A consensus seems to have recently settled in UK politics: that young British lives are not as they should be, and something must be done. Our teens and twentysomethings, we are told, are lonely, phone-addicted, “overdiagnosed”, and too often jobless, which entails a great blizzard of proposals – from welfare reform to the scaling-back of university education – that seem to have more to do with older voters’ prejudices than the real-life problems of other generations. At the next election, the extension of the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds may do something to correct that, but I wouldn’t count on it. There is, after all, something deep within the British psyche that favours age over youth, and consequently misrepresents and ignores the latter in a way that sometimes looks almost pathological.
If you want a vivid example, consider a drastic loss from millions of young lives that is still bafflingly overlooked. During the first 10 years of the spending cuts that began in 2010, councils’ funding for youth services in England and Wales suffered a real-terms cut of 70%. By 2023, about 1,200 publicly run youth centres had closed, and more than 4,500 youth workers had lost their jobs. Villages, towns and cities still bear the scars: empty buildings that look just as forlorn as any shuttered library or Sure Start centre. But while other aspects of the austerity disaster have at least been acknowledged, this one still seems to be a strange kind of guilty secret, with seemingly no chance of all that lost provision ever being restored.
