Welcome to the Jilted Generation E-Book

Ed Howker

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 365

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This the 44-page Preface to the 2013 edition of Ed Howker and Shiv Malik's Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted Its Youth. In 2010, 'Jilted Generation: How Britain Bankrupted It's Youth' revealed the plight of Britain's youngest adults for the first time while a new coalition government set out to solve them. The Tories said they would "fulfil a solemn promise to the next generation". The Liberal Democrats said they were "absolutely determined that we will be able to look our children and grandchildren in the eye and say we did the best we could for them". So how has that been working out? In this trailblazing new analysis, the authors of Jilted Generation reveal the canyon between Britain's next generation and the politicians claiming to help them. In unemployment and homelessness rates, through the riots, student protests and workfare battles, a picture emerges of a generation in crisis, a government in stasis and an unprecedented opportunity to solve both problems. Published here as an eBook Short, as well as in the fully updated new edition of Jilted Generation, this essay offers an insight into the issues - a clear and hard-hitting view of the situation in 2013 for Britain's young adults.

Leseprobe

Praise for the first edition of Jilted Generation

‘What the authors eloquently trace is the consequences of a breathtakingly foolhardy thirty-year experiment in dismantling the state and individualising responsibility that has led straight to the debt crisis we face today. We should applaud their forensic skill in exposing the rarely discussed assumptions that have led us to where we are, and in setting out the consequences in concrete terms.’ The Oldie

‘Jilted Generation brilliantly analyses the problems faced by today’s generation of young adults.’ Scotsman

‘Howker and Malik knit together a taut and analytically rigorous narrative of 25 years of political myopia and mismanagement, outlining a series of gross policy errors that have disproportionately benefited the old at the expense of the young. These mistakes are likely to loom large over the UK for decades.’ The Spectator

‘No parent can dismiss this argument about our collective failure to invest in the future.’ The Guardian

‘An excellent analysis of the hardship and inequity faced by today’s generation of young people.’ Morning Star

‘Ed Howker and Shiv Malik have written a critique of capitalism that is as powerful and provocative as anything written by Marx and Engels.’ Tribune

‘A heady cocktail … that’s enough to make anyone’s blood boil. At times the writers become true polemicists … a compelling narrative that explains exactly how serial ministers’ focus on individuals as self-interested and motivated purely by money has influenced our politics.’ Politics.co.uk

‘The run-up to the election saw a string of books on intergenerational unfairness … The best was Jilted Generation by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik. They did not confine themselves to education but looked at how children were having their rites of passage to adulthood postponed, and how vast numbers were living with their parents into their twenties. They could not afford exorbitant housing costs, or build a career because they worked in exploitative internships or insecure temporary jobs, if they worked at all.’ Nick Cohen, The Observer

‘They do not hold babyboomers responsible for the misfortunes of the current generation. They develop a more interesting line of argument … Howker and Malik want politicians to engage in more long-term thinking about the problems of society, but one of the obstacles is this culture of self-expression and immediate gratification, which is now a key part of the way the economy and politics work. Reversing this lies at the heart of the contemporary political dilemma.’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Most political books are dated even by publication, but the Malik/Howker Jilted Generation argument just gets stronger by the day.’ The Max Dunbar blog

Revised printed edition published in the UK in 2013 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.net

Original printed edition published in the UK in 2010

by Icon Books Ltd

This updated electronic edition published in 2013

by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-184831-624-9 (ePub format)

Text copyright © 2010, 2013 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.

Typesetting by Marie Doherty

CONTENTS

Praise for the first edition

Title page

Copyright information

About the authors

Dedication

Preface to the new edition

Introduction

Chapter 1. Housing

Chapter 2. Jobs

Chapter 3. Inheritance

Chapter 4. Politics

Conclusion

Notes

Acknowledgements

About the authors

Ed Howker is an investigative journalist on Channel 4’s Dispatches programme. Shiv Malik is a staff writer on The Guardian newspaper. They co-founded The Intergenerational Foundation in 2011 and are in their early 30s.

To our parents, thank you.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

We are sometimes tempted to think that history repeats itself, that one government is just like the last, that one generation is just like the one that came before it, that nothing really changes. But history moves in mysterious ways.

Most mysterious of all is the plight of the group this book dubs the jilted generation – those born from the end of the 1970s onwards – who now face a future more precarious, more impoverished in income and of spirit than either they or their parents expected.

The statistics that describe this age-group are peculiarly worse than those that apply to older generations now, and previous generations at a similar point in their life-cycle. You will see the facts laid bare in the following pages.

