Under 25s have had a rough ride under this government. University fees tripled, despite the graduate job market shrinking (effectively students are paying more for less). Then the EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance), once lauded as an essential tool in keeping people in education, was scrapped. Now there are persistent hints from the Prime Minister and Chancellor that they will start denying the under 25s jobseeker’s allowance and housing benefit. Put that together with a serious youth unemployment problem and you have a cocktail of misery for a whole generation. Increasingly there is a sense of the young poor being placed more and more under strain, and receiving less and less in return. Not all young people will be affected by all these measures, but many will be hit by several. This is in marked contrast to the continued rejection of ideas to means-test winter fuel allowance or the apparent willingness of the government to ring fence pensions. It’s a phenomenon of inter-generational politics even government minister David Willets has criticised in his book The Pinch.
The suggestion seems to be that young people can live at home, increasingly reliant on their family for support. This seems in stark contrast to a key tenet of the Department for Work and Pensions reforms thus far – which seems to have been on encouraging personal responsibility (was that not the stated aim of Universal Credit?). These measures seem to create an ever-increasing dependency culture. Not, obviously, a dependence on the state, but a dependency nonetheless. The logic of Universal Credit is that there are people who, for whatever reason, require support from the state, but they should receive it in a way which encourages an ethos of personal and social responsibility. By removing benefits for the under 25s it creates the contrary ethos that instead of the state providing in such a way that it fosters responsibility, young people should instead be kept as children – unable to live away from home or stand on their own feet.
A welfare system that allows for a degree of responsible risk taking (e.g. pursuing higher education in order to gain better qualifications for a more competitive job or moving away from home to take work elsewhere) is healthy for the economy and better teaches the lessons of personal responsibility.
A failure to recognise this while continuing to disproportionately burden the younger generation also carries other risks – notably for social mobility. For all the many problems in the UK university system it remains one of the best in the world – and the correlation between degree-level qualification and subsequent earning power is impossible to ignore. Tony Blair’s target of 50% of students attending university was silly target setting, but one of the legacies the Labour Party should be rightly proud of was the remarkable increase in students going to university, especially from poorer backgrounds. This good work is rapidly being undone. It is not the fees which are the big problem but the fact that the graduate employment market has shrunk and the fear of taking on significant debt without likely reward (especially without the safety net of a jobseeker’s allowance) makes university a daunting prospect.
Then there is the issue of labour mobility. Figures which suggest that there are plenty of jobs available on the market ignore the fact that these jobs are not evenly distributed across the country. There are pockets of the country where youth unemployment is high for the simple reason that there are no jobs (Teesside, for example, has just short of a million youth unemployed). It is little consolation to be told that there are jobs available in Greater London if you live in the North East. One could try and travel to find work, of course, and many would suggest that it is not the government which should dictate to market forces where jobs are needed. However, if the assumption is that you should live with your parents then that handcuffs jobseekers to a limited area. With the price of commuting and private renting rising significantly faster than wages and a lack of housing benefit poorer young people may not be able even to afford to follow jobs around the country. The choice becomes between being able to afford to live somewhere where there might be no jobs, or moving to where there are jobs but being unable to afford to live there. Again this impacts upon social mobility – only those from relatively privileged backgrounds will have the family money necessary to be able to afford to move to London.
It would be naïve to assume that this is only a problem for the time being. The consequences of an impoverished younger generation now will be felt for decades. Already people are having children later and later. 18% of the UK is currently over 65, but that is projected to rise significantly over the next few decades, despite recent talk of an Olympics baby boom. The longer young people are expected to live with their parents the greater this gap will become as it will be longer and longer before they are financially independent enough to start families of their own. That may, in some ways, be responsible planning, but it also runs the risk of generating a situation like in Japan where the number of retired people so outstrips the birth rate that an enormous pension gap is looming.
Mary Dejevsky’s rather heartless answer to this problem in the Guardian was blunt – young people don’t vote so if they want things changed they should do so. It’s true that on the whole young people don’t vote as much as older people. In fairness, many of the people these measures will come on to affect are still currently under 18 and will not be eligible to vote even at the next election. But even beyond that whom does she suggest voting for?
The Liberal Democrats traditionally do well in student towns, but they have been part of this same government and folded so meekly on university fees (despite many of them having signed a much-publicised pledge not to do so) that their promises to the young now are worthless. Labour then? Labour traditionally receives disproportionate support from younger voters anyway, but it has made few promises to capture the imagination and its own record in government was often uninspiring. No wonder Russell Brand, for all that his opinions were utterly vacuous and vague, received such attention from younger audiences - it’s not as if anyone else is speaking up for them.
I’d like to stop just slightly short of revolution (young people of the UK unite, you have nothing to lose but disproportionate budgetary burdens just isn’t quite catchy enough). Rather, I would prefer to advocate a better appreciation of the nature of solidarity within the existing framework. Attempting to fix problems by loading them on to only one segment of society, regardless of the future costs, is not good economics, but more importantly it is not a just society. The logical conclusion of Mary Dejevsky’s piece seems to be that minorities deserve to be punished if they cannot win elections.
In a just society we would expect compassion and fairness to be central values, not something which is a reward given simply for constituting a large segment of society. In a society exhibiting solidarity we should expect a recognition of our equal dignity as human beings and our essential relationality with one another. Perhaps it is time that David Cameron rewrote his much-mocked “we’re all this in together” in favour of the truer still “we will all be in this together”. Short term thinking on a generational level now could lead to a disconnected and injust society in the future.
Ben Ryan is a researcher at Theos.
Image from flickr.com by bobaliciouslondon under the Creative Commons Licence.
