The young and woke will be older and wiser one day

Ever since the creation of Absolutely Fabulous’s sober, censorious Saffy back in the 1990s, we ageing ravers have liked to portray ourselves as wilder than the generations which have succeeded us. Every time I read a new survey about young people having less sex or old people catching more STDs, I get a snuggly shimmer of sleaze-superiority by proxy. Still got it! And now we’ve got the big intellectual guns on our side, in the essay UnHerd published this week by the brilliant academic Eric Kaufmann Are Young People Turning To The Right?

The variously attributed quotation has it that “If a person is not a liberal when he is 20, he has no heart; if he is not a conservative when he is 40, he has no head.” But it’s not strictly true that young people have always been rebellious; they’ve always been prone to taking a puritanical view on emotional issues such as abortion and adultery because they’re naive. Generally, before the invention of the post-war Western teenager, they went from being children to adults, following the path their parents had plotted without much questioning.

Then in the Sixties, pleasureseeking and leisure-taking, which had been the preserve of the rich, was democratised. One of the most fascinating examples of this were the teenage suburban mods working in West End offices who would spend their lunch break taking speed and dancing in the basement clubs of Soho, as recorded by Tom Wolfe in his 1968 essay The Noonday Underground. Jobs were so plentiful that if they were sacked for getting back to the office a little late they could walk straight into another position that afternoon and still have money to blow on pills and thrills at the weekend. It was predictable that people who led such hedonistic lives would be loath to grow old gracefully.

They were kids when prime minister Harold McMillan said “You’ve never had it so good” – imagine a PM saying that today! Instead they get “You poor things – don’t worry, we’ll help you”. The centrepiece of the £2billion programme in this week’s budget will see the Government subsidising six-month job placements for under-25s. The awareness that there will be a lot less to go around would explain why young people in particular might be less tolerant of the liberal establishment line on issues such as immigration.

Ever since the invention of teenage, young people have been encouraged to rebel against their parents by a crafty capitalism which was well aware that many trappings of rebellion – outrageous clothing, sexy music – could bring in a pretty penny. (We can see this again now in the risible rush by purely-for-profit brands to bend the knee to wokeness.) But this new development examined by Professor Kaufmann would indicate that the very young aren’t rebelling quite in the way we’re used to. Youngsters don’t dislike old people – everybody loves their gran – but they do tend to bridle at being lectured about life by people a bit older than them. No one likes their smug older sibling and the target of the coming generation’s ire might well be the Wokeists themselves.

The liberal establishment have behaved disgracefully to the elderly in recent years – blaming them for Brexit and counting the days till they die, stealing their free TV licences, writing them off with the pathetically limp diss “OK Boomer” – all in the hope of bagging the young.

But the thing about pandering to the youth vote is that young people who have anything about them don’t identify as young, but as what they’d like their adult lives to be like. And I’d bet they’re no keener on living in a censorious, narrow-minded cancelculture than we old folk.

Any day now the giant overgrown toddlers who spit their dummies out over everything from JK Rowling’s superior grasp of biological science to Jodie Comer’s Republican boyfriend are going to wake up and find themselves 30. Then they can no longer use youth as an excuse for being so parasitic, so intellectually lazy and so scared of any opinions which challenge their own. I’m well into my twilight years – but I’d certainly like to stick around to see that.