The jilted generation are not simply being held back by recession and austerity but by a deeper problem and it stems from that myopia that allows us to tell ourselves that nothing really changes and so the future can look after itself. It does not.

However, this book is not merely an act of special pleading by youth about youth. It should matter to everyone. History moves on, the youth grow up. Today’s school leavers are tomorrow’s workers, parents and taxpayers. So if the prospects of a younger generation suffer, so must everyone else for inescapable economic reasons: when unemployment becomes focused on the generation that should be driving the economy, they cannot fuel growth. Unable to earn money, they cannot spend it. The next generation struggle to pay the taxes that are needed to fund debt repayments, pensions, healthcare – services upon which the oldest and youngest generations around them rely. Demand for goods and services slackens. People find it harder to realise their hopes.

The effects can also be felt more immediately by other generations. When young people are held back the older generation are forced to pick up the pieces – just ask the millions of parents continuing to support adult children in the family home, still topping up their income, still wondering what went wrong.

In the three years since this book was first published, politicians on the right and the left have finally acknowledged that young people face a crisis but, in an era in which we might be tempted to think that nothing changes, it is to be expected that they have few new ideas to resolve it.

At the extremes, the left have been busy thinking up ways to blame ‘the rich’ for what has happened, while the right blame individuals’ fecklessness and big government. Both sides have used this book as a stick with which to beat their opponents. The Tories have claimed that Labour ‘created the jilted generation’, Labour say the Coalition are only making matters worse.1 Neither party’s activities in office escape criticism in the following pages. Meanwhile, those who feel threatened by our ideas complain with full throats and half wits that we seek to fight a generational battle pitting the young against the old. We do not. This book seeks to put bad ideas, not ‘baby boomers’, pensioners, or our parents on trial.

If political battles are to be fought about the issues we raise, they will not look like those which have come before. In the sixties, young activists marched on Grosvenor Square to protest against the Vietnam war outside the US Embassy, now hacktivist members of the jilted generation launch ‘Denial Of Service’ attacks from the computers in their bedrooms. The Beatles rebuked the ‘Taxman’, now there are protests against tax-avoidance. It used to be said that young people don’t do politics. That is wrong. Young people’s political concerns have evolved and so have the forms of their expression: sometimes insightful, sometimes incoherent, sometimes violent, unpredictable, networked, immediate; they just don’t do politics like they used to.

Britain’s current party leaders are young. They think they know the new generation of adults. We doubt it. This book is for them. It is for every parent still wondering why their well-educated and diligent child is living at home in their early thirties; for every school-leaver who finds that society offers no job for them and that cleaning floors in Poundland is the price of their dole money; it is for every member of Britain’s new generation who think their unemployment and hopelessness are their own fault, and for everyone else standing by wondering what has gone wrong.

To unravel the mystery of this generation today, we need to begin with its most vulnerable part – those who are entering the adult world of work for the first time and discovering that there are few jobs, few mechanisms for achieving their ambitions and few paths to true adulthood. A typical example of them is Caitlin Reilly. Reilly was not a rioter. She is not a political militant. She studied geology and wants to work as a museum curator. She is an unlikely activist with an even more unlikely cause – for more effective employment policies. And the truth of her story is not one either the left or the right want to hear, which is unfortunate, because it outlines the shape of things to come.

The jilted generation go to work

At the start of 2012, Reilly and a 41-year-old landscape gardener called Jamieson Wilson began legal action against the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. The pair, and hundreds of thousands like them, had been placed on employment schemes in which the jobless are put to work unpaid in Tesco, Primark and other high street stores and charities, compelled by the threat of having their benefits stripped.

Schemes in which the unemployed are compelled to work for their benefits are known as ‘workfare’ after the punitive employment policies designed by the Nixon administration. The Coalition call their policies ‘Mandatory Work Activity’, ‘Steps to Work’, even ‘The Young People Trailblazer’. Whatever you call them, the schemes targeted at the jilted generation began with the best of intentions.

With youth unemployment in Britain spiking above one million soon after David Cameron assumed office, the Coalition felt compelled to act quickly to solve the problem. In the era of austerity, the government was reluctant to invest resources to help them but it considered that the young could learn skills by doing work experience.

Business leaders were invited to 10 Downing Street. Would they, it was asked, help provide experience? Could young people be placed in their businesses? It did not seem to take much persuading for a raft of multi-national corporations to offer temporary positions in their workforce to the unemployed, providing, of course, that they didn’t have to pay them.

