In memoriam: Ambition

In attempting to boil down my socialism to its basics I describe it as a belief in fairness and equality. Doubtless my Conservative friends would ascribe similar characteristics to their beliefs, and nuance it with the conflict between the free market and a command economy, between a large state and provision supplied by the private sector. Such distinctions between the two important political arguments have become blurred. The old clause four was not scrapped just to make the party look modern; a democratic socialist party was never going to go for the common ownership of production, distribution, and exchange.

The fairness and equality agenda lay behind the anti-discrimination legislation, women and gay rights, the attack on the democratic deficit. It also was the driver behind the push for full employment and the opening up of education to a wider audience. The target of 50% attending university was as much about participation as it was about equipping our young for the challenges of the new century.

The landscape for young people today looks pretty grim. Opportunities in further education are vastly better than during the 1970s when I was at school, but the prospect of the horrendous debt that will accompany it will be a millstone. I wonder how mortgage applications will be treated for those saddled with repaying tuition fees and other costs once graduation has been achieved. That house prices are something like eleven times the average wage makes the dream of home ownership problematical at best.

The unavailability of work is worse. I can recall a time when the total jobless at a million was viewed as a national disaster; now that number has been matched just by the young. And whilst it may be just a statistic for the rich and cossetted, the reality is that it affects us all. The summer riots are but one by-product; watch crime figures, drug dependency and suicide rates climb unless that Plan B is unveiled.

What young people are witnessing is, as Johnny Rotten so poetically put, “no future”. The party of aspiration may still make being super-rich even more attractive, but for many ordinary people the blank canvass that is the future has no prospect of paint being applied. If equality means anything it means turning aspiration into ambition.

Without full employment and affordable and accessible education there is no prospect for ambition to grow. Eighteen months in and this Conservative Government has already trashed the lives of many young people. The next Labour Government will have much to repair, although I fear that much like the 1980s we will be faced with a lost generation.