A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of generational inequality. In fact, this ghost has intercontinental reach, haunting North America, East Asia, Australasia, South America and even, to an extent, South Asia. It disturbs the very idea of progress between parent and child, a fundamental tenet of modern life. Whether or not the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle, all societies might henceforth expect a future of generational strife.
This might sound alarmist. But then again, when you consider that in so many corners of the world, young people are expected to earn less, own less, have fewer children and, in some cases, have shorter lives than their parents, it might not sound alarmist enough. The last, gravest regression is especially bad in the US where, as Anne Case and the Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton have identified, “deaths of despair” (those from suicide and addiction) are now striking each successive generation at a younger age. In Britain, also suffering a rise in such fatalities, the Resolution Foundation has shown that young people’s wages bounced back far slower from the financial crisis than those of their parents, while their likelihood of owning a house by the age of 30 is half that of the generation before.
Then, of course, there’s that other spectre. All these disparities, severe before the pandemic, have grown worse. People under 35 are more likely to have lost their jobs; the latest official data showed that no less than 88 per cent of the net loss of employee jobs over the past year was accounted for by that younger age range. For the over-50s, there had actually been an increase in jobs. More than that, many young people have gone into debt or developed a mental illness, as a result of society’s treatment for a virus that is statistically far less dangerous to them than the old. When you factor in the impact of a year without proper schooling, it doesn’t seem overly pessimistic to start talking about a “lost” generation and begin preparing for the worst.
It’s hard to be sure where we’re headed because this situation is unprecedented in human history. Not the pandemic—those happen every few decades—but a society in which the majority of people are over 40 and hold an overwhelming proportion of the country’s political, economic and cultural capital. Recently, the UK’s median age passed the big 4-0, up from 35 in the middle of the last century towards a projected 45 by the middle of this one. These crumbling milestones have been long surpassed in Germany and Japan, where the median age is 47. The world has never seen such geriatric societies before.
Politically, things are even more top-heavy than the headline demographics suggest, partly because no one can vote until they are an adult, and partly because young adults—who disproportionately face obstacles to voting—do so less often than the old. Drawing on data from the British Election Study, analyst Matt Singh suggests the median age of an eligible British voter is not 40 but 50, rising to 51 for a registered voter and 53 for an actual voter. It’s a vicious cycle. As the young become increasingly exposed, their plight becomes more marginal: a major new survey of British public opinion conducted by King’s College London found that, in our ageing society, the great economic age gulf is considered the “least important” of all forms of inequality. So, we have a generational divide about whether the generational divide is something we need to worry about. But it’s real, and it runs between people of the same social class, race, even the same family.
I have yet to mention a certain word that usually dominates jeremiads such as these. The generation born between 1946-1964 are much scorned for their profligacy, but this is no anti-boomer polemic—I love Bob Dylan, and my parents. The fallout from the post-war demographic explosion can’t be completely attributed to the supposed selfishness of the individuals in a particular cohort. But there will be no fixing the problem until we have faced it: the big squeeze that has affected the young is in part due to deliberate political decisions about which perks and benefits get protected and which have been in line for cuts. Part of it is down to chance: boomers came of age during a long economic upswing when asset prices were low but on the way up, and there was bipartisan agreement on the need for free higher education and a strong welfare state. What happened next, though, is the result of pure demographics: as this population bulge has moved up the age range, in western societies where people were already living longer, it has carried the centre of the culture with it. As a result, many of these societies are now senescent, ruled by older people governing—maybe consciously, maybe not—in their generation’s own interests.
Given the British obsession with homeownership, the ability—or lack thereof—for different generations to get a “foot on the ladder” is as obvious a place to demonstrate this divergence as any. Even before the global financial crisis, the cost of buying a home had risen to a point that increasingly priced out the young; once it hit, banks demanded deposits that many could never hope to achieve in an era of stagnant pay. In 2013, George Osborne reportedly told the cabinet: “Hopefully we will get a little housing boom and everyone will be happy as property values go up.” Though the then-chancellor may have been making a joke, it was telling. On a semantic level, the “everyone” politicians hoped to make happy clearly meant “everyone who already owns a home.” At a time of historically low levels of housebuilding, Osborne got what he was after: a rapid increase in the price of a finite commodity.
Even those of his policies supposedly designed to give younger people greater access to the property pantheon, such as Help to Buy, merely served to push up prices. Also important to this conspiracy were central banks. Although notionally independent, politicians set their mandates and often have a hand in top appointments. It’s almost inevitable, therefore, that they give more attention to those parts of the population with most political clout.
Over a dozen post-crash years—and in spades since the pandemic—they have gone for historically low interest rates combined with quantitative easing. That has made money cheap and plentiful. With more of it sloshing around, the price of assets like houses skyrocketed, to the tremendous advantage of homeowners, many of whom were given a double boon through lower mortgage repayments. Today, on total assets, one in five over-65s is a millionaire; one in six younger boomers own a second home. Meanwhile, a younger generation has effectively been locked out of homeownership. British millennials will, on average, need to save for 19 years in order to afford a deposit; in the 1980s, it took only three.