Unclear in those early stages, however, was the element of compulsion in the schemes. Thousands of unemployed young people received letters threatening their benefits if they did not ‘volunteer’. If young people simply ‘expressed verbal interest’ in the scheme at the Job Centre they were compelled to participate; if they did not or quit once in position, their benefits would be cut off. And those who refused and subsequently became long-term unemployed would be forced to undertake ‘Mandatory Work Activity’ unpaid and lasting as long as six months. Some, like Reilly, were simply forced into work experience by Job Centre caseworkers who appeared unsure of the rules.

To keep her £53 Jobseeker’s Allowance, Reilly cancelled her work experience in a local museum – a placement which she had organised herself – and took a three-week position in Poundland stacking shelves and cleaning. That was in 2011. A year later, workfare was endemic, even making an appearance during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

The night before London prepared to celebrate the anniversary by sending the largest flotilla of boats ever assembled down the Thames, two coaches arrived from the West Country carrying stewards for the big event.

Security firm Close Protection UK (CPUK) had been hired at great expense to marshal the event but their employees were as cheap as they come. Some were on apprentice wages, 30 were on workfare schemes – working for nothing but the threat of having their benefits removed.

The coaches arrived earlier than expected and so the organisers herded their wards beneath the arches of London Bridge where they were instructed to roll out their mats and sleeping bags on the pavement and sleep rough before the big day.

CPUK offered a carrot as well as a stick: if the workfarers passed this test – and demonstrated that they were willing to work a fourteen-hour day without bathroom or bed – they might be offered paid work at the Olympics later in the year.

As dawn broke and forecasts predicted downpours, the stewards were offered a sandwich in a sodden paper bag and told to change into their work clothes ready to safeguard the nation’s splendour. Afterwards, they were taken to a swampy campsite outside London for the night.

A scheme that began with the best of intentions had transformed into a mechanism for exploitation.

Since the schemes began few jobseekers had complained publicly. Even those workfarers who shared their experiences at the Jubilee did so on the condition of anonymity. The threat of penury is a great silencer. But neither Caitlin Reilly nor Jamieson Wilson stayed quiet. By the time of the Jubilee, their judicial review was in full swing.

Judicial reviews – when judges examine whether laws, regulations and processes are lawful – seldom succeed. At best, a few statutory tweaks are made. Reilly and Wilson made two claims: workfare schemes breached their human rights, a claim judges dismiss; and they also pointed out that jobseekers had not been given enough information about the rules of the schemes and the possible punishments they faced if they broke them. There was merit in this – the scheme certainly seemed out of control but the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Iain Duncan Smith, refused to accept it. Instead, he decided to fight a generational war.

Having already blamed the 2011 riots on an ‘X-Factor generation’,2 the Minister warmed to his theme: ‘The Government’s opponents – who constitute a group of modern-day Luddites – will stop at nothing in their attempts to mislead the public on this issue … I doubt I’m the only person who thinks supermarket shelf-stackers add more value to our society than many of those “job snobs”… The belief that you can just sit at home or wait to become a TV star and that work simply lands in your lap, in turn, feeds the pernicious idea that success is not related to effort and work … It’s small wonder that businesses have hired so many foreign nationals in the past decade or so. The fact is that they can’t find the employees of quality that they need from the available British workforce.’3

Workfare, a delinquent scheme knocked together on-the-fly in 2010, had transformed into a moral crusade. Then Duncan Smith lost the case.

By March 2013, Wilson and Reilly, with the help of Public Interest Lawyers, had won in both the High Court and the Court of Appeal. As a result, perhaps 300,000 jobseekers who had lost their benefits in various workfare schemes would have to be reimbursed at a cost to the state of £110–130 million.

On the day of the Appeal Court judgement, cheers went up on the steps of the Royal Courts but the response from the government was swift, unapologetic and brazen.

The Coalition’s first move was to publish new workfare regulations in Parliament that very evening, correcting what the Department for Work and Pensions was now calling ‘a technical’ issue. That way the schemes and the benefit withdrawals could carry on unhindered. Next, another Bill was rushed before Parliament on a timetable usually reserved for national security issues. Its singular purpose was to retroactively make legal what the courts had deemed illegal. In this way the Department could avoid any payout.

