Baby Boomber Britain and Social Divisions Widened, Rather Than Diminished
On the afternoon of 23 June 2016, Beth Jenkinson, 19, entered the Wesley Memorial Church in central Oxford and voted for Uk to remain in the European Union. Jenkinson, the start in her family unit to attend academy, knew some Get out voters (including three of her 4 grandparents back in Yorkshire) simply no one she met that day supported Brexit – or expected it. "Nosotros were all convinced that it would be fine," she says now.
When Jenkinson woke the adjacent morning to confirmation that the UK had become the first land to vote to leave the Eu, she felt "deplorable and angry to exist British" – and resentful towards the older generations.
Three-quarters of 18- to 24-year-olds voted Remain. But two-thirds of over-65s (the demographic that turned out in the greatest numbers) favoured Brexit. "I wish we'd had the aforementioned vote in ten years' time. A lot of people who voted Exit wouldn't be hither," says Jenkinson, who now works as a researcher at the Intergenerational Foundation, a London-based think tank. Her judgement is harsh, but information technology reflects the despair that many immature people feel virtually their prospects.
Vince Cable, the 74-year-old Liberal Democrat leader, is equally frank about the Brexit vote when we speak one morning in his parliamentary part. "The older generation shafted the young. Their life chances have been radically affected by what the older generation has decided."
Class has historically been the main determinant of how people vote in Britain, and social divisions have widened, rather than macerated. As the cultural critic Richard Hoggart observed in 1989, "Each decade we shiftily declare we have buried class; each decade the coffin stays empty." However age is now the best predictor of how people cast their ballots. At the 2017 general election, the generation gap was the largest since polling records began. Amongst 18- to 24-year-olds, 62 per cent voted for Labour, compared with 27 per cent for the Tories. For older people, the positions were reversed: 61 per cent of over-65s voted for the Conservatives and 25 per cent for Labour. At the same time, the class electoral separate significantly narrowed. Both back up for Labour among the middle class and support for the Conservatives among the working class rose by 12 points.
Divisions between the young and one-time are hardly a new phenomenon. In the turbulent 1960s, the baby boomers railed against the political and cultural mores of their parents. It was a menstruum of youthful insurgency – in Paris and beyond, students took to the streets and dreamed of revolution. But rarely has the generational split up been equally pronounced as it is today.
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What caused this chasm? And can any political political party – indeed, any group or establishment – hope to bridge it?
Most 8 years ago, the and then Conservative shadow minister David Willetts published The Compression, an business relationship of "how the baby boomers took their children'due south time to come – and why they should requite it back". He charted how the old were hoarding the benefits of a market economy (property wealth, generous individual pensions) while the young were left with its burdens (expensive housing, task insecurity, student debt, inadequate or non-existent pensions).
"I was taking a fleck of a flyer. Some people thought information technology was rather eccentric," Willetts, now 61 and the chair of the Resolution Foundation retrieve tank, tells me. Merely he had identified a genuine schism, ane that his party would exercise much to widen.
In coalition with the Liberal Democrats from May 2010, the Conservatives tripled university tuition fees from £3,000 to £9,000 (in defiance of the Lib Dems' manifesto promise), abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance (a payment of upwardly to £30 a calendar week for 16- to eighteen-twelvemonth-olds living in depression-income households) and capped working-age benefit increases at 1 per cent from 2013 (benefits were frozen birthday from 2016). A cap on total benefits payments was introduced and set at £26,000 per household, while the maximum housing benefit was prepare at £21,000.
Pensioners were spared social security cuts – which allowed David Cameron to keep his campaign promises to older voters. "I'1000 not having one of those bloody carve up-screen moments," he told his aides (mindful of Nick Clegg's troubles). From 2010 onwards, the coalition protected the "triple lock" on the state pension (and so that it rose by aggrandizement, boilerplate earnings or 2.5 per cent, whichever was highest), too equally the means-tested Pension Credit and universal benefits such every bit winter fuel payments, complimentary autobus passes and free TV licences.
Gore Vidal once characterised the United states of america economical system every bit "free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich". The Conservatives favoured capitalism for the immature and socialism for the former. Median incomes for pensioners rose by 13 per cent from 2008 to 2016 but fell by ane.2 per cent for working households.
"I often get caricatured every bit a 'generational warrior'," Willetts says. "Every fourth dimension I do an interview like this, I become a letter of the alphabet in copperplate handwriting on Basildon Bail notepaper from an 81-year-old saying her life has been very tough, and she's struggling to make ends meet, and what take I got against her? And I've got nothing against her." But he maintains: "The residuum of savings should be more than fairly allocated between working-historic period families and pensioners."
By far the greatest disparity between immature and one-time is in belongings ownership. During the coalition years, housebuilding barbarous to its lowest level since the 1920s. Measures such every bit the "Help to Buy" scheme, which was aimed at first-time buyers, focused on subsidising demand rather than increasing supply. As the so chancellor, George Osborne, alleged at a 2013 cabinet coming together: "Hopefully we volition become a piffling housing boom and anybody volition be happy as property values get upwardly."
The young, most of whom longed for business firm prices to fall, were far from happy. Whereas holding ownership amid the over-65s rose between 1997 and 2016, it fell among 16- to 34-twelvemonth-olds, from 54 per cent to 34 per cent. Osborne'southward favoured combination of monetary activism (ultra-low interest rates and quantitative easing) and financial conservatism (public spending cuts and taxation rises) kept asset prices high and housebuilding rates low.
At the 2015 general election, the Conservatives won their first parliamentary majority since 1992 aided by homeowners, among whom the Tories enjoyed a 24-bespeak atomic number 82. But they are now struggling to sell capitalism to a generation with no capital. The traditional transmission belt to Conservatism – property ownership – is broken for Generation Rent.
