The government makes for Hay while the sun shines

5 June 2010

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

I’m writing this from the Hay Festival which seems to be populated by an unusually large number of government ministers. I spotted Michael Gove wandering along Newport Street eating an ice cream on Sunday afternoon and later this week I’m hoping to catch Nick Clegg being interviewed by Philippe Sands. If this annual gathering of the liberal intelligentsia is anything to go by, the Guardian-reading classes are completely at ease with the coalition government.

This was evident in a very good-humoured event I attended at which Jon Snow, the urbane Channel 4 newsreader, interviewed David Willetts, the Minister of State for Universities and Science. Willetts is in town to promote The Pinch, his attack on the Baby Boomers for feathering their nest at the expense of their children. He has calculated that by the end of their lives the Boomers will have taken out 118 per cent of what they’ve put in, leaving the next generation with smaller houses, higher taxes and a degraded environment. They are guilty of breaking the inter-generational social contract.

If Two Brains has got his sums right, this is bad news for Generation X and even worse for Generation Y. According to some research carried out by Professor Paul Harvey at the University of Hampshire, those born in the 1980s and 1990s combine an overweening sense of entitlement with practically no work ethic. In a psychological test designed to measure just how narcissistic they are, they scored 25 per cent higher than those aged 40-60 and 50 per cent higher than those over 61.

‘Even if they fail miserably at a job, they still think they’re great at it,’ says Harvey. ‘It stems from the self-esteem movement, telling kids, “You’re great, you’re special.”’

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