As the official notes explained: ‘Once enacted, the Jobseeker’s (Back to Work Schemes) Bill will ensure that any such [benefit] decisions cannot be challenged on the grounds that the regulations were invalid … notwithstanding the Court of Appeal’s judgment.’4

The Secretary of State was creating, as one parliamentarian put it, a ‘legal science fiction’ – a reversal of time to remake the law. Why? Speaking for the government, Lord Freud betrayed the intent behind it: the unemployed, he said, ‘do not deserve a windfall payment’.5

In 2010, this book warned that an ancient turn of thought was returning to Britain’s debate about the unemployed. The idea that the least fortunate have only themselves to blame for their poverty, that they exploit society’s sympathy for them, was gaining currency even then. The Victorians had the short-hand ‘undeserving poor’, and so apparently does Lord Freud. Others now say ‘scroungers’.

At a time when there are 1.5 million unemployed members of the jilted generation,6 this talk is particularly dangerous for young people. All of them are subject to complex economic forces – globalisation, private debt, public spending commitments, an ageing society, borrowing rates – over which individuals have little control and to which the youngest workers in society are most vulnerable. To simply dismiss them, en masse, as ‘underserving’ – rightly convicted by a kind of economic justice – is, frankly, moronic. But in the Coalition government’s attitude to the workless we found the realisation of our worst fears.

Look again at Iain Duncan Smith’s article about Reilly. In it he makes no mention of the fact that the work that Reilly was made to do, and objected to, was unpaid. She was not turning down a job offer from Poundland but she felt exploited by being forced to work a 35-hour week without pay. Duncan Smith did correct this omission some time later when he asserted that Reilly ‘was paid Jobseeker’s Allowance by the taxpayer to do this’.7 (At a rate of £1.51 an hour – even Duncan Smith’s eager foreign nationals might object.)8

He also, remarkably, made no mention of recession – one obvious reason why there were so many more people out of work in the first place. Instead, he aimed his guns at a generation of ‘job snobs’ who ‘sit at home waiting to become TV stars’. Could his purpose be anything but to imply that laziness and possibly vanity lie at the root of unemployment? And how much sense can that make when 40 per cent of all those unemployed are under 25? The Secretary of State has no right, and no evidence with which, to write-off a generation.

If Iain Duncan Smith were an outlier for an extreme and unsympathetic view that would be one thing. If workfare reform was pushed through the Commons to widespread public condemnation that would be another. If people wanted the unemployed to receive more and better help that would again change matters. But he isn’t, it didn’t and they don’t. Duncan Smith’s arguments and his delinquent employment schemes are calculated to appeal widely.

As the British Social Attitudes survey concluded in 2012, people’s attitudes are toughening: ‘In previous economic downturns, the public has responded with increased sympathy for welfare recipients and support for spending on welfare benefits. Now people are more sceptical about whether benefit recipients deserve the help they receive than during the last recession.’9

Offered weak out-of-work assistance and little subsistence, and unemployed on an unprecedented scale, this attitude will cost the jilted generation more dearly than most; but what we didn’t know when we wrote the book is that one particular generation, more than any other, were unlikely to think of the welfare state as Britain’s proudest achievement, were likely to prefer policies that cut benefits, believe that individuals and not societies experience problems, and that the government should not spend more on benefits for the poor. And the group which hold the views most sympathetic to the Secretary of State’s view of society? That group is the jilted generation.

The ‘only me’ generation

The first hints that our own generation believed they were failing individually and not as a generation came as we toured the country after publication. We met the 28-year-old woman from Newcastle who cried when she told us that there was no way she could afford to raise a family. However much she and her husband tried to save, they were undermined by paying punishing amounts of rent. She just assumed it was her fault, that it was a matter of mortgage advice, not decades of delinquent housing policies.

We met dozens of undergraduates who admitted that they would never have enrolled had they found jobs. And they blamed themselves for failing to find work, not the reluctance of employers to pay young people or the decline of paid and structured apprenticeships in Britain.

Blaming oneself is one way people deal with hopelessness and dashed ambition in a world that is shockingly insecure. Finding fault in yourself can actually be empowering because you are also the solution to your own problems.

For most issues, for most of the time, thinking this way is very helpful. But the hurdles faced by our youngest adults are far too great to be surmounted by individualistic thinking. This book argues that they stem from systemic political and economic failures beyond individuals’ control.

However, what we heard was more than just anecdote. It is fact. Just turn to the ground-breaking work of IPSOS MORI social researcher Bobby Duffy. What he has already found will have the deepest implications for politics over the jilted generation’s lifetime.

Partly inspired by this book to examine attitudes from a generational perspective, Duffy began a highly original research project in late 2012. He took years of historic poll data and then, instead of breaking down the findings by gender or class, he sorted the data by generations.