Alongside the generationally lopsided monetary regime came austerity measures that, not coincidentally, fell heavily on the young. As pensions were “triple locked” and the NHS budget “ringfenced” for protection, education budgets were squeezed and tuition fees soared. Back in the days when it powered the rise of the post-war meritocracy, education had been known as the “great equaliser.” Today, it has become an engine of inequality, both within the younger generation and between it and the cohort above. Tony Blair pledged to ensure that 50 per cent of young people attended university—a target achieved and then surpassed in 2019. But the issuing of more degree certificates (at increasingly inflated grades) created a strange paradox. Degrees became an effective prerequisite for even humdrum employment, and yet—at the same time—those conferred by anywhere except the most elite alma maters were devalued within top professions.
Then there’s the reality of who paid for this great expansion. First came the phasing-out of maintenance grants during the 1990s, then the introduction of the first tuition fees in 1998, the arrival of “top-up” fees in 2004, and then the coalition’s move to triple the cap (which in effect was a floor) on them to over £9,000 a year. Students graduating in England this summer are expected to do so with an average debt of over £50,000. This figure becomes tragic when you consider that many will have accrued the last year of it staring wall-eyed at online lectures.
A decade after graduating, a quarter of millennials are in low-skilled work. Some have called this a “proletarianisation” of the young, and argued that old taxonomies based on social class are now obsolete. As long as there are still older workers slogging away in low-paid jobs, this is obviously a crude simplification. But when it comes to politics, it is an increasingly sound one. Over the past 10 years, as the country’s leading psephologist John Curtice put it, Labour has become “no longer a party of the working class” but “a party of young people.” Its recent manifesto policies—above all the abolition of university fees—reflects this. Amid the gloom, the finding of an ideological home could offer comfort. But if you are in a perpetual minority in a democracy, as the young are now fated to be, you can expect perpetual disappointment. In the last election, the one before it and the EU referendum, age was the defining factor in determining voter intention, and also—for the young—a guarantee of ending up on the losing side.
The pattern is astonishingly clear. In 2019, according to Ipsos Mori’s post-result re-crunch of its polls, Labour enjoyed 62 per cent of the total ballot among voters aged 18-24, and a 43-point lead. This fell incrementally for each ascending age bracket so that among the over-65s they languished on just 17 per cent, fully 47 points behind the Tories. The age effect dwarfs the old class divide. And today class is psephologically inconsequential compared to age: in 2019, Labour was behind the Tories in every class including the lowest “DE” occupational grade, which encompasses manual workers and those on state benefits.
Voter support ebbs and flows, but Labour’s structural trap could deepen. The only reason that it could fall behind in every social stratum yet still be so far ahead among young voters is that there just aren’t that many of them. After the last election, I spoke to Chris Curtis, political research manager at YouGov, and he confirmed that age had become “what social class was in the seventies and eighties.” Those decades were marred by class conflict. So, are we about to see similar intergenerational confrontations? And what, if anything, can we do to avert it?
If you’re a conservative (of either sized “c”) it’s not hard to realise that if young people have no stake in a society, they will want to bring it down. In America, where problems like student debt weigh even heavier, a poll revealed 50 per cent of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist country. Last year, its cities roiled in protest. The immediate focus was racial injustice, but the wider inter-generational culture war stoked the mood of rage on both sides.
Recent unsavoury events in Bristol have been blamed for undermining what many agree is a noble cause, when peaceful (and mostly young) protests against the draconian Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill were overshadowed by a small band who set fire to police cars. Nonetheless, it never pays to dismiss the source of such anger: Martin Luther King once said “a riot is the language of the unheard.” A decade ago, thousands of young British people took to the streets to register their fury, variously, at the police shooting of Mark Duggan, the rise in tuition fees and the axing of the Educational Maintenance Allowance. They already felt betrayed by those meant to protect them and those elected to represent them. The response back then only reinforced this—there were reports that ordinary sentencing guidelines were suspended to allow rioters in both instances to be made an example of, sometimes over what were essentially shoplifting or vandalism offences, and a lot of police brutality was recorded. The government and media became cheerleaders for severity in the courts, in the process managing to strip all discussion of politics from any of the riots so as to portray them purely as wanton acts of greed and violence.
After the statue of slaveowner Edward Colston was thrown into Bristol Harbour last year, the more Conservative (and older) end of Fleet Street whipped up great fury about alleged threats to “Rule Britannia!” at the Proms and a George Eliot statue in Nuneaton. The government has since moved to toughen the (already severe) criminal penalties for damaging monuments. While such rows might seem brain-numbingly pointless to young people, they are actually shrewd. As YouGov’s Curtis told me, “voters have switched from an economic axis to a cultural one.” This means young and old are more likely to choose parties they feel to be aligned with their views on things like immigration or the environment, rather than taxation or government spending. Thus, we have the government pointedly dropping Theresa May’s proposal for self-certification of legal gender, or Boris Johnson taking time during a pandemic to write an extended tweet thread denouncing those who wish to “censor history” by removing statues of imperialists.
