George Osborne’s Britain is no country for young men… or women
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Version 0 of 1. I have taken to apologising for owning a home. Not in the Uriah Heepish way leftwing males apologise for sexism, the better to get into women’s knickers, or in the self-abasing manner of students who check their white privilege and thus perpetuate the racial stereotypes they are meant to deplore. I don’t believe in wasting energy apologising for genders and skin colours you had no say in choosing. And I thought I had seen too many charlatans exploit identity politics and liberal guilt to comply with demands to check my privilege. Yet still, and for all that, when young friends call, I fall over myself to explain how I came to own a house in London. There’s no family fortune, I say, it’s just that in the 1980s debt was low and property cheap. A middle-class couple in unspectacular jobs – I was a general news reporter on the Independent, my wife was a department manager for John Lewis – would climb on the property ladder as automatically as we would take a driving test. My guests cannot imagine owning a flat if they live to be 100. They try not to hit me and I try to explain to myself why I am apologising. Checking your age privilege feels as absurd as checking your white or male privilege. The notion of the oppressed “young” is as artificial as the oppressed “ethnic minorities” or subjugated “women”. It is not as if we are talking about a unified group in any of these instances. More often than not, the British are just finding a way of avoiding talking about class, which so thoroughly dominates this creaking country it is as if the 20th century never happened. To spell it out: a supposedly privileged baby-boomer is not noticeably privileged if he’s a 65-year-old former miner, coughing up his lungs with chronic bronchitis. Nor can a public-school-educated princess, with a job in the City or the arts, and the promise of an untaxed and unearned windfall when her parents die, reasonably be described as an accursed member of “the jilted generation”. But just as your gender matters vastly more than it should if you live in Saudi Arabia or work in a sexist office, so age in the rich world is determining to an unjust extent the burdens citizens must carry. In Europe, the pain of the eurozone crisis bears disproportionately on the young, who have experienced Weimar levels of youth unemployment in Spain, Portugal and Greece. In Britain, you see a less dramatic but equally ominous future: the growth of the gerontocracy, where politicians realise that the client group they must bribe with other people’s money is the ever-growing number of elderly voters. George Osborne may have been the youngest chancellor in 120 years but he has turned on the young with single-minded viciousness. Maybe he was bullied at school. More probably he has made a cynical calculation. There are more pensioners than ever. They are more likely to vote than anyone else. Therefore the smart move for canny political operators everywhere is to forget about prudence and fiscal conservatism in the elderly’s case and follow a doctrine of “capitalism for the young and socialism for the old”. A small library of research charts the shift in wealth and power. As we report today, the 2015 Intergenerational Fairness Index reveals a 10% deterioration in the prospects of younger generations relative to the old in the past five years. The Office for National Statistics says that retirees saw their incomes increase by 5.1% between 2007/08 and 2011/12, while typical working households saw incomes fall by 6.4%. The Institute for Fiscal Studies meanwhile makes a point that cannot be made often enough: 30 years ago, pensioners were much more likely to be poorer than their younger counterparts. In 2011, the average incomes of pensioner households rose above the average incomes of the rest of the population for the first time in history, and they are still rising today. Tory policies are too often acts of class war, designed to help the middle and upper classes at the expense of the working class and poor, but they are also acts of intergenerational war, designed to protect and increase the wealth of the old at the expense of the young. Last week’s budget was an exceptionally squalid example: Osborne hit 13 million working families with his changes to tax credits and the universal benefit, decided that his raised minimum wage should apply only to workers aged over 25, turned the university maintenance grants of 500,000 students from working-class families into loans and further restricted housing benefit for 18- to 21-year-olds. The consequences of denying opportunities to the young are well known. As the leftwing economist Chris Dillow puts it: “Economic conditions in our formative years can have long-lasting effects upon our attitudes towards the economy. It is, surely, only a generation brought up cosseted in (relative) affluence that could ever have listened to song lyrics such as ‘All you need is love’ without laughing contemptuously.” Some of today’s young who have been through exploitative internships, bum jobs and no jobs at all will be cowed for the rest of their life. They haven’t made their rites of passage. They have missed out on learning the work ethic and lost opportunities for education and training. The economic record shows they are less productive when they finally find work. There is good evidence that they are also likely to be much more cynical than men and women who came of age in good times. They believe that success depends on luck, not talent, and they are far less inclined to take financial risks as they grow older. Modern Conservative economics produces very unconservative people In short, modern Conservative economics produces very unconservative people. They are unlikely to be entrepreneurs and will regard the “role models” society holds up for them to admire as the beneficiaries of luck or fraud. It is also unsustainable. As the number of pensioners grows we cannot afford to keep whacking up their benefits, or fund lavish public sector pensions, or exempt all pensioner earnings from national insurance. Especially when we are simultaneously inflating the costs of housing and education for their children and grandchildren. One day, we’ll find there aren’t enough productive young people to support Osborne’s future. And as the young are all in the end the old have to maintain them, they should worry more about how they are going to do it. |