The results were fascinating. For the first time someone has been able to solidly demonstrate that there is a real generational dimension to politics in Britain: different generations have markedly different attitudes to all sorts of questions. And once these attitudes are formed, it seems that each generation is permanently marked by them throughout their life span.

The findings also demonstrate a trend in which each successive generation has become increasingly individualistic. Britain really has become a changed country over the last 30 years.

Over time voters have become less likely to seek higher spending on the NHS for example, less likely to take pride in the welfare state and less likely to be members of political parties. But the generation at the individualistic extreme in almost all those polls is the jilted generation.

These results also seem to be about more than economic self-interest. It might not be surprising, for example, that young people are less supportive of spending on the NHS since they rely far less on public health services than older members of society. But when it comes to other types of collective spending or services – services they might need to rely on – they are still repulsed. Take the youngest adult generation’s attitude to welfare spending on ‘the poor’.

As you can see, today’s overall attitudes aren’t the same as in 1987. But the graph also shows that when pollsters start questioning the youngest generation, they find they are the least likely to agree with the statement, ‘Government should spend more money on welfare benefits for the poor, even if it leads to higher taxes’.

The jilted generation are also more likely to question the behaviours of the poor than any other cohort. Asked whether the out-of-work were receiving unemployment benefits more because they were mainly ‘unlucky rather than lazy’, twice as many members of the jilted generation than the over-65s disagreed.10

These results are remarkable because, as the graph below shows, the jilted generation are much more likely to consider themselves poor and to be reliant on benefits aimed at the poor. As you can see, in 2009, 58 per cent of ‘Gen Y’ put themselves in the ‘low income’ bracket:

The jilted generation, then, hold a peculiar set of beliefs: more likely to seek cuts to all welfare programmes including those on which they, as an age-group, most rely; more likely to consider themselves poor but less likely to want state help; more likely to be unemployed than any other cohort but perhaps more likely to feel that’s the fault of idle behaviour than of bad luck.

Now, look again at the way the Work and Pensions Secretary has talked down the young, at his claim that businesses hire outsiders because they ‘can’t find the employees of quality’, that ‘pernicious ideas’ and a ‘twisted culture’ are at the root of unemployment. You might reasonably conclude that he is not just speaking about young adults, but speaking right to them; parroting back a generation’s beliefs, perhaps even trying to win their votes.

Even this will not work effectively, however, because the jilted generation has also concluded that mainstream political parties can do nothing to help them. When he asked if people were supporters ‘of any one political party’ Duffy found that in 2009 more than 50 per cent of the over-65s said they were, while just 10 per cent of the jilted generation said the same.

Duffy’s polling also shows that for the youngest members of the jilted generation, their first taste of elections was sour indeed. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election, the Liberal Democrats gained the support of 44 per cent of the jilted generation11 as they promised to fight to abolish tuition fees. And when the Liberal Democrats broke the promise, that support plummeted.

It remains to be seen if young people will engage with the democratic process with as much enthusiasm again. In the meantime, they’ve found other ways to express themselves – not least about the cost of education.

Shopping with violence

The demonstration against the trebling of tuition fees on 10 November 2010 began like so many other marches – a union-organised affair that most believed would pass without incident. Stewards in fluorescent jackets with radios would marshal people every step of the way from Whitehall past Parliament and down the bank of the Thames. From there they would head to a predetermined end point where speeches by union leaders and lecturers would be delivered. Organisers had liaised with the police in advance with neither side expecting trouble. But the numbers marching that day surprised everyone – some 50,000 students had shown up – more than double the predictions.

As the middle of the march passed the Millbank tower – home of Conservative Party Campaign HQ – a breakaway group of students headed through the lobby and right up to the party office front door determined to cause chaos.

As Newsnight’s economics correspondent and author Paul Mason put it: ‘Both the political and media classes anticipated that opposition to the fee increase would be led by the usual “student leader” types, eager to join the Millbank set themselves.’12

But the ‘usual “student leader” types’ had lost control. Within the hour, plate glass had been broken, graffiti was being sprayed, and 2,000 students were chanting ‘Tory scum’ in unison and cheering the handful of demonstrators standing on the rooftop. Were it not for a line of riot police stationed at the entrance, those 2,000 would have happily marched into the building as well.

When a BBC journalist reporting live from Millbank’s burning courtyard took one of the protesters aside and asked, ‘Your President, Aaron Porter has told you to stop the violence – so why are you still here?’, the bemused look on the student’s face summed it all up: ‘Who is Aaron Porter? How is he my President, and why do you think he can tell me what to do?’

