They’re the squeezed generation: facing higher education fees, kept out of housing by the rise in costs and ultimately paying bills to look after their ageing parents. But are they genuinely radical or just looking after number one?
WATCHING television pictures of students protesting in London in recent weeks, beamed into homes courtesy of television stations’ helicopters flying low overhead, critics have fulminated about the “youth of today”.
For some it is evidence that British youth is feckless, pampered, out of touch with the harsh reality of modern life. In fact London may have witnessed the opening salvoes in the Generation Wars.
The spark for the protests came from the decision of the Conservative-Liberal Democrats coalition government to increase tuition fees to £6,000 in most cases and up to £9,000 in some, along with cutting payments to 16- to 18-year-olds to encourage them to stay in school.
Following this week’s House of Lords vote, which unlike the Commons vote last Thursday week was not met with demonstrations, the higher charges, coupled with state loans to pay for them, will now come into force, as planned, in September 2012.
Some agitators became involved seeking to exploit demonstrations for their own ends, but, equally, the issue has ignited feelings among students that will not quietly burn out. “I have not seen students, their families and their university teachers so angry since the 1970s,” says Prof Marianne Elliott, director of the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool.
And fees are but the start of it, according to Ed Howker and Shiv Malik, authors of The Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth, who argue that “Thatcher’s children” – the ones born after 1979 – have been left a poisoned chalice. It is a bleak perspective. Nearly a third of men and 18 per cent of women aged 20 to 34 in Britain are still living with their parents. Dubbed Kippers (kids in parents’ pockets eroding retirement savings), iPods (infantile posse of over-indulged drunks) or one of a host of other unflattering acronyms, some are at home because it is more comfortable, but for most it’s because they cannot afford places of their own. Howker and Malik’s figures show that first-time buyers between 1970 and 1997 paid 2.4 times their annual income to buy a house; between 1997 and 2007 it jumped to 3.4 times. Today it is 4 times. And the ratio is still rising.
This increase in cost had a dramatic effect on the profile of house owners. In 1990 8 per cent of house-owners were under 25; 43 per cent were between 25 and 34. Today just 2 per cent are under 25; 27 per cent are aged 25 to 34. Equally, unemployment is hitting younger people hardest: 60 per cent of the current dole queues are filled by the 25- to 34-year-olds, while more than a third of 16- and 17-year-olds who have left school are out of work.
Just 5 per cent of those aged 50 to 65 are in the same position. More men over 60, contrary to the popular image, found work during the recession, while women over 60 increased their numbers in the workforce by 2 per cent.
“Graduates have gone down the spiral and taken the less demanding jobs. And it has pushed the people at the bottom out of work,” wrote David Blanchflower of the Prince’s Trust in a report on youth unemployment.
“The jilted-generation argument is one that we agree with,” says Susan Nash, vice-president of the National Union of Students, whose father comes from Kerry and whose mother was raised in Kilkenny.
“Students are faced with significant fee rises, job insecurity afterwards – if they get a job – and higher housing costs. It makes this generation feel that their future is quite bleak. And now they feel that they will have to pay for the costs of mistakes they didn’t make,” she says.
Even the prospect of inheritance is not what it was, as so many of the assets enjoyed by the older generations will end up being needed to take care of people now surviving, often comfortably, into their 90s.
Equally, the National Health Service’s costs have surged from 5 per cent of GDP in 1990 to a predicted 10 per cent in 2040, while £60 billion worth of privately financed state projects will leave future generations paying back £260 billion worth of debt for facilities enjoyed by those living today.
Pensions, too, are a nightmare, with bitter opposition the order of the day from those facing delayed retirements. However, the cost of the state pension – one that is not large compared with Ireland’s – has risen by a third in just six years.
Meanwhile, the British government’s own actuaries warn that the unfunded part of the UK’s pension liabilities now runs to £2.2 trillion – £1.4 trillion for the state pension and £800 billion for retired public-sector workers.
