Young people want to fight for equality, not be called victims

We have to build solidarity between the generations – and taking away their dignity isn’t the way to do it

I was doing a corporate gig last week about political disruption, not because I like dressing up and getting paid, but more because I love the infinite variety of human opinion, and the sandwiches. I won’t bore you with my theory of change: I just said it was a fallacy that young people would become more rightwing as they matured. We used to see this as a quasi-ovarian system, everyone being born with an egg of conservatism that would pop out at maturity. It seems, instead, that to shift to the property-protecting class, you need to own property. At the rate we’re going, no one will become a Tory until they’re 50, by which time they won’t have a clue how to do it: they’ll think it means agreeing with Enoch Powell and knowing when to prune wisteria.

This all seemed self-evident to me, but a young woman in the audience violently disagreed. She wished people would stop going on about housing; young people didn’t share this tawdry obsession with ownership; things are far more complicated than the roof over your head; we should be talking about the infinite possibilities of tech. Obviously, I wanted to take this point by point, and start by shouting: “It’s not a tawdry obsession, it’s life. It’s the difference between a two-hour and one-hour commute. It’s the difference between amassing savings and assets or pissing money down someone else’s drain. It’s the difference between being able to start a family and not.” Fortunately, it wasn’t my turn to talk, because some days later I remembered I’d had this argument before: with a soft-left radical who ran the Architecture Foundation and tried to explain, gently, that young people weren’t aspiring, and failing, in the way their elders thought, and were more interested in fair conditions for renters; with a soft-right economist who argued that, precisely because they were young, his generation valued the flexibility of being able to move, along with the admin-lite lifestyle of not having to fix your own boiler. I fought all that in the regular way, like a tiger. As with a zero-hours contract or an open relationship, flexibility is only fun if it’s a choice, and it’s only a choice if security is also an option.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2OAxtCC