ARE we creating a Philip Larkin generation? A generation of young people damaged and warped by the mistakes of us, their parents?

Larkin wrote in his poem This Be The Verse: “They f**k you up, your mum and dad.” If we do what good parents should do, and pay close attention to the lives of our millennial children, we’ll see that something has gone awry, and I fear we’re to blame. For, if not us, then who?

There’s an abiding stereotype that millennials are a snowflake generation in a perpetual state of shock and outrage, pursuing a progressive utopia. It’s a false stereotype – most millennials are saddled with debt, have little hope of ever buying a house, and are running themselves ragged working multiple low-wage, zero-hour-contract jobs. Only an unrepresentative handful live on social media trying to police the thoughts of the world.

But there’s a section of young people we seldom think of and they represent the generation’s real sickness: millennial nazis. Extremists in their late teens and early twenties radicalised by the alt-right, the new right, the far right – whatever expression we use to describe fascism in the 21st century.

It may seem counter-intuitive when older, right-wing commentators endlessly bemoan millennials as virtue-signalling left-wingers, but the truth is that the engine room of modern fascism is stoked by the radical young. As a whole, millennials vote broadly for left/liberal parties, but it’s equally true that the alt-right wouldn’t function without millennial leadership.

Look anywhere in the world and young people are in the thick of the new hard right: Brazil, France, Germany, Britain, America, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Italy.

In the UK, the main alt-right youth movement is Generation Identity (GI). It was recently out campaigning on the streets of Scotland. The anti-racist organisation Hope Not Hate monitors GI, which has connections to extremists including Mark Collett, a former BNP official who propagandises about “white genocide”. There are also links to the American white supremacist Richard Spencer, infamous for his ‘Hail Trump’ speech which received nazi salutes. GI members talk of ‘the great replacement’, a conspiracy theory that whites are being outnumbered by immigrants.

In Austria, the ‘Identitarian’ leader is Martin Sellner. He’s been deported from the UK, and prevented from entering America. In 2006, he was given community service for placing swastikas on a synagogue. However, it was too much for even Sellner when Generation Identity in the UK invited Colin Robertson, the Scottish YouTube propagandist known as Millennial Woes, and described as a “white supremacist and anti-semitic conspiracy theorist”, to address its annual conference.

Movements like GI want to shape public opinion, exploit cultural differences, push ethno-nationalism, and ultimately create a white Europe. Hope Not Hate describes these Identitarian groups – active in 23 countries – as “one of the most dangerous far-right networks currently active”.

The far-right terrorist who killed 51 people during the Christchurch mosque shootings donated money to the movement’s French and Austrian branches. Austria’s centre-right People’s Party wants Identitarians banned. The ideas of Identitarians are amplified by far-right websites like Brietbart and neo-nazi sites like the Daily Stormer.

It’s not new to see young people in thrall to right-wing extremism. When I was 15, National Front skinheads put me in hospital for looking like the kind of kid who listened to The Smiths. The housing estate I grew up in had NF and swastikas spray-painted on walls. However, what is new is that young people today aren’t just the bootboys, they’re calling the shots, creating the conversation.

So much of alt-right propaganda comes straight out of youth culture online. Neo-nazis use memes and sick hipster humour to make their political points. Think of all those insults for left-wingers – like libtard or snowflake – they all flowed from the alt-right online.

I’ve investigated the far right for nearly 30 years. Over that time, I’ve seen many young people radicalised by the ideology and become foot soldiers for older leaders. Today, though – despite older figureheads for the alt-right like Donald Trump in America and Marine Le Pen in France – the grassroots movement is increasingly led by the young. And it’s not just young men, there’s plenty of young women involved too.

So why? For the first time in living memory, conditions for the young are worse than those of their parents. This echo of the 1920s spells social disaster. Earlier generations may have felt poor or powerless, they may have been equally vulnerable to radicalisation over issues like immigration, but at least they knew they’d have a better life than mum and dad.

Today’s generation have no such hope. Some disconnect from politics completely, some reject the ideal of home/job/family, some swallow their disgust and accept the pointless grind of the rat race, a vocal minority try to fight from the left to change the world, and an increasing radicalised fringe embraces the far-right and helps sculpt its message and lead it to power.

We’re the ones who stripped hope away from the young. Think of the lives they’ve lived. Where we saw the end of the Cold War, peace in Ireland, increasing pay, growing home ownership – they saw the Iraq War, the economic crash, September 11 and food banks.

My generation may have thought we had it hard – and recessions, industrial decline and rising unemployment were certainly not fun to live through – but we had hope. We believed life would be better for us than our parents. For millennials, the lies of the Iraq war destroyed democracy, September 11 created racial hatred, and the crash ripped away all hope of economic change.

Social attitude surveys show that young people are now more authoritarian than people my age – I’m in my late 40s. We created the wars, crashes and terror outrages that shaped our children so shouldn’t we try to refashion the world for them while we still can?

Is it beyond our wit to see that the dog-eat-dog form of capitalism we accept as the norm can be remodelled so it is fairer for our children? If we just started with trying to make our children’s lives financially better – through equitable taxes, jobs that pay decent wages and treat employees with respect, and affordable housing – we’d go a long way to healing the harm we have done to their generation, and preventing future damage in the generation to come.

Surely we have enough time left to us on this earth to do that for our children?

Neil Mackay is Scotland’s Columnist of the Year