Announcing her new Youth Matters plan – £500m to “boost resilience and teach skills” – the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, spoke of a “violent indifference” from the political establishment towards young people that had been going on “for decades”. She’s not wrong. We can look at all of the ways in which young people have seen their economic prospects and work opportunities systematically destroyed – and see that they all date from 2010.
First, the tripling of the tuition fee cap saddled them with debts that have become astronomical, particularly for degrees that are socially beneficial, such as medicine and nursing; this, incidentally, from a coalition in which one party explicitly promised never to do that. Yet for all its boldness in setting fire to manifesto promises and playing fast and loose with a generation’s future, the tuition fees policy didn’t actually deliver a sustainable funding plan for tertiary education – instead leaving it to cross-subsidise with foreign students, whom the political establishment has spent the past five years trying to chase out of the country.
Then, Brexit removed young people’s freedom of movement, while making their country permanently poorer. I didn’t vote for that, but at least I could have; I cannot imagine the indignation I’d feel if I’d been under 18 for the referendum and still had to deal with its consequences every day, while simultaneously being told that it was my fault the “red wall” was angry, because I was too woke.
Political cliche offers us a simple explanation: old people vote, young people don’t, therefore the old are rigorously prioritised, whether by the benefits system with the triple-lock, or the political culture, which puts their abstract notions of sovereignty and amorphous concerns about Britishness above anything an 18-year-old might think about finding a bar job in Split.
To accept that, though, is to accept that politics has been profoundly debased; the principle that each new generation should have it better than the last was what the whole thing was supposed to be all about. To casually replace that with a presumption of electoral self-interest above all is not just cynical and narrow, it freezes the discourse in a perpetual, circular present, with MPs fighting to retain their power for no better reason than that their power is retained.
It’s only when organisations pop up and advocate for the young that you realise how rare that now is. This morning the cross-party UK Trade and Business Commission produced a report recommending terms for a time-limited youth experience scheme, capped at 44,000 visas in the first year. They wouldn’t be tied to any particular job or study, and young people could use them in combination with student visas to get more years in the UK. GB News was quick to respond, interviewing the Conservative MP Gareth Davies, who said: “We want less migration not more migration and we know that Labour are cosying up to the European Union”. The fact that this is untrue – 72% of Britons support such a scheme – is just detail.
In the neutral, pragmatic, sleeves-rolled-up language of a trade organisation, this report delivers an important warning: they arrived at that figure of 44,000 because that’s how many more young people are leaving, for New Zealand, Canada and Australia, than are coming in. You could pinpoint proximal reasons for that – student debt, wage stagnation and the underfunding of services are making it much more attractive to be a doctor in Australia than in the UK, for example. Our political establishment, with its “violent indifference” to young people, has made a forceful case for emigration.
Whether that’s because you can’t ignore an entire generation for ever without breaking the bonds of patriotic loyalty, or whether it’s because a bunch of young people could just use a break from the tedium and stasis of their own political culture, has yet to become clear. But it would be foolish not to consider the real danger of the scheme, which is not the arrival of energetic, adventurous, ambitious young Europeans. Rather, it’s that young Britons, their interests disregarded so openly, so shamelessly, will leave and move mountains to not come back.
That’s not an argument against the scheme, incidentally. As Sting would tell you, if you love them, set them free.
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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