
Sort of. We’re Thatcher’s kids. Crap with money but happy to watch gay boys make out on Hollyoaks. We grew up secretly watching Eurotrash as kids and masturbating to every possible flavour of porn on the Internet as teens. Many of us are highly educated, thousands of pounds in debt and pinning our future career hopes on three-month unpaid internships at Café Nero. We haven’t got enough money to pay the rent but we believe that’s our fault. We blog. About Beyonce. We don’t want to hurt you for being different, and your can marry a horse for all we care, but we don’t particularly want to help you either. Nor do we want your help. We’re going it alone. We don’t know any other way.
No wonder. If you were brought up in a room that was painted blue and only contained blue things, how could you possibly know if red was your favourite colour? Millennials may be to the right of our grandparents on economic issues, but we don’t even know that we are. We don’t know shit.
Up until very recently, I didn’t know that it was only in the 1980s that regular people started using credit cards to get themselves into thousands of pounds of debt. I didn’t know that it used to be free to go to University. I didn’t know that couples used to be able to live off one person’s income while the other partner (albeit a woman, usually) stayed at home to look after the kids. I was born into a world where all grown-ups work long hours, share houses and sofas they haven’t paid for and carry on like this is just how the world works.
It wasn’t always this way. My mate Michael likes trains and Morrissey and is a bit of a nerd and knows about boring crap like the difference between "left wing" and ‘"right wing". Before he educated me on a few things, I thought that being on the dole was something to be ashamed of and I secretly resented friends who’d been given council houses after having babies as teenagers. I never considered the possibility that maybe we just need more houses and that if the government didn’t offer people homes, I myself wouldn’t have had anywhere to live as a child because my mum was also, once, a single teenage mother. It didn’t occur to me that had I been born 40 years previously I might have grown up in a slum and contributed even less to society than I do now as a journalist.
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Ed’s policy is a lovely idea that could make a real difference if we lived in a society where those skills might actually translate into paid work, but we don’t. We live in Britain, in 2014. As no one seems to have come up with any plan to change the situation since I last raised this issue, I’ll politely point it out again: there are no jobs.
Who is going to create jobs? Show us your work schemes, Ed, not your training schemes. Thanks to Labour, more of us go to University now than ever before, so why are there currently 2.16 million unemployed people in Britain, of which 853,000 are young people? The true number is probably much higher, once you include those lucky "employed" in unpaid internships, voluntary roles and part time jobs that don’t pay shit.
So what will Labour be taking people off benefits and training them up for? To go and work in imaginary factories for imaginary pay packets? While you’re at it, Ed, why not take away people’s wheelchairs and watch them jump up and dance for a living?
Meanwhile, huge coporations continue to avoid paying billions in tax on the gazillions they make. Apparently, Ed’s plans to take benefits off yoofs will save us 65 million. I think he’d be better off focusing his efforts on finding the 6,000,000 billion trillion various huge companies owe us. OK, so a few people have been protesting about tax avoidance, but the truth is our generation aren’t nearly as angry as we should be so why expect our politicians to be any better? As one Guardian commenter witheringly put it “society is weird when the hippies have to act like emergency tax inspectors”.
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