Give £10,000 to every 25- year-old? God, I’ m fed up with those whingeing millennials!

VIRTuALLY every week, we hear from some shrill voice or other trying to make out that ‘millennials’ are the first generation in history to be worse off than their parents. No voice has been louder or more persistent on this issue than that of a body pompously called the Resolution Foundation.

Yesterday, this think- tank published a report claiming that the ‘ generational contract’ between young and old has broken down, with the middle-aged and elderly growing wealthy at young people’s expense. In other words, the entire population of under- 30s is effectively a repressed group that should be given special treatment.

In order to redress matters, the Foundation proposes that all 25year-olds be paid an ‘inheritance’ of £10,000, which could be used as a downpayment on a home, to acquire skills or to set up a business. It would be paid for — surprise, surprise — out of greater taxes on pensioners.

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy this argument. At the risk of sounding like one of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen — who boasted of being so poor, they lived 126 to a room — the idea that today’s young people are having a much harder time than their parents or grandparents is bunk.

The truth is that, in many ways, they have never been better off.

No doubt the young will howl that they can’t afford to get on the housing ladder, and it’s true house prices have risen sharply in real terms over the past couple of generations.

Moreover, graduates are now saddled with debts to pay their tuition fees of some £9,000 a year, while those of my generation lucky enough to go to university had our fees paid for us.

But whose fault is that? The then universities minister who jacked up tuition fees from around £3,000 to £9,000 a year was none other than David Willetts — who is now executive chairman of, yes, you guessed, the Resolution Foundation, which is proposing this bountiful five-figure payout.

It is astonishing hypocrisy for him to complain that today’s 25-year- olds are badly off and that the ‘generational contract’ has broken down.

If it has, it is his fault more than anyone else’s. Maybe he’s feeling guilty. (Willetts is also the man who massively increased the number of students who can go to university, with the result that a huge number now drop out and standards have been diluted, with a 40 per cent increase in the proportion of students getting a First.)

Willetts’ argument is that twentysomethings are shortchanged and disenfranchised by

the older generations. But, in so many ways, young people are far better off now than when I was a 25-year-old in 1991. A year later, in 1992, the unemployment rate peaked at more than 10 per cent. It is now 4.2 per cent (the lowest since 1975).

I’m sure there are plenty of graduates today stuck in jobs where they feel underpaid and under-appreciated, but things were no different when I was 25 — except that you were far less likely then to have a job at all.

As for graduate salaries, according to the website High Fliers, the top 100 companies pay their graduate trainees a median salary of £30,000 and one-sixth of them pay more than £40,000.

Even a trainee at cut- price grocer Aldi can earn £42,000 a year. Hardly the breadline, is it?

So many things, including food, clothes and travel, are much cheaper than they were when I was young — never mind my parents’ generation. Today, you can whizz around Europe by air for a few pounds, on a flight probably booked via the ubiquitous smartphones that make communicating so much simpler than ever before.

In fact, if you were to use one word to sum up modern life for under- 30s today, it could be ‘freedom’. Freedom to travel, to socialise, to ‘hook up’ with lovers ( using a smartphone app, naturally), to shop online and to be entertained with a thousand digital distractions.

For my generation, sometimes called Generation X, and the Baby Boomers born just after the war, life was far more regimented.

Whether you went to university or not, it’s likely that, by the age of 25, you would have settled down and married, scraped together enough to buy your first marital home and shackled yourself to a mortgage.

Those were social and economic imperatives that do not seem to trouble today’s twentysomethings. Of course, they will angrily argue that getting on the property ladder is beyond them because the market is overheated.

Prices certainly are far too high. Yet just look at the rock-bottom interest rates that are available to these so-called millennials.

THIRTY years ago, Britain was in the middle of a mad housing boom that was about to go pop, landing millions in negative equity and leading to many losing their homes.

It was not a great time to be dipping your toe in the property market for the first time.

Few of today’s 25-year-olds have any idea of the pain that sky-high mortgage rates inflicted on home-buyers.

Frankly, I was fortunate I couldn’t afford a home when I left university in 1989 — I was saved from the house price crash that came about when interest rates hit 15 per cent. (And if that kind of rate would make modern youngsters take fright, remember that the generation before, in the Seventies, had to cope with interest rates of 17 per cent).

I bought my first home — a 19th-century two-up, two-down outside Cambridge — in 1993 for £63,000.

If you think that sounds a steal, that wasn’t how it seemed then, with interest rates still at 7.75 per cent.

Yet rates have plummeted in the intervening years, so that you can now get a mortgage fixed at 1.5 per cent for two years.

At that level, the annual interest payments on that house today — even with its modern purchase price of around £250,000 — would be far lower than I had to pay three decades ago.

Admittedly, it’s harder for today’s 25- year- olds to save enough for a deposit because banks have mostly turned their backs on 95 per cent and 100 per cent mortgages.

Presumably, that’s what led David Willetts to dream up this idea of a £10,000 bung to the young. The trouble is that if you hurl these ‘ inheritances’ at 25-year- olds, as the Resolution Foundation suggests, it would achieve little other than to inflate house prices even further.

There’s no doubt that people in their 50s, 60s and 70s have done well out of life and are better off than their parents were at their age.

But that doesn’t mean their children are worse off.

Living standards have improved for all age groups, just as they have for every generation since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago.

So, please, let’s not hear any more about young people being hard done by — especially from the ex-minister who chose to triple tuition fees and load up a generation with debt.

Baron Willetts was once dubbed ‘ Two Brains’, thanks to his apparently towering intellect.

But, after this naive and divisive proposal, perhaps he should be renamed ‘No Brains’.