While I agree with Tim Lott that nothing has changed for working-class children in 40 years (We’ve betrayed Britain’s working-class children, Family, 16 July), there is a big change for their children that I could never have foreseen. I was born in west London in the 1950s. Apparently I failed the 11-plus but when I attended the secondary modern school I was put in the “G” stream and told that the grammar school was full up. We did O-levels like the grammar school kids but somehow you never quite recover from failing at 11.
Anyway, I went on to study for a degree with the Open University and though I did very well I never really made up the lost ground. However, my son did. He’s 27 and has a 2:1 degree in electronic engineering. Of course he has the debt but I was so pleased that he was going up “the ladder”. However, that ladder no longer leads anywhere. He lives with his girlfriend in a “shack” that he built in my back garden. There can be no home-buying, marriage or children on the horizon. He can’t even manage to do what my working-class parents did in the 1930s – rent a flat in London.
We’ve always “betrayed the working class children of Britain”, but we’ve gone on to betray any hopes they may have for their children.
Lorraine Croxford
Dunstable, Bedfordshire
• Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson, in their book Going South – Why Britain Will Have a Third World Economy, were surely prescient about the future of Britain’s economy and its increasing resemblance to a developing country evidenced by symptoms of “chronic debt, volatile growth and painful vulnerability to external events”.
The onward march of self-employment (Report, 21 July) points to the growing influence of the “informal sector” which, although reducing unemployment and underemployment, provides jobs that are low paid and insecure. In developing countries tax revenues from this sector are low and consequently welfare state-type provision is poor.
Britain needs to ask itself whether it really does wish to embrace this path to a third world economy status and tolerate its impact on its citizens.
Tessa Harding
Witchford, Cambridgeshire
• Larry Elliott (Millennials may be the first to earn less than previous generation, 18 July) does raise starkly the issue facing Theresa May and her “one nation” commitment to help those people who are working but “just coping”. Income is indeed depressed, much to the benefit of employers, but the other side of the problem is more significant and difficult to address.
This generation, more than any other, is suffering the results of 37 years of shrinking the state and privatising its services. All those services that were funded through taxation (childcare, higher education, transport, aged care) or regulated and planned by the state (rent and house building) are now ever rising charges on depressed income levels.
We look forward to reading Mrs May’s plans to remedy this awful and demoralising mess.
Ted Hartley
Rotherham, South Yorkshire
• Larry Elliott’s article highlights the stark reality facing young people entering the job market and trying to get on the housing ladder today.
Working with the NUS, we found that almost half (46%) of graduates receive a salary lower than they expected after graduation – two-thirds (66%) are earning under £19,000 a year in their first year after university. They pay on average £480 rent a month (rising to £621.84 in London), and nearly four out of 10 (37%) put aside £50-£199 each month in order to attempt to get on the property ladder within the next five years.
Therefore, I echo the concerns raised by David Willetts and Torsten Bell at the Resolution Foundation – everyone is worried about the future of younger generations, because they are dealing with serious generational inequalities.
Young people leaving education today have the same fundamental aspirations as previous generations: a decent wage and a proper home; but they face unpredictable wages and a mountain to climb before they even set foot on the housing ladder. They need help from the financial services industry in collaboration with government and industry to help them make their aspirations a reality.
Sara Newell
Head of student and graduate markets, Endsleigh
• The contributions to your “How will history judge David Cameron?” are for the most part finely judged (Journal, 16 July). But how many more times must we be subjected to the utter falsehood that somehow Cameron had to “meet the challenges of economic crisis”, as Vernon Bogdanor writes? By 2010, when Cameron took power, the challenge posed by the credit crunch had already been met: the economy was growing again and the level of public debt was manageable in terms of both British-historical and contemporary cross-country comparisons.
Whatever crisis the Cameron administrations had to meet was of their own making and clearly made in the interests of taking (2010) and maintaining (2015) power. It hardly needs repeating that the lasting consequences of Cameron’s crisis management are the destabilisation of Europe more generally and the UK in particular.
Dr William Dixon City University, London
Dr David Wilson Walton-on-the-Naze, Essex
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