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You’ve never had it so bad

Andrew Fisher
13th August 2011 at 16:27
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Like many others, my youth shaped my politics. Born in 1979, I believe there were several events and experiences that shaped me and the politics I have today. But although growing up under Thatcher – witnessing the bigotry directed at single mothers like my own, the introduction of the Poll Tax, the freezing of the student grant when my sister went to university in 1989 (which appears like a golden age now) – I consider myself lucky.

My teenage years were post-SUS law and before ASBOs. When I went to university in 1998 the grant was halved (and in my second and third years abolished entirely and replaced by loans) but there were no fees for poorer kids like me – only means-tested fees of up to £1000 per year. When I graduated in 2001 unemployment was at an historically low level and when I later decided to do a Masters the fees were just £2800 – and my college was flush enough to offer me a scholarship. Rental costs though rising were not unaffordable and though I have no appetite to return to those days I got by my undergraduate and postgraduate years with part-time jobs that covered rent, but left little for socialising.

I sympathise immensely with today’s generation of young people – they have never had it so bad. I know as an older generation I should be saying ‘we never had Xbox 360, 3G phones or even the internet when I grew up’ (and we didn’t) but I would not swap my formative years for theirs.

Today’s young men and women face a multitude of obstacles I never did. When I was in my mid-teens in Worthing, we used to congregate around the shelters on the seafront, around benches in the park, or in the stairwells of the council estate in winter. We got up to mischief – underage drinking and smoking , being loud and probably a bit obnoxious, occasionally but rarely fighting, going out egging, cycling on the pavement (we didn’t have lights on our bikes), throwing fireworks and rio-snappers (packs of tissue paper-wrapped gunpowder, sold in every newsagent at the time), pushing over traffic bollards, and yes some of my group, though not me, would occasionally shoplift too.

My point is that with less police on the streets then and no busy-body safer neighbourhoods teams we had little to no contact with the police. On a few occasions we had bottles of cider and Thunderbird confiscated, but no fixed penalty notices, no taking of names and addresses and no anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs). I do not believe I or my peers at the time could have those years again, without getting ASBO’d. Certainly New Labour’s dispersal orders would have been used against us. Being the mouthy rebellious git I was then and largely still am today, I would have ignored any ASBO or dispersal order like the majority of today’s youth do. The unlucky get caught breaching the terms of their ASBO and though they may have committed no actual offence, many end up with a criminal record. The almost institutionalised abuse of the anti-terror laws means stop and search afflicts young people even more, especially in London.

This harassment of young people by the police and other authorities, multiplied by several factors if you are walking while not white, is why young people feel disrespected and hassled – and why police are seen as the enemy.

While I graduated a decade ago in relatively prosperous times, today’s school leavers and graduates emerge into a labour market with the highest youth unemployment in our history. There has never been a worse time to be young and in need of work. The harassment of the unemployed in the welfare system, from the New Deal for Young People to the even more conditionality-based programmes today mean they have to jump through numerous hoops just to get the measly £51.85 per week of Jobseeker’s Allowance paid to under-25s.

For those that are still in education, the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) – one of New Labour’s few positive policies that gave working class kids £40 per week to stay in college – is being abolished. When I was 17 I was offered a sales job at a company where I worked part-time. I admit it turned my head and I was tempted to give up college, but in the end I stayed; it was only a week before the term began that I had applied to go to sixth form college in the first place. That extra £40 per week would no doubt have kept in college the friends of mine who did drop out. Others might have been encouraged to go in the first place.

But that is being taken away from today’s young people, and barely ten years after I graduated those leaving college next year will face £9,000 per year university fees – meaning a lifetime of debt and an extra 9% deduction from their pay. With little prospect of the labour market improving in the short-term young people are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Although house prices have fallen slightly from their peak in 2007/08, rental costs have continue to rise above the rate of inflation from London to Belfast, while banks are less likely to lend and are demanding ever higher deposits. The housing crisis in London and other cities is forcing young people to stay at home later and for the poorest that is often in substandard and overcrowded housing. The inevitable tensions this gives rise to are another source of anxiety among today’s youth. Unable to find work, to (whether real or perceived) afford an education or to afford to leave home.

Young people don’t live in isolation either. They are living through a period of sustained high unemployment, when even those in work are seeing their wages fall as wage freezes and high inflation cause living standards to fall. As Bank of England governor Meryn King said “Households face the most dramatic squeeze in living standards since the 1920s”. Young people see their parents struggling: losing their jobs, fighting to make ends meet, working longer and more anti-social hours – and inevitably being more stressed and less happy as a result.

And in the last year, planned school and college building improvements have been cancelled and local council youth services budgets have been slashed, closing youth centres and cutting support from vulnerable young adults.

And then there is the increasingly high-pressured consumerist society in which we live – where success is measured by what you wear, what you drive, what console or phone you own. It is hardly surprising that the rioting of early August 2011 was aggravated shopping more than fighting the police or trying to smash the state. This consumerist individualist culture was growing as I grew up, but it has continued to grow since and the differences are more stark. The New Labour years may have slowed the growth rate of inequality, but it did not reverse it.

Finally there is the lack of political voice. When I was growing up under the Thatcher and Major governments, the official opposition opposed the Poll Tax, the demonisation of single mothers and black people. It appeared to stand for – though perhaps not as clearly as I and many then perceived – a belief in society, in equality, against prejudice. Thirteen years of abolishing student grants, introducing and ratcheting up fees, and introducing ASBOs and increasingly imprisoning young people, and attacking welfare will have punctured most young people’s illusions. The minimum wage – often and rightly cited as one of New Labour’s best achievements – originally excluded young workers. And then there were the wars, which young people opposed overwhelmingly. Not enough money for you to go to university with a grant or without fees, but enough to follow a madcap US regime into a war for oil.

Some young people turned to the Liberal Democrats – who had opposed New Labour’s illiberal policies on crime and anti-social behaviour, who had opposed university fees, and who had opposed the war in Iraq. Any illusions in Nick Clegg’s Liberals – the last mainstream political outlet young people had put some faith in – are shattered. Young people are politically voiceless: no one represents them and logically therefore they don’t vote, reinforcing their own alienation. They are increasingly demonised as NEDs or Chavs, and described as feral.

Only half a generation separates me from today’s youth – yet in nearly every area of life it has got worse, and for some appears hopeless. No wonder they riot.

Their anger and frustration is entirely understandable and justified, if totally misdirected in the last week. Some will point out the rioters represent a small minority (described in the media as a criminal underclass of ‘feral rats’) of today’s youth, and that is true. But the tens of thousands who marched, occupied and were accused of rioting over fees last November and December smashed the Tory HQ, faced down police charges on horse-back and with batons, survived kittling, risked exclusion by occupying buildings in colleges and universities and by walking out of schools. The politicised protests saw them demonised and dismissed – while being beaten and kettled by a feral police. The conventional political campaigning (like over Iraq) was just ignored too.

In recent years this demonised, criminalised, excluded and ignored generation have witnessed corruption in the police that beat and harass them, in the media that demonises them and among the political class that ignores them. Why the fuck would they have any respect for that? I haven’t either.

Many young people feel they have nothing to lose – if living standards continue to fall and unemployment grows these riots will be merely a precursor to a more widespread and volatile conflagration that no police surge can dissuade. The carping politicians and media should heed this warning: if you don’t tackle the causes now, the cities will be burning again soon.