The names for the next series of protests were Day X; ‘X’ marking nothing except a few perfunctory details; it was unknown, unmanaged and unmanageable and would bear little resemblance to the National Union of Students-led demo. Facebook became a notice board around which people congregated, Twitter became the service for live updates.

In the weeks that followed the first protest, a virtual mob formed by an event page with 25,000 promises to attend, suddenly became real – a series of angry flashmobs. The French word for protest seemed more apt – this was a manifestation; a spirit of protest had suddenly formed into being with very little mediation in between. And it was happening all over the country.

On 24 November thousands of kids skipped class and broke out: 300 from Highfields School in Matlock in Derbyshire, 200 from Camden School for Girls, hundreds more from Surrey, Gloucestershire, Salford, Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield.

The 2011 summer riots, which started as race protests, took a similar form as disorganised leaderless mobs coalesced using the Blackberry Messenger service on their mobile phones to create the most serious outbreak of public disorder for decades.

Was this violence evidence of anything but simple thuggery? If the National Union of Students had condemned the violence of the student protests, it was impossible to disentangle them from their political context. But the case was stronger with the riots which destroyed homes, businesses and communities. David Starkey dismissed them as ‘shopping with violence’ – stripping them of any political meaning.

There was more to it than that. Research undertaken by the Guardian found that the vast proportion of those who participated were young – nearly 80 per cent of those up on charges were aged under 25 – and that one of the largest drivers of unrest was anger at a lack of hope and desperation at their economic situation.

As one young masked Mancunian trying to describe why he robbed stores put it, ‘They look at us, yeah and they say “fuck it, youths mate” that’s all they think.

‘At the end of the day, they think … the youth generation today goes mental. We don’t go mental, we don’t want no trouble. We just want a job.’13

‘Shopping with violence’ was politics for the most inarticulate members of a disenchanted and individualistic generation. And if the riots seemed spontaneous, they were in fact predicted. A week before they began, eighteen-year-old Chavez Campbell was filmed discussing the closure of London’s youth clubs. He said: ‘The streets are just crazy. They are full of people who have no ambitions, or have ambitions but can’t fulfil them. I think it’s going to be swarmin’. There are a lot of people without jobs, without anything to do.’

Then he paused and considered all this for a moment. ‘There will be riots,’ he repeated,14 ‘there will be riots.’

One year earlier we wrote something similar at the end of the introduction to this book: ‘Slowly, sombrely, inevitably, the storm is gathering pace. Those “profound effects” are waiting to be felt in full force. The generation who will bail Britain out can’t quite get started. The generation waiting to retire are nervously looking on, wondering why. Meanwhile, the debts are getting bigger, jobs are getting scarcer, lives are getting tougher. If circumstances get worse, people will begin looking for simple shapes. They will start to seek out a narrative, any narrative. And then people will find someone to blame.’15

The jilted generation in Coalition

From the perspective of the new generation of adults, British politics probably resembles The Hunger Games because the civilised rules of human behaviour seem no longer to apply and the young are constantly under threat. Take a tour through the past three years of policy and you’ll quickly see why.

Imagine you voted for the first time in 2010, heard the Deputy Prime Minister courting your vote by pledging to scrap university fees. When he gained office, he broke the pledge and tripled them.

Now you’re under 29 and rely on housing benefit. If you heard George Osborne’s 2011 Budget speech you would have heard him pledge to cut the debt on behalf ‘of the next generation’ but then he aimed his cuts directly at the roof over your head.16

What if you’re 24, an unemployed graduate without family to rely on? You might have welcomed the Work and Pensions Secretary’s pledge to offer you ‘work experience’ only to discover, as Caitlin Reilly did, that your ‘experience’ is sweeping floors for no wages and your Jobseeker’s Allowance is removed if you don’t comply. Are you meant to feel like ‘we are all in this together’ simply because a third of those queuing for the foodbank are under 30?17

And what of government’s attitude to you? The riots were evidence of ‘slow-motion moral collapse over generations’;18 your unemployment is your own fault since, aged all of eighteen, you’re written off as feckless by Iain Duncan Smith, something other than a ‘worker of quality’; ‘not deserving’ in Lord Freud’s words of legal redress; a member of what some call a ‘lost generation’, what others call ‘jinxed’ – a pariah still living in your childhood bedroom.

Surveying this political landscape, young people have no option but to turn away from mainstream party politics – as we know they have.