“Britain’s young people will bankroll the entire scheme. That means our pay packets will be smaller than they otherwise would have been, and the costs of living our own lives, raising kids and providing for the next generation will be harder to afford,” warn Howker and Malik.
The generational time bomb was first looked at by the UK’s treasury only in 2002, when officials warned that the ageing of Britain will have “profound effects” – a mandarin’s code for “Houston, we have a problem” – on its society and economy.
Britain’s national debt is now running at just under £1 trillion and will not peak until 2013/14, even if the chancellor of the exchequer’s cuts work, which they may well not do. This debt tells just a part of the story, says Dr Eamonn Butler, the director and co-founder of the Adam Smith Institute, a right-wing, pro-free-market think tank.
“Alongside those strictly financial obligations to its creditors, Britain has also promised itself a huge raft of social benefits that it hopes its children will be good enough to pay for. And like someone ordering an expense-account lunch, it has inclined to be generous with other people’s money,” he says.
THE FORMER president of Warwick Students’ Union, Derry-born Brian Duggan, says critics are focusing too much on the actions of the few demonstrators who attacked the car carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, on Regent Street last Thursday week rather than looking at the underlying grievances.
Hard-left activists were involved in some of the violence there and around Westminster, he says, but the students in the main are from the “pragmatic left” and are not in favour of street violence. They believe this time they have the support of the majority of British people, he says, particularly those from earlier generations who enjoyed university education without fees.
For now, whatever their longer-term worries, students are primarily focused on university costs and access. Labour during its years in government decreed that university should be attended by half of 18- to 21-year-olds. Last year, however, 200,000 applicants were turned away, says Prof Marianne Elliott. “It will be worse next year, as those turned down last year, plus others trying to get in before the fee rise, apply along with those just emerging from school etc. Universities have not been allowed to increase their number of places, apart from a tiny number in vocational subjects. Indeed, they were fined by government if they did so. The result is that the aspirations and hard work of prospective students have been dashed.”
Politically, students do not vote in significant numbers. In May just 44 per cent of 18- to 25-year-olds went to the polling stations, according to the polling company Ipsos/Mori, despite all the talk in the weeks before the election that a wave of youth support would drive Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats to historic gains. In the end the Liberal Democrats lost five seats.
But where the university vote did turn out, it was pivotal. In Norwich South, according to Susan Nash of the National Union of Students, the Liberal Democrats candidate, Simon Wright, beat former Labour minister Charles Clarke by 310 votes against expectations on the backs of the votes of students, thus explaining the visceral anger now being felt by Liberal Democrats MPs.
“I think we are in danger of losing a generation of first-time voters, who have lost complete faith in the political process and will simply disengage from it. And there is a danger that some of them will drift to more radical movements. The majority don’t want that – they don’t want violence – but some could drift away,” Nash warns.
On the march? Difficult days ahead
Student protests in Britain are unpredictable and non-hierarchical, organised as much on Twitter as they are at meetings. Given that higher tuition fees are now law, the question is whether the protestors will fade away or prove to be the harbingers of wider public fury.
Students gathered in their tens of thousands for the tuition-fee vote by MPs 10 days ago, but did not bother, or were unable, to do so when the House of Lords gave the legislation its final sanction this week. The Commons protests are unlikely to be the last, however, and difficult days on British streets lie ahead.
The cuts ordered by the coalition are beginning to bite, and a monster Trades Union Congress rally is to be held in Hyde Park on March 26th. Most of the students protesting can legitimately argue that they are not acting selfishly, as many of them will have finished college by the time the cuts come in, or be affected only marginally if they stay longer. “They were not marching for themselves. They were marching for the next generation: their brothers and sisters, the families that will be hurt by the changes,” says NUS vice-president Susan Nash.
Judging by the reaction in London, one could be forgiven for thinking that civilisation had ended, with leading political and policing figures talking openly about banning demonstrations or even using water cannons.
To keep it in perspective, however unpleasant the protests, and despite the number of injuries sustained by both police and demonstrators, the confrontations on the street were confined to just a few areas of the city, causing £50,000 worth of damage.
