'They want more than we did' – how the Tories made age our biggest divide

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/jul/17/old-young-age-divide-christchurch

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It’s a Thursday morning in Christchurch, Dorset, and in its own way, the scene in the centre of town looks idyllic. The number of cafes – which include the obligatory Costa, and Caffe Nero – easily extends to double figures. In any city, they would be full of people barking out their orders and twitching their way to work, but here just about everyone takes their time. Breakfast might stretch to an hour; elevenses even longer. Meanwhile, as the sun beats down, other people idly sit on benches and at bus stops. Very quickly, you get the sense that being busy might easily strike some people as being tantamount to rudeness.

Christchurch has a population of 54,000 and sits at the heart of a parliamentary constituency with the same name. At the last count, the 33% of people here who are over 65 made it the constituency with the UK’s oldest age profile, a demographic quirk that hits you as soon as you arrive, not least on account of the number of bungalows. It is rock-solidly Tory: although the Lib Dems took it in a byelection at the fag-end of the John Major years, Christopher Chope now has a seemingly impregnable majority of 18,000 (with Ukip having recently leapfrogged the two other main parties into second).

It is, moreover, a great place to come if you want to get to grips with one of the key elements of what happened under the coalition, which seems to be going to overdrive now the Tories are ruling on their own: the protection of the benefits and entitlements that apply to older people, while those at the younger end of the age spectrum have their help and protection hacked back.

Related: The Guardian view on the generation gap: youth clubbed | Editorial

Last week’s budget was a particularly brazen case in point, as George Osborne scrapped maintenance grants for poorer university students (worth up to £3,387 a year), did away with housing benefit for 18 to 21 year olds and made one glaring exception to his new “national living wage”, which will rise to at least £9 by 2020: those under 25, who will be paid a lower minimum wage. Meanwhile, the state pension – currently up to £115.95 a week, but rising to up to £155 for new pensioners as of April 2016 – is now linked to earnings, and despite occasional noise about such universal pensioner benefits as free prescriptions, gratis bus travel and the winter fuel allowance, they look set to remain in place. Austerity, it seems, is predominantly a young person’s game.

On Saxon Square, a pristine quadrangle of shops and cafes at the northern edge of town, I meet Dee and Graham Snape, 68 and 71 respectively, having coffee in the sunshine. Until they retired, Dee was the PA to the chief executive of the local council and Graham was a civil engineer. They both have final salary pensions. Their 36-year-old daughter, they tell me, is attempting to get on the property ladder and finding it extremely difficult; they are about to help her get her deposit together.

“I do feel sympathy for younger people now,” says Dee, “and I know it’s a struggle. But they want more than we did. When we started our married life, there was no help. No maternity pay, even. When I left work to have my first baby, I got a £25 voucher to buy some nappies and that was it. We went down from two salaries to one.” Credit, they remind me, was impossible to come by. “And we couldn’t afford holidays abroad. We had second-hand furniture.”

What did they make of the budget? “We knew if the Conservatives got in they’d protect the likes of us, because we’re the bulk of their voters, aren’t we?” says Dee. In fact, they are both tribal Labour supporters, who got used to tactically supporting the Lib Dems when they moved here from their native West Midlands, and they have obvious reservations about what Osborne announced. Dee expresses deep unease about the so-called national living wage not being there for anyone under 25. “That’s not going to help people, is it? Eighteen, I would have said. Or 21. And I can’t imagine what it’s like living in an area where there’s no hope of getting work.”

How, I wonder, do they feel about all those universal pensioner benefits, and the regular calls to limit their reach? Both sound doubtful about the winter fuel allowance, but see the others as the just reward for their previous efforts. But do they feel lucky, compared to younger generations? “Oh gosh, yes,” says Graham. “I think our generation has been the last one that’s been able to own their property and have savings. We probably are a fortunate generation.”

On the other side of the square, I sit down with 63-year-old Lynne Tabraham and Ursula Smith, who is 91. A native of Lübeck in Germany who came to the UK with her British husband 68 years ago, Smith has a 10-a-day cigarette habit, but aside from a walking stick, shows no outward signs of ill health. Both are retired hairdressers, and dyed-in-the-wool Conservatives. “They’re very good,” says Tabraham. “They know what they’re talking about. I wouldn’t have liked to see anyone else doing it. David Cameron needs to finish what he’s started.”