Can there be any other response when faced by the seeming hypocrisy, aggression, and condemnation of those in authority but for the young to begin rejecting the state, if not society, out of hand? No wonder the generation most likely to be on unemployment benefits reject welfare: during a once-in-a-generation crisis, it is becoming a stick with which to beat them.

But if the jilted generation’s problems were the result only of policies pursued by one party in office or even two in Coalition, they would be easy enough to solve. A new party could be elected, the bad ideas thrown out. However, this book was first written before the Coalition took office. The character of the job and housing markets, of threats from long-term public debts, cannot all be blamed on one administration, however poor its performance. Something else must be at work. This book argues that the young have been ‘jilted’, not by politicians who seem hypocritical but by their ideas which are weak and have been undermining future generations for decades.

It shows that the policies of Conservatives who maintain they are the safe hands on the tiller of Britain’s economy are profligate – they’re only too eager to squander the national inheritance away on tax breaks and voter inducements. Labour, which marketed itself as a ‘party of aspiration’ in the mid-1990s, is revealed to have only entrenched social divisions and stifled social mobility while in office.

Meanwhile this book, which first went to press only weeks after Liberal Democrats entered government for the first time in three-quarters of a century, predicted that the party would break that tuition fee promise when faced with pressure from the Tories, so proving itself yellow in both senses.

We felt confident in this prophecy for a simple reason: the young are effectively disenfranchised – always an easy political target. And when government announced a policy of austerity, we knew exactly who would most likely bear the costs.

But there were also other factors at work. The government made the case that undergraduates needed to take responsibility for their own education – that non-graduate taxpayers should not be paying for them during a period of austerity. While this argument held no water since graduates tend to pay more taxes than non-graduates, a second argument was made. By forcing young people to borrow money to finish their education, the Coalition argued, they were actually ‘offering greater choice’.19 The government was getting out of the way of school-leavers and creating a more efficient and effective private market in higher education.20

That the brightest young people in Britain begin adult life in debt, in other words, is a manifestation of personal freedom. This may seem contorted but much of the political and economic reform that Britain has undertaken in the past few decades has attempted to create ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ for individuals through private markets.

Be it higher education, health care, employment schemes, or housing, the refrain is always the same. The state must get out of our lives, out of the markets, out of the way of individuals. In part, this book serves to chart the rise of individualism in politics as it affects the new generation and, at least in 2010, the results were not good. Short-term benefits of the market often come at a long-term cost to the country and the problems are made worse for the jilted generation because even government itself seems completely devoid of long-term aims. At least, that’s what we thought in 2010. Is all this still true in 2013? Before writing this, we set about discovering what could be said about the housing, job, and inheritance prospects of the jilted generation today.

Housing

First, the good news: housing has risen up the political agenda in the past three years.21 It is now broadly accepted that UK homes are unaffordable and, in 2011, the Prime Minister personally resolved to intervene to solve the problem – and that’s the bad news.

‘Macmillan,’ David Cameron told members of the Conservative Party conference that autumn, ‘made us the party of the property-owning democracy. It was Margaret Thatcher who gave us the “right to buy”, so let us, in this generation, inspire a new Tory housing revolution.’22

As if watching a false prophet at the water’s edge who raises his hands and urges the seas to withdraw, his audience has, however, detected naught but the silence of the breeze and the gently lapping waves. Less than nothing happened. Indeed, in 2013, the full effect of the ‘new Tory housing revolution’ can be described as follows:

In 2012 the number of new homes built in England fell below 100,000 for only the second time in 30 years. It is commonly accepted that to meet demand, the country requires three times that amount built every year. Worse, we now have evidence of a totemic shift in the way we house the next generation – the era of the property-owning democracy is ending. There were fewer homeowners in 2011 than in 2001 – the first decade-on-decade drop since the end of the First World War.23

As for council housing, build levels here are at their lowest point since rationing. In 2012, fewer than 18,000 were built, and less noticed but more significant is the conclusion of the English Housing Survey which in 2013 found that for the first time since the 1960s England now has more people privately renting than living in social housing. There’s a simple reason for this: when the axe of austerity was first wielded in October 2010, funding for building social housing took one of the largest chops – it was cut by more than 60 per cent.24

However, other more subtle changes have also harmed the housing prospects of the poorest and youngest, not least housing benefits slashed on the basis of age. Now the ‘Shared Room Rate’ (explained in this book on page145) is extended to apply not just to those under 25 but to those aged under 35.

