From housing to vaccine passports, politicians act as if young people don't exist

House prices were having a mini-boom by last July, buoyed up by what felt like the windfall of a stamp duty holiday and the pent-up demand of the first lockdown. By the autumn, prices were still climbing, but not to worry, said the experts: they’ll crash again when people start to lose their jobs. With that foot yet to fall, things continue to look very rosy, if you’re a house. For everyone else, a crazy situation has only got worse.

The latest figures in the UK from December show that house prices are now 8.4 times the annual average income. The only time that figure has ever been marginally higher was just before the global financial crash in 2008. Those who have managed to hoick themselves on to the ladder think they’re the winners in a fiendish game of skill and chance. Compared with tenants, who pour their wages indefinitely down the drain of the rentier economy, mortgage-holders do seem well blessed.

Yet the scale of debt puts mortgage-holders in a state of indentured servitude which, if we could only stop blinking at our own good fortune for a second, we might object to. The ideal citizen for the age is the one who bought their house in January 1958, paid off their mortgage decades ago, and is now sitting on millions. This is why we’re all supposed to rail against boomers (though technically people in this position, now in their 80s, are part of the “silent generation” that preceded boomers), but you can bet that they’re spending all that hard-earned leisure worrying about their children and grandchildren. The world we’re accelerating into is working for landlords and for banks. Or to put that more simply, for capital alone.

Of course there are solutions to all of this – there are answers that