These stunts leave Labour squirming—it can wave flags in an attempt to win back older “red wall” voters, but by doing so it will end up being, at best, ridiculed by the younger voters who now constitute its base. Even though Keir Starmer has renewed the Corbyn-era pledge to abolish tuition fees, some polling has shown young people deserting to the Greens. To many of them in Scotland and Wales, progressive nationalism appears a more attractive offer.
Still, in the end, won’t things change? After all, notwithstanding Mick Jagger, baby boomers aren’t immortal. And, if the path of material progress is permanently blocked for those born after 1980, then surely their electoral voice will become more powerful as older
generations depart the arena. After all, that apocryphal saying about possession of a brain meaning one must be a conservative by 40 doesn’t work when the chances of having any of the things that traditionally signify success (a steady job, a house, a spouse, children) at that age also declines.
For the first time in years, it is the US that offers hope about how to reunite the generations through shifting the discussion back to economics. The 78-year-old Biden is as old-school as one can be, but his willingness to work with fellow codger Bernie Sanders is—ironically—recognition of the debt he owes to the youth, and the Vermont senator’s own popularity among millennials shows that the age divide isn’t as intractable as it might seem. With Sanders now sitting as chair of the Budget Committee, their collaboration will prove crucial in restoring faith in economic policy.
It goes without saying that most parents want their children to have better lives than themselves, but unless more older voters, and politicians, can be persuaded to start acting against their own immediate interests, the generational divide will only get worse. By 2030, every living member of the boomer generation will be elderly (that is, 65+); a depleted, insecure tax base will be overwhelmed by their pension, health and care needs—leaving education, social welfare and other youth-related services on the chopping block. If, as some argue, our risk-averse approach to coronavirus is a symptom of our increasingly senescent society, how cripplingly cautious will we be when there are even more old people to protect?
With the traditional markers of material progress out of reach, young people have already been forced to recalibrate their idea of what constitutes a life well lived: a more self-aware generation sees happiness as a noble and adequate goal in itself. Unfortunately, it too is often unattainable: a study by the NHS in July 2020 revealed that one in five young men (aged 17-22) had experienced a mental disorder, a figure that rose to more than one in four among young women.
Thankfully, it’s not only junior idealists but thoughtful establishment figures who recognise the severity of the problem. Tory peer and president of the Resolution Foundation, David Willetts, who has been raising the issue of generational inequality for years, has proposed a universal grant of £30,000 for every 18-year-old to spend either on education, starting a business or as a deposit on a house. This could be paid for by a one-off wealth tax. As a technical policy proposal it sounds appropriately radical, but still leaves unanswered the fraught political question of winning support for that accompanying wealth tax, which would offend against a shibboleth of the property-owning democracy that has served a powerful older generation well. A more comprehensive answer will have to include a redistribution of political power as much as funds. The easiest way to do this, by increasing immigration from the young southern hemisphere, is also, politically, the hardest. Older (and more xenophobic) societies such as Japan are currently grappling with exactly this predicament.
The alternative is to somehow rebalance the electoral scales. As things stand, differential electoral turnout compounds the demographic drift: Ipsos Mori estimates that turnout in 2019 was 47 per cent for the youngest adults against 74 per cent for pensioners. Some of this is about the logistical difficulties of registering to vote if you rent and move frequently. Unfortunately, at the moment, the main “reform” in the air is not about narrowing this gap, but instead demanding extra identity checks against non-existent voter fraud—which, by demanding extra paperwork, would work to entrench it. We would do better looking at our antiquated electoral system while being under no illusion that mending it can fix the whole problem.
A more radical option could be to go down the Australian route and make voting mandatory. An even more radical one, such as has been mooted by the Cambridge political scientist David Runciman, would be to extend the franchise to children (or, alternatively, to entrust parents of young children with extra votes). His suggestion that six-year-olds be allowed to vote was widely pilloried. But it is a useful provocation because, if we go on as we are, we will entrench a bias against governments that plan for the future.
What will it be like when the boomers are all elderly, and millennials, many of whom look set to remain childless, begin to come of a certain age? In 1942, during a worldwide struggle with no end in sight, the government commissioned a report to settle what could be done to reward people for their sacrifices—the Beveridge Report that followed laid the foundations for the welfare state. Millions of young people who were already suffering restricted opportunities, political alienation and economic disadvantage have stoically accepted the need to defeat the virus with sacrifices that belie their relatively low physical risk; an investigation into how their lot might be improved should be the minimum of rewards.
Yet still, these suggestions presuppose that there can be a political solution to a demographic problem. Another option is neatly summed up by a popular meme: “I’m a millennial so my life goal is societal collapse.” Let’s *hope* it doesn’t come to that.
