The generational divide has succeeded the gap between north and south as the driver of inequalities, the source of injustice generally, the perverter of democracy: this is the message we should take from the world around us, from EU polling to the housing market. The baby boomers grabbed everything, and the young are too apathetic to meaningfully protest; all they can do is periodically cover things in spray paint.
Neither the old nor the young typically come off very well from this narrative. Any political movement dominated by retirees – whether Brexit or the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader – is dismissed on that basis: they’ll be dead soon and it isn’t their place to meddle in the future. It’s a bit rum, though, to expect a 65-year-old to shuffle away from public life on grounds of mortality, when they probably have three decades more of future to contend with, which is a longer lens than in any political periscope.
But the young are dismissed too, characterised as inherently apathetic. Disengagement, like debt, is a one-way street in the new discourse: entirely the fault of the disengaged, nothing at all to do with the failure of the political class to be engaging. Yet when the young do engage, particularly if it’s in a sphere more imaginative than party membership, and with any hint of radicalism, their youth is again used against them. If they weren’t so naive, they would know not to ask for these unrealistic things; they would know that the way things are done is the best way things can be done, perfected over decades by wiser heads than theirs.
Much like the north-south divide, this story relies on animosity between the divided sides – a hatred that broadly doesn’t exist and, where it does, is irrelevant. The conditions that ground down manufacturing and bled jobs out of the north were not created by the implacable animus of southerners; rather, by a series of political decisions made by a handful of people who happened to live in the south.
Likewise, the choices that put the interests of the old so far above those of the young are made not by baby boomers but by a coterie of the middle aged. The very mechanism by which the old and young could hate one another is missing – can you even imagine a 69-year-old whose natural solidarity was with her 72-year-old peer above her 35-year-old child?
The misrepresentation of these divides is designed to give a false sense of equivalence between north and south, and young and old, along with an egregious sense of inevitability: how can either be a victim when both feel victimised? How can it by anyone’s fault when their enmity to one another is implacable? They are opposites, for goodness sake! Of course they are opposed. In fact, just as the fiction of a tug-of-war hid the reality of a simple, deliberated impoverishment of the north, so it hides the fact that young are being systematically stiffed.
Economic realities for young people now would be unrecognisable to generations above, who rarely bother to consider or describe those realities in detail, preferring instead to chalk it all up to modernity. Those who are university educated emerge into the workplace with a life-changing amount of debt; their best hope for dealing with it is never to earn enough to have to pay it back (the expected default rate is 45%). Those who drop out (6% of the general student population, 8% of those from a disadvantaged background) stand an even better chance of never having to pay that debt, having emerged with liabilities and nothing to show for them.
Graduates, already in debt servitude, can then expect to descend into serfdom while calling it interning. Those who don’t go to university are likely to be on zero-hours contracts, and must indeed see political institutions, the EU among them, as pretty irrelevant to a working life when their greatest triumphs – sick pay, holiday pay, pensions, the right to unionise – are limited to the jobs of yore, the olden days, when workers were given contracts as if they were a valuable resource rather than treated as interchangeable buttons on a tiddlywinks board. They must be standing, mouth agape, as new legislation locks the under-25s out of the new “living wage”, for no rational reason (unless we are simply to accept that they are less valuable people).
Meanwhile looms the referendum, which will echo in the lives of the young in the most profound ways. Were Brexit to win, it would hamstring their freedom of movement, capsize their chances of working and studying abroad, paralyse the sectors that still offer meaningful prospects rather than sub-minimum-wage service-industry work, and leave them in a small and isolated nation at a time when international cooperation is most urgent.
But this is an ancillary effect of the leave camp, who seek to sacrifice all of us on their zealots’ altar of cleansing the Conservative party of anyone with any sense. The rest has been deliberate: a carefully plotted, rigorously executed strategy of privileging the interests of the old over those of the young, because the old vote and the young don’t. It is not just a slight bias. It is life-changing.
This is why you must register to vote, if you are young, by tomorrow, but better still today: not because the EU is perfect, nor even because you feel strongly about it. Not because you respond deeply or warmly to Cameron or Johnson or Corbyn or Khan. Not because of what politics can do for you, but because of what it can do to you, and has already done to you, when it thinks it can.
