The Squeezed Youth

The squeezed middle. Who are they? What do they look like? What do they feel? What do they want? We’ve had plenty of descriptions (some of which have been better than others).

So perhaps instead of thinking of this rather large group as a single mass, we should look at it as a series of smaller groups – and few groups are being squeezed more than young people.

The young are often the forgotten group of modern politics. They are loud but disparate. They are less likely to vote and therefore easier to ignore, and their demands are often contradictory (because they are a broad cross section of the electorate). Labour has a particular problem with youth. We have, arguably for the first time, a generation that grew up under a Labour government. I was 12 when Blair was elected and 25 when Brown was defeated. I am a child of New Labour.

That means that for many of my peers – and for me personally, in a past life – Labour represents the establishment. And for much of Britain’s youth, Labour was the cause of their political awakenings – not all of which were positive. We introduced their tuition fees (then trebled them). We invaded countries. We managed an economy that slumped into recession and oversaw spiralling youth unemployment. And perhaps worst of all we presided over a declining and disinterested electorate. If your first election was 2005 (with Labour elected on a fraction of the vote) or 2010 (when the Tories firmed a government without a majority and the Lib Dems betrayed the first time votes so many young people) you might wonder why you should bother voting at all.

And yet young people arguably have the most to win and lose from a change of government. Labour may have overseen the acceleration of youth unemployment, but this government have taken off the brakes. The future jobs fund is gone. Regional development agencies are gone. Want to stay on and study? EMA is gone too.

And as youth unemployment spirals and hits a terrifying one million, the prospect of ever getting a job seems unlikely. This government are risking a lost generation. And as its my generation I’m more than a little pissed off about it.

We’re the squeezed youth. We’re less likely to have a job than any group of young people in British history. Even if we are employed, we find it hard to contemplate ever owning our own homes – instead condemned to act as a cash cow for baby boomer buy-to-let landlords (another way in which that generation has sold the family silver leaving us with the scraps).

It’s notoriously difficult to turn out young people to vote. Any election campaign that aimed to do so would be attacked as wasteful, naive or desperate. But in a week when everyone is talking about the “granny tax” (and quite rightly), remember that Britain’s real forgotten generation isn’t the one who’ve finished working.

They’re the ones who haven’t even had a chance to get started yet.