But what, I wonder, of the great howls of pain that have gone up since the budget, and young people’s complaints that they are increasingly living in impossible circumstances?

“We’ve all been through that, my dear,” says Smith. “I’ve lived in rooms in attics, and I worked till I was 70. We worked all our lives. Life is what you make it: you’ve got to go out and get it.” A pause. “People having eight or 10 kids on benefits – that does annoy me. If you can’t afford the kids, don’t have them.”

As many of my conversations in Christchurch suggest, if people at the younger end of the age range are having an increasingly rough time, there is one pretty obvious explanation. At this year’s general election, turnout among the over-65s was 78%, as against a measly 43% for 18-24 year olds. Moreover, 47% of the oldest category of people voted for the Conservatives, with only 23% supporting Labour – as against 43% of younger voters backing Labour (and 8% voting Green), with a mere 27% voting Tory. There might, then, be a simple term for what Osborne and his fellow ministers are doing: “Looking after your own supporters” probably nails it.

The budget was hardly the first time that young people have been disproportionately clobbered. The rocketing cost of higher education and the coalition’s abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance are part of the same story. So are many elements of the increasingly punitive benefits system – which, among other things, limits housing benefit for under-35s without children to a paltry “shared accommodation rate”, and stops the benefits of 18-24 year-olds (AKA “sanctioning”) at twice the overall average rate. The job market for young people is increasingly insecure, and low paid: it is sobering to think that the hourly minimum wage for an under-19 apprentice is about to increase from £2.73 to a munificent £3.30. Small wonder, then, that the number of young adults living with their parents has increased by a quarter since 1996, to 3.3 million, the highest number since official records began.

As questions bound up with the widening political age divide start to belatedly intrude on debate, there is now a thinktank dedicated to looking at them: the Intergenerational Foundation, co-founded in 2011 by 55-year-old Angus Hanton. Its work, he tells me, boils down to “researching fairness between generations”, and although its charitable status means that it won’t adopt party-political standpoints, he and his colleagues have some basic political convictions. “We have a sort of background view that young people and future generations have been rather ... I don’t know what the word is ... shafted by successive government policies,” he says. Osborne’s recent manouvres were particularly glaring, he adds: “We’ve been shocked by how much the government are building up intergenerational tensions. Previous governments have done it, but this budget is particularly harsh on young people, and particularly generous for older generations.

“Our concern,” he says, “is that age is still being used as a proxy for need. People say, ‘Well, these people must need money because they’re older.’ That was maybe true in the 1980s, when life expectancies were lower and pensions were very poor, and older people were less likely to own their own home. But it seems to me that the government’s job is to work out where need is.”

One of his biggest bugbears, he tells me, is the existence of large numbers of people over 60 who the foundation counts as millionaires (property values come into this) and who qualify for universal benefits: “Our figures show that there are 2 million of them, and that’s a lot: more than 10%.” Political considerations, he says, mean that these people are left alone, whereas hard times fall on the young for two reasons: first, their relative political disengagement; and second, an even simpler calculation.

“In a time of austerity, the government realises that people don’t miss what they’ve never had,” he says. “So there’s a tendency not to allow new benefit claimants. It looks very effective, and it’s bound to fall more heavily on young people. And it applies very much to even bigger things, like free education.”

So how might all this be resolved? Hanton thinks official safeguards should apply to young people, in the same way they do to ethnic minorities or gay people. He would also like sunset clauses built into such age-specific benefits as the winter fuel allowance, so they could fall away with a minimum of political fuss. “More fundamentally,” he concludes, “younger people need to assert themselves, and say, ‘This isn’t fair.’ I think they’re starting to do that. But part of the issue is that they’re so well brought-up: they’re very respectful of older people, and generous towards them.”

There is, though, an obvious danger in characterising young people’s predicament as a largely matter of generational distribution. For a start, it neglects how much millions of older people are also being stung by austerity, as seen in everything from cuts in social care to the hacking-down of bus routes. The eventual result of highlighting an old v young divide might be the downgrading of provision for older people, rather than any improvement for people lower down the age range. Moreover, the generational view perhaps also risks misunderstanding huge changes that are already affecting people far beyond their youth, and will sooner or later collide with everybody, of whatever age.

