Anthem for doomed youth

Britain’s greying post-war generation are getting increasingly used to a bad press.

Britain’s greying post-war generation are getting increasingly used to a bad press. Once lauded for liberating British society, the teenyboppers of the 1960s are now vilified for squandering a time of plenty, having mortgaged their children’s futures to fund a reckless, debt-fuelled shopping spree.

The Baby Boomers’ thirst for property speculation, their younger critics lament, has transformed the UK housing market into a vicious collusion between rack-rent retirees and latte-crazed estate agents.

For the young, owning a house has become a distant dream. Bright-eyed graduates pump the bulk of their income into subsidising the Boomers’ buy-to-let investments, scrambling for the chance of a no-pay internship in the vague hope of a life of low pay in a moribund labour market.

And on their youthful shoulders rests a national debt so large it won’t be paid off until the day they die, with the prospect of retiring before 65 likely to be relegated to a fanciful 20th-century luxury.

For Ed Howker and Shiv Malik, authors of Jilted Generation, British youth now face the most uncertain future since the 1930s. Identifying the eponymous generation as those born after 1979 — the first UK school year to pay university tuition fees — the authors argue that a country where the young have lost out even during the giddiest boom in living memory has effectively auto- cannibalised.

Older readers could be forgiven for a weary sigh. Did the much maligned Boomers not toil for their houses, pay into their pensions and contribute to the national coffers through taxes? The 1960s and 70s were surely not a golden age where debt-free graduates sauntered down from university into dream jobs and glamorous accommodation. Why do the youth of today feel they deserve to have it easy?

But Jilted Generation is not a brattish rant about entitlement.