I was doing a corporate gig last week about political disruption, not because I like dressing up and getting paid, but more because I love the infinite variety of human opinion, and the sandwiches. I won’t bore you with my theory of change: I just said it was a fallacy that young people would become more rightwing as they matured. We used to see this as a quasi-ovarian system, everyone being born with an egg of conservatism that would pop out at maturity. It seems, instead, that to shift to the property-protecting class, you need to own property. At the rate we’re going, no one will become a Tory until they’re 50, by which time they won’t have a clue how to do it: they’ll think it means agreeing with Enoch Powell and knowing when to prune wisteria.
This all seemed self-evident to me, but a young woman in the audience violently disagreed. She wished people would stop going on about housing; young people didn’t share this tawdry obsession with ownership; things are far more complicated than the roof over your head; we should be talking about the infinite possibilities of tech. Obviously, I wanted to take this point by point, and start by shouting: “It’s not a tawdry obsession, it’s life. It’s the difference between a two-hour and one-hour commute. It’s the difference between amassing savings and assets or pissing money down someone else’s drain. It’s the difference between being able to start a family and not.” Fortunately, it wasn’t my turn to talk, because some days later I remembered I’d had this argument before: with a soft-left radical who ran the Architecture Foundation and tried to explain, gently, that young people weren’t aspiring, and failing, in the way their elders thought, and were more interested in fair conditions for renters; with a soft-right economist who argued that, precisely because they were young, his generation valued the flexibility of being able to move, along with the admin-lite lifestyle of not having to fix your own boiler. I fought all that in the regular way, like a tiger. As with a zero-hours contract or an open relationship, flexibility is only fun if it’s a choice, and it’s only a choice if security is also an option.
It is shaming how long it took me to put all this together: young people don’t like to present as the victims of a system. They are exercised about inequality, but on behalf of others. They are not averse to fighting identity-based injustice – indeed, they are shit-hot at it, inventive, trenchant – but they are not enthused by “little them battling the gargantuan system”. Now they mention it, I’m not wild about it, either. There’s no dignity in it. Naming the oppressor is only fun if you can locate the victim some way away, in some other country, some other generation; late capitalism is a deluge, but happily, I can swim. Think of the others, who can’t!
There must be a way to build solidarity without anyone having to embrace the status of the downtrodden. So, I have come to reject any fundamental difference between one generation and the next. Some young Conservatives had a jolly this week, their T-shirts festooned with far-right slogans, written so small that only other young people could read them. It wasn’t a dogwhistle so much as a hawksign. So, sure, some of their lot are plain weird. But broadly, when it looks as if attitudes have changed, it’s because circumstances have.
Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor feels like a triumph over inequality
I made the mistake of asking my 10-year-old about his hopes for Sunday. As a family, we are quite well prepared. I have figured out how to activate live TV with a remote control. The people who are not interested in Doctor Who have committed to remain silent for its duration, and the two hours before and after. But making a wishlist for Jodie Whittaker’s first outing is setting ourselves up to be crushed. What if my son is dreaming of a Doctor more caustic than Peter Capaldi, more energetic than Matt Smith? What if he wants Whittaker to unveil a sonic screwdriver that has some functionality? I should have managed expectations. I should have said: “It takes time to get used to a new Doctor – remember Clara’s face that time he regenerated and was no longer handsome?” Instead, I invited unrealisable dreams and would have enshrined them in writing, were it not for the fact that he was playing Fortnite and didn’t reply.
The person with all the unrealistic expectations is me: as a glass ceiling, you cannot say this is louder and smashier than the first woman to go to university, or become a doctor; yet coming so late in the day of the feminist movement, it feels like the gateway triumph over all those silent, atmospheric inequalities – the way driving is considered more skilled than nannying; the way a plumber will always charge to the end of an hour, while a carer measures out her time in 15-minute slots; the way women always say sorry, and men always swim in the fast lane. The supreme court sitting with a female majority for the first time may be a bigger deal on paper, but Whittaker is a bigger deal in essence. I know, I’m overinvested; the new world won’t emerge overnight. Doctor Who will unfurl as it always does, with me not knowing what the hell just happened.
You no longer need a maid to be middle class – a fridge will do
Half the world is now middle class; more than are economically vulnerable, considerably more than those living in poverty. The bar of entry continues to fall: you now count if you can afford a fridge, a washing machine or a motorbike, which would be news to anyone with a fridge. You used to be middle class if you could afford a maid, now you just need to put milk in your coffee, as long as you call it a latte and sip it. It is a ruse to avert revolution: how can we have class war if we’re all the same class? But it reminds me of the time in Blackadder Goes Forth when Baldrick was serving in the trenches and carved his name into a bullet. Just because you call it a new thing doesn’t mean it won’t bite you.
