prisons forcing others to convert at knife-point, then somehow Starmer became part of it, and I just had to leave. I’ve been trying to help her, but I don’t really understand politics and I end up making it worse. We’ve always been close but I feel like I’m losing her.”
Graham has never had a clear idea of what, exactly, his mother is consuming on her screens, or how she has become radicalised. But he is far from alone in grappling with the sometimes extreme rightward political drift of an older relative. While so much research and concern has focused on radicalisation in young people – particularly young men – less is understood about the effects of a fragmenting political and media landscape on increasingly online boomers, the generation now aged from about 60 to 80.
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