Willetts acknowledges his party'south shortcomings. "We do demand to accept that there's a very important office for the public sector in getting houses congenital. It tin't all exist done by individual housebuilders… On this, I am completely not-ideological."
The problem, yet, is not merely one of housing supply. As Paul Johnson, the director of the Found for Fiscal Studies (IFS), tells me, "Remarkably – I always find this number amazing – ten per cent of people have two or more homes. And, of course, all those immature people are living somewhere and, on the whole, they're renting off older people."
Johnson, notwithstanding, cautions confronting intergenerational conflict: the divisions within generations remain greater than those betwixt them. In recent decades, pensioner poverty has fallen significantly, but the gap between rich and poor pensioners has
simultaneously widened.
***
David Cameron's gifts to the elderly were non simply fiscal. In January 2013, as older Tory voters defected to Ukip, Cameron promised a plebiscite on EU membership. The outcome magnified the divide between United kingdom'southward younger cosmopolitans and its older conservatives.
Young people had never known a Uk exterior the EU. Free movement – the freedom to live and work in 27 other European countries – was equally much a feature of their lives equally the smartphone and Facebook.
But as clearing to the Britain surged (cyberspace migration reached a tape level of 336,000 in 2015), older voters in detail revolted against open borders. The 2017 British Social Attitudes survey later found that the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland had the largest generation gap of any European country over immigration (Sweden – which, like United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, did not impose transitional controls on migration from eastern Europe in 2004 – was in second identify). Nearly half of those aged between 18 and 29 believed that clearing had "a positive impact on the economy", compared with only 29 per cent of those aged over 70.
Beth Jenkinson tells me of the "pride" that she felt in her generation the day subsequently the EU referendum. "It was a reflection of our values and what we believe in: tolerance, being welcoming as a land. That'south where I see the large divide – the dissever in
values." At the 2017 ballot, Remainers took their revenge.
For the young, the Brexit vote intensified the sense of a globe beyond their control. Here was a generation charged £nine,000 a yr for almost all university courses, regardless of their quality, with no guarantee of a graduate job at the end. This was a generation for whom saving for a deposit felt ever more futile later on house prices rose to vii.6 times the average salary. (In November, the estate agent Strutt & Parker helpfully advised the young to stop ownership sandwiches and enjoy fewer nights out if they wanted to buy holding in London.)
As their European friends spoke anxiously of their fears of being deported from Britain, the Leave vote felt to them similar the terminal insult. Theresa May'south support for fob hunting and her abandonment of a total ban on the ivory merchandise in U.k. could have been designed to repel the young (who in the general ballot turned out in larger numbers than at whatsoever election since 1992).
***
Labour, by contrast, courted the youth vote by pledging to abolish university tuition fees – a determination described by political party strategists as their "big bazooka". Jeremy Corbyn was that rarest of things: a politico whom the immature trusted. His political and ideological consistency – exemplified past a photo of him existence arrested in 1984 while protesting against South African apartheid – appealed to those who felt betrayed by the Lib Dems and New Labour. (James Schneider, who after became Corbyn's head of strategic communications, left the Lib Dems in 2010 and joined Labour in 2015.)
Huda Elmi, 23, a member of Momentum's national co-ordinating group, says: "Near immature people are political. They are politicised. The result has e'er been that their politicisation hasn't been inside party politics." Corbyn, she adds, "shattered" the "perception of politics equally existence middle-class white men in suits in a Westminster chimera" by championing "the issues that people are fighting for in their own communities and in their ain organising networks".
For Corbyn'south supporters, his promise to abolish tuition fees was a recognition of higher education as a public good, rather than a individual commodity. But others condemned the policy on the grounds of fairness. "Labour's proposal is incredibly regressive," David Willetts, who oversaw the introduction of £9,000 fees as universities minister, tells me. An IFS written report found that the highest-earning graduates would benefit the most while the lowest-earning would benefit the least. Willetts warned that the estimated £11bn cost of catastrophe fees would strength the government to reimpose a cap on educatee numbers. "The marginal students that don't become a place are the ones from less affluent backgrounds."
The Conservatives have pledged to freeze fees at £9,250 (their level since 2017) and to increase the loan repayment threshold from £21,000 to £25,000. Thomas Tozer, 25, a policy researcher who graduated with £xl,000 of student debt and pays a 3rd of his income in rent in Greenwich, south-east London, dismissed this as "crumbs from the table". "The young are not as naive or equally easily misled as people assume," he says. "The regime cares more most its reputation and its paradigm than genuinely helping young people."
Labour'south manifesto vowed to shield the sometime as well equally the immature from austerity. Unlike Theresa May, Corbyn pledged to protect the triple lock on the state alimony and all universal pensioner benefits. "There is this perception of united states [Momentum] but being for the young, or all existence middle class, hummus-eating hipsters," says Elmi. "Simply you actually have a lot of retired pensioners who are Momentum volunteers, and that is solidarity in action."
Willetts echoes this sentiment. "I am fundamentally an optimist… The polling work we've done shows that young people themselves intendance most the living standards of older people. And Granny does worry that her grandson can't go started on the housing ladder."
This may be besides optimistic. The Brexit vote that acquired Jenkinson such despair – "I couldn't understand why that acrimony had to affect my life and my future" – was a symptom of a viscerally divided state. There is no reason to believe that Brexit will heal the divisions. The epic task of Eu withdrawal – the nation's most demanding post-1945 negotiation – has deprived the government of the capacity to solve the housing crunch facing the young or the social care crisis facing the one-time. A poorer and ever more than polarised Uk is no country for young people or, indeed, for old ones.
This article appears in the 03 Jan 2018 consequence of the New Statesman, Young vs Old
Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2018/01/boomers-vs-millennials-defining-schism-uk-politics
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