For a pair of politicians who will take any opportunity to boast about their peachy domestic lives, whether in the shape of insurance-brochure style, whole-family cycling trips, or the transmission, from father to devoted son, of sacred political precepts, both Cameron and Miliband take a notably less elevated view of other people’s families. In an election which, it is widely asserted, promises to be the ugly stand-off long predicted by connoisseurs of intergenerational hostility, both their parties presume a set-up in which young people and their parents and grandparents understand one another, at best, as remote individuals with equally distant concerns.
Ideally, for the purposes of this election, old and young people are not so much atomised as sitcom-style enemies: the former a tribe of smug, mercenary bastards who stole the future; the latter a rival force of resentful princesses too apathetic to register to vote. Even Mrs Thatcher, when she denounced society, admitted: “There are individual men and women and there are families.” Not any more.
Pending his keenly awaited Youth Manifesto, building on an online youth consultation, Shape your Future – and, presumably, on the hope that young people do not, whatever the polls say, recoil, disproportionately, from the spectacle of Ed Miliband – Labour has already promised more apprenticeships, a younger voting age, a slash of tuition fees that is all but backdated and a deep sense of youth, uh, commitment that dates back to, oh, at least January 15, 2015. “This government has betrayed young people,” Miliband told students at the launch, around three seconds ago, of Shape your Future. “Let’s build a country where all young people can succeed.”
His designated youth person, Ivan Lewis, aged 47, informed them: “Too many politicians ignore your views and needs. Ed Miliband has made a different choice. He wants young people to be heard so you can help us create the country that you want to live in.” It must have been to reinforce this point that the party recently exhumed that evergreen electoral asset, the trusted Blairite and famous mentor of young (ish) female colleagues, John Prescott, aged 76.
Contrariwise, for Conservative exponents of generational conflict, it is hoped that older people will, despite being universally deserving and wise after their lifetimes of toil, fall gratefully upon any and all of the bribes and perquisites they are promised, regardless of the potential cost to youth. If Tory calculations are right, those most dependable of voters, pensioners and boomers, have done nothing since the moment David Cameron promised that the universal benefits introduced by Gordon Brown would be safe in his hands but punch the air with their greedy old fists, dream of world cruises, and hoover up high-interest bonds. It can only have added to their exultation to hear that younger members of the family will, so as to help guarantee these pensioner comforts, have to clean the streets (as their parents swoop past in top-of-the-range, pension-pot Osbornemobiles) – this being a punishment for not being able to find work or, as Cameron has just stressed, turn a profiterama. That will teach the young devils.
Although both sides have been acclaimed by loyalists for progressively pitting the interests of one generation, as opposed to one class, against another, it is hard to know, beyond the assurances contained in various well-known, generationist tracts, how dependably their targets will respond to this bold exercise in type-casting. It scarcely needs pointing out that some students are rightwing, while countless boomers are not the complacent beneficiaries of the housing bonanza, free degrees and vast pensions of yore, but living in dependent poverty, in places where social care has all but disappeared.
And even then the designated dogs may not salivate. One of the great challenges for political strategists is the people who vote against their personal interests, and not always out of altruism. On the mystery of disadvantaged Americans voting Republican, the Democrat writer Thomas Frank has conjured up an image of pure, electoral perversity: “It’s like a French Revolution in reverse in which the workers come pouring down the street screaming, ‘More power to the aristocracy!’” he writes.
If, similarly, we will shortly see women voting in vast numbers for a party which currently tolerates only five women in its cabinet, and whose leader considers them hysterical, it does not seem impossible that some young voters will reject Labour’s late-onset temptations in favour of another party, Natalie Bennett’s, that can’t promise them anything tangible at all.
No less perverse, perhaps, is the observed tendency of family members, not only in David Attenborough programmes, to prioritise the interests of people close to them. Even before the world went more Anne Tyler, the 60s pensioner from hell, Alf Garnett, allowed his useless long-haired son-in-law to live with him. True, the Child Support Agency only exists because of individuals who consider their children an outrageous drain on their disposable incomes; these wretches are, however, outnumbered by the sort of parents whose preoccupation with their children’s welfare accounts for unpaid care of grandchildren worth £17 billion to the economy. In a Gransnet poll, one in five mothers said they could not work without it.
If the Conservatives are relying for votes on ruthless, elderly self-interest, they need to convince all older people who, in principle or in practice, are ready to impoverish themselves to help more fortunate members of Generation Rent become Generation Crippling Mortgage. At least Labour is talking about homes and jobs for their descendants. On the other hand, some of Labour’s unregistered malcontents may be equally filled with family, or friendly, feeling, even if they themselves plan on never aging, to the point of wanting to protect the universal pensioner benefits introduced by Gordon Brown but not guaranteed by their personal Pied Piper, Ed Miliband.
Moreover, it should perhaps be a warning to specialists in intergenerational mischief that all too many of the best misery memoirs, featuring proper parental monsters, tend to be set in the fairly distant past. If only, from the Tories’ point of view, more elderly people were still of the standard, frozen, 1940s and 1950s variety, from the time that lucky baby boomers were in their infancy. If only, from Labour’s, more young people were still reacting with the same, If-like desire to shoot their elders from the rooftops.
As it is, the inducements to generational separatism come at a moment when, without overstating the elderly incursions into Glastonbury and Facebook, or understating youth’s very natural horror of capering age, there may be fewer obviously unbridgeable cultural divisions between young and old than at any time since teenagers were invented. For the fomenters of intergenerational warfare it may not be the most auspicious start.
