There is something deeply unsettling happening in England right now, and it has nothing to do with who is in power or which party is making the headlines. It is about whether ordinary people still have the tools to understand what is going on around them at all.
Far-right groups have been making organised shows of force at major English ports. Masked demonstrators gathered in Dover and Portsmouth in what were clearly planned, coordinated events. Another group turned up outside a national newspaper’s London offices demanding their leader’s mother be given a new house. These are not fringe incidents happening in the shadows. They are bold, public, and growing in confidence.
Yet according to a YouGov poll published last week, 43% of people across all age groups were either completely unaware of the Dover and Portsmouth demonstrations or simply were not following the story. Among 18 to 24 year olds, 53% said they had no opinion on whether the masked protests were a legitimate form of demonstration. No opinion. Not even a gut feeling either way.
How does that happen? How do organised fascist demonstrations at English ports fail to register with nearly half the population?
Part of the answer might be sitting in your pocket right now.
Research suggests that TikTok users can scroll through around 260 videos in under 35 minutes. That works out to roughly eight seconds per video before moving on to the next thing. A clip of the Dover protests might appear in someone’s feed, hold their attention for a few seconds, and then vanish as they swipe to a dog doing backflips or someone jumping off a building into a pool. The information technically reached them. But it did not stick, it was not processed, and it left no real impression.
This is not just about TikTok. It is about the broader shift in how people in England, particularly younger generations, consume information. Long-form reading, whether that is newspapers, books, or even lengthy online articles, has been in decline for years. The ability to sit with a complex story, follow its threads, weigh up different perspectives, and form a considered view is a skill. And like any skill, if you stop practising it, you lose it.
What replaces it is something much more fragmented. Snippets. Reaction videos. Outrage clips stripped of context. Memes that flatten complicated issues into a single punchline. None of these formats are designed to build understanding. They are designed to grab attention, trigger a response, and move on.
The danger is not just that people miss individual stories. The danger is that over time, people lose the capacity to connect dots, spot patterns, and recognise when something serious is developing. Fascist movements have historically relied on exactly this kind of confusion and disengagement to grow. They thrive when the public cannot quite work out what is happening, when the noise is too loud and the signal too weak.
England is not immune to this. The far-right groups currently organising at ports and online are not stupid. They understand the information landscape. They produce content specifically designed for short attention spans, using memes, short videos, and emotionally charged clips that spread fast and stick just long enough to do their work before people scroll on. They are fluent in the language of distraction.
Meanwhile, the analytical tools needed to challenge them, critical reading, historical awareness, the patience to follow a story over days or weeks, are becoming rarer.
None of this means that young people in England are apathetic or beyond reach. Plenty of them are engaged, angry, and paying close attention to the world. But the systems delivering information to them are not built for depth. They are built for speed and engagement, and those are very different things.
The worry is a straightforward one. Democracy does not just need voters. It needs an informed public that can recognise threats when they emerge, understand context, and make judgements based on more than a few seconds of footage. If reading continues to decline and short-form content continues to dominate, that capacity weakens. And the people who benefit most from a confused, disengaged public are exactly the ones currently marching in masks at English ports.
That should be enough to make anyone put the phone down and read something properly.