The flight of Britain’s futureless young
The young live without reward for their hard-work nor extract any fulfilment for a life in which they own nothing, have no privacy, and are certainly not happy about it.
Life in Britain, both physically and metaphorically, seems to be running out of power, supplying only enough energy to light a dim bulb that never grows in brightness and threatens to extinguish itself completely at any moment.
Time is running out, and this grim reality acutely faces the younger generation who, by virtue of nature’s horological stance, have many more years left on this earth to forge their own futures. A future, many perceive, to not be found on these fair isles.
Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s budget confirmed Britain’s status as the world’s first care home state with a nation attached to it. Being dependant on the vote of Britain’s increasingly pension bound population, the jewel in the Tories’ electoral crown (instead of anything actually conservative) is the triple lock.
A bribe in which the state pension must rise annually in line with either inflation, wage growth, or by 2.5% (whichever is higher). Due to inflation putting on its running boots as of late, the state pension has inevitably increased by £870 for next year.
An extortionate cost that is chained around the neck of Britain’s young, a demographic who will receive little relief from Whitehall in the cost of living crisis and whose pay check will not return to 2008 levels until 2027, in the form of tax increases.
Nor can the racketeering benefits of the triple lock be promised to them, as a negative and some may say extinction level fertility rate of 1.6 shrinks the workforce and taxable base even further. Britain’s youth are also aptly termed Generation Rent because of recklessly spending too much money on avocados and Netflix subscriptions.
Just kidding. Between the 1980s and the 1990s, the average cost of a house was around three times more than the average wage. Nowadays, it is a staggering 7 times. The problem gets even worse should you live in London or its surrounding suburb-commuter belt (where virtually all of the employment opportunities are for clever youngsters), where it is closer to 11 times.
Demand has vastly outstripped supply. A lack of political will to build more houses, largely as a result of Boomer-fuelled NIMBYism, as the laws of economics dictate that an influx of more properties will see rent and mortgage rates decline. And those who purchased houses for a fraction of their current value decades ago can’t be expected to drop the ladder which they pulled from up behind them.
A net migration of half a million people a year (roughly the population of Cornwall) will also not do Britain’s choked housing market any favours, and also puts unnecessary pressure on the job market and local infrastructure.
As a consequence, young people must pour their youth away, delaying (or sometimes postponing indefinitely) the many vital rites of passages that make adults, adults. An economy of destitute renters or boomerang children (adults who still live with their parents due to the reasons stated above) is not a nation of marriages, families, independence, or dynamism.
It is one without a future; a land of decay and what’s-the-point nihilism. At the extreme, it is a boiling pot of internal turmoil and political extremism that is bound to spill onto the streets (and you thought university and Silicon Valley were birthing a breed of latte-sipping Marxists and bedroom bound far-right fantasists).
But these concerns are not even recognised. If you are perplexed as to why a country once as grand as Britain has devolved into a sclerotic, twitching cadaver that has lost all faith in itself and whose treacherous institutions are making it commit suicide, it is because our political and economic system is geared towards a class who does not possess a long-term outlook or is willing to share the burden of sacrifice enforced upon the youth.
When Theresa May even wrote a whiff of social care reform into her 2017 manifesto, the part that said that the elderly may have to pay for their own care (the kind of pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps self-responsibility that is muttered viciously towards Generation Rent), she immediately had to backtrack and a hung parliament ensued.
The social contract, in both the liberal and conservative traditions, has been severed with an axe. The young live without reward for their hard-work nor extract any fulfilment for a life in which they own nothing, have no privacy, and are certainly not happy about it. They are certain that this world is not made for them, and do not see any hope or point in prolonging its existence.
Nevertheless, when one side does not hold to their part of the bargain, there is a brief period of ‘running on borrowed time’ until the other party realises that they are being taken for a fool and correctly deduce that the only winning move is not to play.
Britain’s futureless youth are fleeing this nation. First it was underpaid and overworked medical graduates, now it’s anyone with a pulse and the right working visa to get there. First a trickle, now a flood. In contemporary Britain, a suitcase and a passport are more valuable to a twenty-something than all other material possessions they can realistically get their hands on, so is it any wonder they are leaving while they still can?
The youth have given up on Britain, because Britain has given up on them.