Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth

Jilted Generation

How Britain Has Bankrupted its Youth

Ed Howker and Shiv Malik

Published in the UK in 2010 by

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Text copyright © 2010 Ed Howker and Shiv Malik

The authors have asserted their moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Plantin Light by Marie Doherty

CONTENTS

Title

About the Authors

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1: Housing

Chapter 2: Jobs

Chapter 3: Inheritance

Chapter 4: Politics

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the authors

Ed Howker is a journalist at The Spectator magazine and before that worked on current affairs documentaries for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme. Shiv Malik writes for the Sunday Times and Prospect magazine and is a regular broadcaster. They are both 29 and live in London.

To our parents, thank you.

INTRODUCTION

Like all demographic change, the decline in childbirth carries both plusses and minuses. The crime rate ought to fall, since the 16–19 age-group includes the highest number of offenders; but that may be offset by a falling off in young recruits for the police. The young will suddenly find themselves much more sought-after. Universities and other places of higher education may be forced to lower their standards of entry. Employers will have to compete for them: the blight of youth unemployment should start to lift. Their wages, which in recent years have been falling behind, may accordingly burgeon.

‘When the springs of youth run dry’, leading article, The Guardian, 6 April 1988

Perhaps this is a book about coincidence, an unconnected series of unfortunate events. Human nature is such that we seek out simple shapes and narratives for our lives where there are none; we try to impose order on happenstance and accident. We look for heroes and villains. Stories comfort us. They give us someone to blame.

If nothing else, you could say that coincidence is painted thick onto the lives of those born in September 1979 and afterwards. Theirs would be the first generation to receive student loans and be compelled to pay tuition fees while their contemporaries, born just weeks earlier, and who therefore entered school a full year beforehand, would pay nothing. That they would start their university careers in the very year when property prices began their skyrocketing trajectory far beyond the future incomes of Britain’s young workers seems unlucky. And that they will spend the next 30 years of their working lives paying off implicit government debt, and the very explicit deficit, seems somehow ill-fated too. And this, of course, assumes that they get a job, since many of them are joining the employment market following the worst recession in decades.

But what if these observations, many of which seem to be the concerns of the best-educated and richest young people, barely scratch the surface of the peculiar predicament in which an entire generation now find themselves? What if their disparate problems are linked and are getting worse? And what if the forces that shape their lives and their hardships – real or imagined – have been gathering pace and power for several decades so subtly that they are almost imperceptible today? Sometimes the only retort that seems to make sense is the one their parents offer: stop whingeing, stop complaining, just get on with it.

These, more or less, are the questions that have shaped this book, but to answer them fully is an almost impossible task. The post-79 generation have already lived through an era of momentous change. A ‘Cold War’ between Britain, its allies, and communism melted away before the oldest of them were teenagers, only to be replaced by unpredictable but frequent real wars in the Middle East and Asia. By the time that generation took GCSEs, the internet was beginning to change for ever the terms and opportunities for communication. And over the course of their lives digital innovations have led a rapid evolution in the means of manufacturing, service provision, and the nature and frequency of human interaction. Further, a political and scientific movement embryonic at their birth had pushed environmental concerns to the forefront of people’s lives by the time they reached adulthood. It’s all but impossible to measure the effect of so many complex forces on an entire generation’s lives. So, we’re just a page into this book and already we’re forced to admit that it’s not going to tell the whole story. For example, in the following pages we don’t examine environmental issues in any detail. We don’t trace the cause of feminism and try to quantify its effect on the freedoms and opportunities of women; we don’t examine fully the impact of technology on the lives of young people, or even what numerous irregular and often contradictory education reforms have meant for them. Others have explored these trends better than we ever could. We don’t even have a particular qualification for investigating this subject, apart from the fact that we’re members of that post-79 generation.

So what are we looking at? This book examines four basic areas that form the foundation of people’s lives regardless of which generation they’re born into: Housing, Jobs, Inheritance – how wealth is transferred between generations – and Politics. There’s another good reason for confining the terms of this book to these areas. These four subjects are easier to compare between generations, and we’re going to need to do that if we’re to establish whether Britain’s young adults really are having an unexpectedly rough time. After that, we’ve tried to piece together what has happened and what can be done to fix it.

