Spare us the anthems for doomed youth
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Forgive me for sounding like an old sage, but I can’t see generational divides being a particularly new thing. Every generation seems to have it: looking up to their parents and wondering what exactly they were thinking in creating the present situation, and chastising them for giving over such a poor inheritance to their offspring. They peer up to their prosperous forebears, who are frollicking in their late middle-aged comfort, and virulently protest over the state of the world they have to inhabit and somehow gain a living in.
Every so often, the situation young people are faced with really is dire, whether they are presented with war, national disrepair, or terminal decline. To those growing up after both world wars, there was a markedly different response, from the jollity and liveliness of the 1920s, to the morose, rationing-stricken generation of the ’50s and all the “angry young men” who tried to catch the zeitgeist. Those from the ‘60s would have grown up with the Cold War, the 1970s were once called ‘Weimar without the sex’, and the ‘80s had the Falklands, defeat of the miners and the poll tax. At every point, never did many say that those entering the workplace were going to be in for a great time.
Like Hamlet, though without all the murder, most adolescents aim to “take arms against a sea of troubles” in one way or another, and the most popular movements are often those which define the generation to come. Baby-boomers who were released in the late 1960s might go on about the soixante-huitards and the widespread anger over the conservative social mores of post-war Europe. There was the Civil Rights movement, the Stonewall riots; racial and sexual issues previously discussed were happily undergoing a revolution. These goals having been largely achieved, students today are seen making people do jazz hands instead of clapping, and no-platforming exactly those figures who led the change their society now enjoys. It seems as though they’ve almost run out of issues.
Of course, young people today haven’t run out of issues to face in the world they’re entering. As Arthur O’Connor recently pointed out on TheArticle, the list of pressing issues is seemingly endless: mass unemployment, climate change, increased racial division, and a population plagued by social media’s pernicious addiction. All of this in the background of an elder generation who have voted through Brexit and all the other populist leaders who have so prospered in the last decade. Whatever the arguments on such issues, it’s disingenuous to say that the concerns of twenty-somethings were exactly at the forefront of the minds of voters as they took to the polls to make such choices.
I’m from the same generation as O’Connor and I sympathise with his plight, if not his anthem for doomed youth. In Britain, I can’t see the situation getting better any time soon. More than half of the population in the UK goes to university, but their high expectations from academia are unlikely to be met by the increasingly dire labour market. Global Britain, a country we were promised post-Brexit, now seems a long way off as we try our best not to let anyone in or out of the country at all. Brexit, which gained the most support from those it least affected, will nonetheless see its consequences cower in the corner, in the face of a lockdown which sees Britain with one of the highest death tolls in Europe, a crippled economy, and a reputation for competence which is heading south as fast as Dominic Cummings’ car did north. Most of our leaders are middle-aged or retreating into the “elder statesman” role, making decisions now which will reverberate through the lives of their children and grandchildren rather than their own.
Yet O’Connor’s solution, for those aged 18-30 to be elected to speak as “generational representatives”, is a meretricious remedy to a problem which takes more than a sprinkle of youthful voices to face up to the next decades. O’Connor says that these representatives would be able to veto new laws “if they have a negative impact on our generation”. How would that work? Would the youthful cabal have to decide unanimously on what determined such a “negative impact”? Would other generations get the same rights, so all the OAPs in the room get to group together and decide whether they’re getting a fair share of the deal? How much leverage would this new group have? Would those in it who turn thirty suddenly see their opinions become nullified? Perhaps we could try a male-only assembly or a voice exclusively for fans of Friends. These would never work because they are exclusionary; only a Chamber of directly elected representatives, regardless of their stature, sex, age or position in society, can hold any real authority.
O’Connor decries the fact that most politicians are not alert to the concerns of their younger voters, purely due to the fact that they are not of the same age. Boris Johnson is “effectively alien” to the world he (and I) grew up in. So does that mean I’m equally alien to those of Johnson’s age and older? No — and it’s time to throw off this heady notion of discriminatory representation. It’s a platitude which will do little to solve the actual problems which governments are elected to solve. Basing the running of the country on the systems of a school prefect society won’t ever serve the interests even of those it is supposed to represent.
People from our generation will start to help in the way that those before them always have: by being elected by voters. That will be the way they will solve the host of problems left over to them by the present crop of politicians. Until then, it will be up to our current rulers to solve the damage wrought by a year where the interests of the young have been put on the back-burner to deal with the threat to the elderly. Only when they reckon with the full extent of the damage this has done will the myriad crises facing a new generation have any hope of being solved.
This means that the Government should stop throwing around gimmicks, such as giving certain groups a more “intimate” involvement in government, and start facing up to what it can, and must, do now. For what will really give this country’s youth the chances they need is to restore the functions of the institutions where they are taught, tentatively, to think for themselves, meet people of different backgrounds, and learn how to figure out a world which seems increasingly set against them, no matter their families’ luck or lack of it. They’re called schools. So why are they closed?
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