We all know these children have no future

None of the SW1 rigmarole matters unless the Tories can solve the generational housing problem

I often regale my children with tales about what life was like before the world they take for granted. You see, there was no ‘internet’ when I was growing up and you couldn’t just ‘pause’ the television. That technology didn’t come along until I was about 24, with Sky+, and at the time it seemed like the work of demons.

When I was growing up we only had four channels, so if you were sick and stuck on the sofa you couldn’t go through hundreds of Netflix shows; it was either Hale and Pace or Watchdog, or the snooker, and that was it. If it was Sunday, televised football was free, but it was quite rubbish, my abiding memory of childhood being Elton Welsby presenting Coventry City v Everton every Sunday.

All but one of the channels shut down before midnight, and on BBC1 they played the national anthem to let you know it was time for bed. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones….

People’s stories inevitably become less interesting once cognitive decline sets in, so I dread to think how bad it will be for my generation when we reach the age where we just repeat the same old tales about seeing Oasis at Glastonbury or that full moon party in Thailand. Surely the temptation to just euthanatise us will be overwhelming.

The thing about the war generation — the old people when I was growing up — was that their stories tended to be quite interesting; as a teenager I worked with a lovely old guy, Doug, who had served in the Royal Navy, and described with great glee firing massive guns at Luftwaffe fighter planes. He seemed to quite enjoy the war and treated it as one big adventure, even when his boat got sunk and they had to be picked up by the Russians (he survived because he was covered in oil, apparently). We have nothing to offer our successors; indeed things may get quite bad for us by the time we’re the elderly.

Britain is cursed with having an unusually bad generational conflict, which is in part related to our culture. England was the first country to really adopt the nuclear family and move away from multi-generational living, and in the early modern period it was normal for English children to spend large parts of their childhood living with another family, as servants. More recently, the British upper classes would be raised away from their parents. I also suspect that our uniquely yobbish drinking culture, in part, stems from the rarity of multi-generational socialising.

But the number one cause of that generational conflict today is money, and luck: the generation born after the Second World War have been incredibly fortunate, and their grandchildren cursed. This is a phenomenon across the developed world, but in no other country is voting so split by generation. If Britain is two nations, it’s one divided by age.

My children’s generation are growing up in a world of stupendous entertainment, in terms of quality and quantity. But as someone once put it, they are blessed with abundantly cheap luxuries and unaffordable necessities. As much as everyone loves the drama at the heart of the Tory Government, none of it matters one bit if they can’t break the Gordian Knot of housing; it doesn’t matter whether Rishi or Penny or Boris wins, because when the younger cohort grow more numerically dominant, the Tories are going to get annihilated.

One of the problems Britain faces is that, while we follow the American narrative of an ageing babyboomer cohort unusually large in size, our demographic bulge came later — and so the worst economic headwinds are yet to come.

There was no post-war babyboom in Britain, as this recent Substack piece by Marlowe points out. Along with BIPOC, segregation and slavery, the £15 minimum wage and the roaring 20s, babyboomer is another fake American cultural import. Britain had a small post-war fertility increase, but the real boom only came about in the 1960s; our ‘babyboomers’ are actually now in their 50s, just past their most economically productive, and soon to add to our already alarming workers-to-pensioners ratio. 

And as the author says, we have trouble getting to grips with our ageing problem because we don’t really understand that old people are not just, you know, old people. ‘My Mum is in her early 70s, and recently went to a charity coffee morning for little old ladies,’ Marlowe writes: ‘My Mum saw the Beatles live when she was a teenager and her favourite band is Fleetwood Mac. The coffee morning was playing stuff like Vera Lynn, things her parents would have liked.’

When I think of pensioners, I still imagine little old ladies called Gladys or Ethel, but the most popular names among new pensioners are Susan and Elizabeth. There is also still a lingering semi-notion that old people need to be rewarded for their wartime service, when most were now born after the conflict. They did not suffer and sweat for the welfare state and the new Britain, they were its beneficiaries.

Just as in some people’s minds, old people will always be listening to Dame Vera as they stoically endure Hitler, so we imagine pensioners as being impoverished. That was once true, but today pensioners tend to be the wealthiest segment of society. They’re rich because the entire British economy is geared around house price inflation, a bubble which has enriched the post-war generation and immiserated their grandchildren. 

Today a great deal of political conflict is simply down to a historically unusual gulf in material assets between generations. On top of this, as populations age they tend to become poorer, less dynamic and weighed down with care for the elderly. Britain now faces Attlee-levels of public spending with Ayn Rand levels of public services.

We’ve avoided confronting this problem because the post-war cohort have essentially captured the governing party, which quite nakedly serves their interests, protecting pensions while doing little for the growth young people desperately need.

But this kind of self-interest does seem to run like a thread throughout the life cycle of the post-war cohort. Watching the documentary of Swinging London, My Generation, conflict between age groups is the central theme. Most of all there is the sense of resentment from the older generation, who never had the money, the freedom or the sexual opportunities that their children enjoyed. They had a horrific war to fight, and they saw young people as being selfish — which of course they were. 

It’s not that the post-war cohort were more inherently selfish, rather that they were incredibly fortunate and had the opportunity, both in youth and old age, to revolve society around their needs. The demands they made as young people were essentially self-interested, and the demands they make as older Conservative voters are self-interested too.

One of the most eye-opening revelations about London life is that many of the people now preventing Soho bars from opening late are ex-punks who, true to form, don’t care what other people want. The whole ethos behind youth culture of the late 70s was to stick two fingers up to the rest of society; why change the habit of a lifetime?

The same ethos can be found among a certain section of the Conservative electorate who have come to rely on an economic system that continues to raise the value of their home while providing a steady supply of cheap labour, from the people serving their food to the nurses changing their bedsheets. This has required an immigration system that effectively works as a Ponzi scheme while at the same time, these mostly older homeowners do everything possible to prevent desperately-needed new flats and houses — supply can never match demand, raising the cost of property still further. High house prices make family formation far harder, and so the only long-term solution to the dependency ratio problem — replacement fertility — becomes totally impossible.

If you’re a young British person right now, then without a great deal of parental help you have little chance of owning a home in the sought-after cities where the most desirable jobs are found.

The lack of interest in this problem must be especially galling considering that the younger generation sacrificed one of their best years to stop the spread of a disease which didn’t even affect them. The friendships people make between 16 and 25 have a huge impact on the rest of their lives, and they just lost a year of that to preserve the health of someone whose house probably earned twice as much as they did. 

This is completely unsustainable, and the sheer scale of house price increases compared to salaries feels like something you’d read in chapter one of a history book, a history book which has subsequent chapters called things like ‘the September terror’ and ‘into the abyss’. Probably the only reason young people aren’t having a revolution is because all the microplastics and vegan diets have left them too enfeebled and lacking in testosterone to do anything.

I used to resist the generational conflict argument, and remember making fun of some Leftist campaigners because they were referring to themselves as ‘doomed youth’ in a way I thought self-indulgent. But they were right and I was wrong; it is very bad for them, not born-in-1895 levels of bad, but if you came into this world around the turn of the millennium, then you really don’t have much of a future. Lord knows why you’d vote Conservative. And if anyone believes that any of the current candidates to be prime minister will change anything, they’re deluded.