Stolen Generation

                                    Stolen generation

In this age of austerity questions are never asked about what happens to the young people in our society. In many ways they will make up a lost generation as they fight tooth and nail for  a foothold on the ladder to success. While it is certainly true that older workers face discrimination there is always a problem with young workers entering the job market for the first time. As they have no track record there are very few employers who will give them a chance

One of the first acts of the coalition government was to  make university fees prohibitively expensive top the extent that many of them have been deterred from going to university. This has resulted in many people seeking options that do not involve going to university. These however are becoming harder to find.

Successive governments have operated on the premised that more and more people should go to university. Past generations grew up secure in the knowledge that a university place would guarantee success and in many ways the feeling has arisen during the course of the current recession that the old idea that every generation would be richer than their parents has been fatally undermined. Now many people are having to deal with a rather different reality.

In this post austerity world jobs are very few and far between and so opportunities are very limited. For most young people life is an endless round of application forms and interviews none of which seem to lead anywhere. The graduate market is fairly saturated and many graduates are finding themselves in the competition for menial jobs.

Previously these were given out to those who had no qualifications at all. Now however employers have their pick of graduates to interview and so consequently can pick and choose. The competition for first jobs is intense. Now internships which are unpaid are seen as the way. However even these are subject to the amount of influence parents have and often as of before it is not what you know but who you know that counts.

This scenario plays out increasingly among the richer segments of society. Of the less rich there is little account apart from the fact that it is often seen that they way to a good standard of living is to be involved in crime. In accordance with this the prison population is booming. This is to some extent raised by the fact that not only have young people nothing to do but the traditional means of keeping them occupied such as youth clubs have been hit hard by cuts in local authority budgets.

As a result a whole generation of young people risks becoming a stolen generation with no prospect of work and no prospects of any meaningful activities. The increasing crime rates tell their own story. While official figures are doctored to make it look as if crime is falling a lethal cocktail of cuts in police numbers and an expanding number of young people points o a different interpretation. Everybody now speaks of the increase in crime in defiance of official figures.

The problem of alienated youth which has already expressed itself in the previous year’s riots is not one that is likely to go away. Since the recession began a whole generation of people have  become disengaged from society as a whole. As the politicians debate economic policy which seems to most people to be more and more obscure the fact remains that there is now a generation that threatens to become a huge ticking time bomb at the heart of Britain. Whatever is done it is likely to be a development that will scar the country or a generation. It is also a development that has not fully run its course as whole generations have grown up never aging a proper job. In years to come the country is likely to rue this lost generation and the subsequent breakdown in the cohesion of the society as crime rates rise and the society continues to break apart.

What is to come from all of this is anybody’s guess.