Corruption or incompetence, in varying degrees and combinations, have characterised so many administrations around the world, it’s no surprise people are so sceptical about the political class. It is remarkable so many are still willing to enter the fray – and some of them are relatively young. At the 2024 general election, 20 new MPs were under 30.
Outside Westminster, younger politically minded people who want to drive change often find that specific causes can offer much more gratification than party politics.
Younger people have always been drawn to protest groups, but have – over time – eventually moved towards more traditional politics. The late Lord Deedes, editor of the Daily Telegraph from 1974-86, recalled that, when he first joined the paper in 1937, he was told the newspaper’s problem was that it didn’t have any younger readers.
In fact, he said, it was not a problem at all because, as they became middle-aged, many of them started to buy it. So it was with political parties. But there is a suspicion that today’s younger generation will not fall into that pattern.
They have good reason to feel that successive governments have served them particularly badly. Financially, they have been saddled with a very inhospitable environment. More broadly, their generational prospects are deeply uninspiring.
Global economics and political tensions far beyond the reach of any national administration account for much of this: Westminster cannot be held responsible for climate change, or for brutal wars elsewhere. But its decisions over the economy are those of the UK government alone. And the drastic dampener on opportunities and prospects that was marketed as Brexit remains, in the eyes of many, a terrible indictment of the political class.
A generation of politicians has let down the young. The number of 16- to 24-year-olds not in employment, education or training is now 946,000 – close to an all-time record. Those who spend any length of time in this state are shown to suffer lasting effects. Pursuing education is no longer any guarantee of a happy outcome. Around 707,000 graduates are unemployed. Many of them are claiming benefits, often related to mental health.
Is it any wonder they are so depressed? While there was a furore over this government’s attempt to deprive old people of their winter fuel allowance, young people see an older generation who got free university education, could afford to buy a home and could afford life’s necessities.
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It is the same generation that enjoyed a final-salary pension scheme and a state pension gold-plated by the government with the ludicrously generous and unaffordable triple lock.
Meanwhile, their grandchildren may never be able to achieve anything like those living standards. House prices have soared to absurd multiples of average salaries, persuading younger people to delay starting a family while the cost of full-time childcare, even allowing for the subsidies now on offer, is crushingly expensive.
For those who make it to the next stage in life, the risk is that they become members of the “sandwich generation”, trying to care not only for their children but also for their ageing parents, for whom the prospect of social care remains, as it has for decades, on the government’s “to do” list.
And then there is the travesty of the student loans system. Interest rates are punitive: in the last tax year alone £15.2bn of interest was added to existing loans. The amount owed by students far outstrips their ability to repay loans when they start work. The government persists in the accounting fallacy that the money will, eventually, all come flooding back into Treasury coffers. In fact, it is a multibillion-pound bad debt that will simply get worse. The government is under increasing pressure to rethink the entire system.
The victims of the inter-generational unfairness that persists have one possible consolation: technology. Whatever the longer-term implications of AI for their job prospects, more immediately, technology has brought them access to media that older generations could never have imagined. It takes them far beyond the narrow focus of mainstream politics, enabling people to manage their news sources and escape many of the grim revelations that the rest of us endure.
Will that mean they have no interest in participating in the democratic process? It might. Already a growing proportion of young people are declaring that there are better ways than democracy to run a country.
For the sake of the next generation, and the country, we must hope that there are politicians prepared to step up and show that the system can produce a fair outcome. What’s the alternative?