As you might have guessed from the title, we don’t think our generation have been treated very well. We think they’ve been jilted – cast aside. What we tell in this book is a tale of neglect – not by our parents’ generation (if anything, they’ve often been left to pick up the pieces), but by British society more generally. Perhaps that sounds strange. Believe us when we tell you that the story is about to get a whole lot stranger. But before we dive deep into the weirdness we’d better explain exactly who the jilted generation are.

Meet the jilted generation

The most recent measure of Britain’s population comes from 2008. Figure 1 shows us the shape of those generations alive today.

Figure 1. Population by age, 2008 (Office for National Statistics, principal population projections).

The spike at the far right-hand side is a crude lumping together of everyone over the age of 90. Working leftwards, the next spike – occurring between the ages of 56 and 63 – shows the ‘first-wave baby boom’. This spike occurred in all Western countries following the end of the Second World War. There was a return to the stability of peacetime and soldiers came home from battle. Men and women got physical. So physical, in fact, that the matrons working for Britain’s newly nationalised health service could barely cope with the number of new births. In America that boom carried on for the next twenty years, but in Britain it slowed down, rising again only between the years 1956 and 1965 in the ‘second-wave baby boom’. Since then some have died and others have migrated, but today in total there are 16.7 million baby boomers in Britain.

What about the jilted generation? The line we draw for our generation isn’t completely arbitrary. We are the children of the baby boomers, the so-called ‘boomer echo’ – a smaller lump that begins in 1979 and continues until 1994 – and there are around 13 million of us. Between these two generations are 11 million members of the so-called ‘Generation X’. It’s worth stating at the get-go that all these generational divides are far from exact, and we’re not going to pretend that there are too many similarities between members of each cohort.

Age of the aged

Of these three generations, the largest by far are baby boomers, and their sheer size has some wide-ranging implications for our society. Britain has an ageing population and this is creating a demographic trend that is completely new: the ratio between the old and the young is imbalanced. Figure 2 shows a second graph taken from government predictions, estimating what will happen in the next twenty years.

Figure 2. The balance of old and young in Britain, 1971–2031 (Office for National Statistics, principal population projections).

It’s easy to think that Britain’s birth-rate or immigration explain why the UK population is growing. However, it’s clear from this graph that between 1971 and 2031 the main factor driving up the population is that people aren’t dying at the age they once did. The population aged under 45 remains broadly stable. But as the population increase over that 60-year period hits 15 million, there are predicted to be 11.5 million extra people aged 45 or older. And, since there are so many baby boomers, Britain’s elderly population will also increase dramatically. By 2040, there will be 10 million over-75s, while the ranks of the super-old, aged over 90, will increase by 390 per cent as the first-wave boomers try to make a century as fit as ever. Over in Whitehall, government has been slowly waking up to the implications of all this. In 2009 a Treasury report on the generations warned:

UK demographic developments … could potentially put direct pressure on the public finances through impacts on age-related expenditure, such as state pensions or health care. Demographic developments could also potentially have implications for the relative size of the workforce and economic growth, thereby indirectly affecting the public finances.1

In other words, Britain’s ageing population could be storing up a whole heap of trouble for our generation who, in the forthcoming era of rising pension and healthcare costs, will be covering these costs on their behalf. What’s more, there will be fewer of us working, so we’ll have to pay proportionally more of our income in tax. Besides rising pension and healthcare costs, it’s easy to think of a few more effects that the ageing population might have: as people get older they’re unlikely to give up ownership of businesses and assets that might naturally have flowed down to younger generations in earlier times. Our economy might begin to skew a bit more directly towards older people’s interests and buying habits. We shouldn’t resent this. The Rolling Stones reached number one in the UK album chart yet again in 2010. We’re getting used to it in the charts – we should be aware of the effect elsewhere.