In the last 10 years or so, a new concept has started to intrude on politics and economics: that of the precariat, a new “dangerous class” at the cutting edge of globalisation, with working lives characterised by huge insecurity and precariousness (hence the name), and an ever-shrinking set of entitlements and rights. The precariat, needless to say, is concentrated among the young.

The creator of the concept is the academic and writer Guy Standing, 67, now a professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. By way of a note of caution, he says that “the generational thing is only one aspect of what’s happening – I regularly find myself saying, ‘Don’t get trapped in it’” But he concedes that in the UK, a majority of people under 30 are now members of the precariat, and that looking at things from an age-group perspective has its uses.

The precariat, he explains, is defined by three key features, “and in all three, youth are bearing the brunt”. First, he says, “they are being habituated to accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living, and they don’t have any occupational career to build”. Second, “they don’t get rights-based benefits. They don’t get any non-wage benefits such as pensions, paid holidays or sick leave. And as a result of falling real wages, they are always living on the edge of unsustainable debt – where one accident or mishap could mean they’re out on the street.

“The third thing,” he continues, “is that they are systematically losing rights that the ordinary citizen takes for granted, which applies to youth, big time.” This, he agrees, is where Osborne’s budget comes in. “Young people are reduced to being supplicants,” he says. “They have to satisfy people, and plead – they get reduced to being institutionalised beggars.” The politics of this, he says, are so far uncertain – because – as evidenced by the fact that measures increasing the size of the precariat have been pushed through by all three mainstream parties – “no one is prepared to speak up for these people”.

The last week has perhaps seen glimmers of change on that front: the acclaimed maiden House of Commons speech by the 20-year-old SNP MP Mhairi Black, with its withering attack on Osborne’s cuts to housing benefit (“I am also the only 20-year-old in the whole of the UK who the chancellor is prepared to help with housing,” she said); the Labour leadership contender Jeremy Corbyn’s £10bn scheme to restore free higher education. But on the whole, what Standing says rings true: if young people are repeatedly at the sharp end of what governments get up to, they still seem light years from the centre of politics.

Back in Christchurch, as my day goes on, at least some of these intergenerational questions start to feel a little more blurred. Paul Fessey, 63, and his wife Veronica, 72, are from Worcester, and here on holiday. He has a private and state pension; she receives half the state pension he does, thanks to the rules that were changed for future pensioners by the last government.“The money we get covers our costs,” says Paul. “But only just.”

Their 41-year-old daughter, they tell me, is trapped in that uncertain place in which part-time work is rendered impossible by the costs of childcare, so some of their benefits – the winter fuel allowance, chiefly – are used to help her and her kids. When I suggest there is a cruel imbalance between help given to old and young people, they both nod, animatedly. “They just don’t get a start in life,” says Paul.

As absurd as it may sound, it takes an amazingly long time to find anyone under 30 in the centre of Christchurchtown. In my first hour, the only young people to be seen are a party of German exchange students. But eventually, I have a 15-minute chat with 19-year-old Joy Howley, who is about to start a film-related degree at the University of the Arts London.

Unfortunately, she has just been hit by a move announced in the budget. For her first 12 months, she’ll receive a maintenance grant, before Osborne’s decision to replace them with loans kicks in, and further payments will be added to her debts. She is at the end of the gap year she has spent working at the local branch of Next to partly pay her way through higher education, and thought the grant would work as a kind of financial cushion. “Most people who go to uni have their parents to help them and add a bit of extra support,” she says. “As someone who doesn’t have that, it’s frustrating to think I’m going to come out of uni even worse off than everyone else.”

How does she feel about the widening divide between old and young? “It’s definitely there. If you’re from a wealthy background, it’s maybe not so obvious. But if you have less financial support, that difference does hit you.”

“As a generation, I don’t think we take enough interest in what’s going on,” she muses. “So they can take advantage of us more. We’re not that involved.” She voted at the last election: Labour for parliament; Green for the local council. But she understands why so many of her contemporaries avert their eyes from politics, even as politicians shred what remain of their rights and entitlements.

“Politics needs to start drawing us in,” she says, with the slightly desperate tone I have heard from young people all over the country. “Whereas now, it’s like we’re all being cut out.”