Locked out of home ownership and social housing, squeezing Britain’s young adults into the ever more expensive private rented sector continues to have punishing consequences. Across England more than half a million families under 35 are now handing a third of their income to their landlord.25 Private renting has become so expensive that the charity National Debtline has warned that private tenants now account for more than half of their calls: a record 12,000 tenants are struggling with arrears.26

Taxpayers suffer too: in the three years before 2015, £35 billion of taxpayer-funded housing benefits will flow into the pockets of private landlords27 charging ‘market’ rents. In the same period, just £4 billion will be spent building new homes. As an example of short-term policy-making this is difficult to beat, but fear not, the Coalition has managed it.

Desperate to arrest the crisis which has come to characterise the Prime Minister’s ‘revolution’, the government announced a last-ditch bid to promote building. ‘Help-to-Buy’ offers taxpayer loans to home buyers who can’t afford the deposit. It might be more evidence that this government wants to place young people in debt. It will have a negligible effect on home building for certain because the plan fundamentally misunderstands the problem in the UK housing market, which is one of supply not demand.

How do we know? Because the ratio of incomes to house prices has more than doubled in the past twenty years.

In London, rents alone rose eight times faster than incomes in 2012. It is not access to mortgages that is the only problem but the housing market itself. Britain’s large developers have a vice-like grip on build rates and are keeping them low.

Their profits derive not simply from building but from speculating on land and gaining planning permissions which transform its value by hundreds of per cent. Only growing heroin poppies on it could effect a more dramatic increase. Once a plot has been purchased, developers have to realise the business plan they make for it – plans not designed to change market conditions but reflect them.28 Developers squeeze every last drop of value from their investments by trickling out new housing developments while keeping a huge supply of between 250,000 and 300,000 plots with planning permission unbuilt.29 With demand ever-increasing, the interventions of the major developers alone are, therefore, unlikely to alter the cost of housing in the UK. They will simply reflect it.

It follows that the result of ‘Help-to-Buy’ in this market is inevitable: increasing demand, as the government’s scheme seeks to do, will not cut the cost of housing; it will raise it. It will not arrest Britain’s housing crisis since it makes unsustainable prices more affordable in the short term and more unsustainable too. It will not help taxpayers funding the benefit bill or renters eager to understand why they’re paying someone else’s mortgage. It is, as the authors of this book stated on the day of its announcement, ‘galactically stupid’. It is also garrulously short term.

And that’s not all. The government is also assisting landlords to buy more properties by offering them access to a different business loan scheme run by the Bank of England called ‘Funding-for-Lending’. There is much in the Housing chapter pointing out the flaws with buy-to-let in general but these can be summarised as follows: buy-to-let landlords are inefficient landlords. Competing against first-time buyers for properties, they drive up the cost of home-ownership for the young; their high rents are dictated by their need to cover the cost of mortgage repayments. They are amateurs who too often enter the market as a result of a short-fall in their pension plans rather than because they have any particular interest in tenants. For them, however, this is boom time. At the time of writing, buy-to-let mortgage rates have increased to 13 per cent of all mortgages.30 In 2012 they brought four times more new rental property to market than the state. As celebrity estate agent Phil Spencer told the Daily Telegraph’s new buy-to-let property club:

‘It’s that old law of supply and demand. I don’t think we’re seeing it quite yet, but we may well reach a stage when young people simply mentally commit – or resign themselves – to being lifelong tenants.’31

The market is counting on a generation giving up on home-ownership and the chances are that they will. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation predicts that by 2020 the number of homeowners under the age of 30 will fall from 2.4 million to 1.3 million. Meanwhile, an extra 1.5 million will be renting while the total number of young adults still living with their parents will have risen to 3.7 million32 – nearly half of them. So much for the ‘housing revolution’.

This book lays out the social consequences of ‘living at home’ in some detail but the final question is this: why does Britain continue to get housing policy so horribly wrong?

One obvious answer is that governments have misplaced their faith in a competitive private housing market which, in reality, exists to reflect market conditions rather than to disrupt them by innovating. The large developers have spent the past decade proving that they will not address the challenge of under-supply by continually failing to build as many homes as Britain needs.

Second, governments no longer believe in public home-building programmes, perhaps because they offer no ‘choice’ to tenants, show the state acting heavy-handedly in the housing market, and are antithetical to the individualistic society. Such programmes would, however, house people efficiently. For those working adults paying 50 per cent of their taxed income to landlords, housing ‘choice’ is illusory in any event. Social housing also offers a cheaper deal for the taxpayer since it is cheaper to supply homes than finance buy-to-let landlords charging ‘market’ rents in the long term.

Another option would be to expand build