But one of the most interesting aspects of population trends is that we haven’t been aware of them. That’s odd: broad demographics are fairly easy to predict – you know that if you have a great deal of children in one year, you’ll have a large number of pensioners 65 years later – but the consequences of the spikes and booms seem somehow to have been swept under the carpet. In the course of researching this book, we discovered something very interesting: the Treasury began publishing long-term public finance reports only in 2002. We don’t know why the UK exchequer didn’t do this earlier, but you get a sense of the severity of the situation they discovered from their very first report: ‘One of the key challenges facing the Government is the ageing of the population’, it said. ‘This trend will have profound effects on Britain’s society and economy over the coming decades.’2

Britain’s professional civil servants are known for their diplomatic language and delicate phraseology, so when they use the term ‘profound effects’ you know something might be about to go horribly wrong.

Lifestyles of the poor and aimless

But actually this book isn’t just about the forthcoming ‘age of the aged’ and those ‘profound effects’ lurking around the corner. What we’re interested in is the way our generation are living right now: our employment prospects, the homes we return to when work is ended, how much tax we pay and what that tax is paying for – the rudimentary issues.

We wanted to understand why the unemployment rate for young people began to rise long before the recession – in 2005; why 25 per cent of 16–17-year-olds were out of school and out of work at the height of the last economic boom. We needed to know why young people are spending a greater proportion of their income on rents than at any time in the last 30 years, and why Britain could enjoy a decade-long surge in house prices while the number of young first-time buyers fell through the floor. We tried to appreciate why we’re paying our taxes to service a national debt that’s potentially five times bigger than Britain’s Gross Domestic Product. And why, when Britain enjoyed the greatest boom in living memory, young people’s wages stagnated while the rest of the population’s soared.

It turns out you don’t have to cast your view forward to 2031 to get a sense of the severity of the jilted generation’s predicament. And even more curiously, these difficulties are shaping not just our lives but those of our contemporaries across the developed world. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) finds that across the world’s richest nations the young are more likely to be poor today than at any time in the last twenty years. There’s a gathering sense, in fact, that our interests are being cast aside.

France’s 2006 riots, in which Parisian students were teargassed by police for the first time since the late 1960s, came about for precisely this reason. One UK reporter on the scene, Angelique Chrisafis, described the chaos:

The young rebels are fighting not for change but for the status quo – they want the same rights and benefits their parents enjoyed. They do not put flowers in their hair, but take to the streets with nooses round their necks, carrying mock gallows or coffins, chanting, ‘We are disposable pieces of shit!’3

Germany’s response to the issue has been somewhat more considered. They have set up a ‘Foundation of the Rights of Future Generations’ to address the problem of age-based wage disparities and the political exclusion of young people. And the issue is just beginning to gain momentum in the United States, where researchers have uncovered one statistic that says it all:

Young men (aged twenty-five to thirty-four) with a high school degree or less earned about $4,000 less in 2002 than in 1975 (with earnings adjusted for inflation). Men with some college education also lost ground, earning about $3,500 a year less.4

This book doesn’t examine the jilted generations in other countries, however. For one thing, the specific circumstances of any generation vary from one nation to the next. For another, while there has been plenty of discussion about ‘baby boomers’ and their legacy in Britain, no one has fully focused yet on the people really losing out: us.

The postponement of adulthood

The most pernicious aspect of young people’s losing out is not material loss. It’s unfortunate if young people have less money, but we’re young – we can always earn more. The trouble is that by making employment and housing and taxation more difficult for young people to handle, a whole series of spin-off problems of a much more disturbing nature are created.

In the first place, these early imbalances create a kind of engine of inequality within our own generation. While young people from wealthy backgrounds are able to weather the tumult of their early years – they’re supported through the bad jobs and high debts and expensive housing by their parents – the poorest have no means of escape. For too many of them, poverty and a lack of opportunity will therefore be further entrenched in their first years of adulthood.

There is another effect. Quite simply, young people aren’t allowed to grow up. The postponement of adulthood doesn’t refer to technological progress – our generation nearly all have iPods, computers and mobile phones. It doesn’t represent young people’s engagement with fashion or culture. Adulthood encompasses much more basic ideas: family, savings, community, realising ambitions and ideas, stability, even having children. And all these are connected by narratives – those vital stories humans construct for themselves.

As this book works through the home and employment markets, a powerful trend emerges of young people who have no narrative to piece together. We work in jobs and live in homes secured on short-term contracts; the steps of our lives are constantly meandering. We’re not settled. Indeed, for many of us, only our childhood homes represent a