A CURSE ON GENERATION ME
They’re the darlings of Corbyn’s Labour, the easily offended, selfie-loving, workshy metrosexual millennials who think that the world owes them a living. But, says one of their contemporaries, it’s time they grew up
There is still a way for Jeremy Corbyn to win the General election. right now, any poll showing him only 20 points behind Theresa May’s Conservatives is a cause for celebration in the Labour Party.
If the pollsters are right, Labour is heading for its worst defeat since the 1930s.
Unless, that is, one last-minute change was made to the franchise. Because if the right to vote was limited to those aged 18 to 30, Jeremy Corbyn would be walking, or rather cycling, into 10 Downing Street in six weeks’ time.
If this sounds worryingly like the plot of the 1976 science fiction movie Logan’s run, in which a future dystopia sets a maximum age of 30, don’t worry, no one is proposing a new model for managing Britain’s population.
rather, the stark divide in attitudes between the young and those who have reached middle age was spotlighted this week in the results of a mega-poll conducted by YouGov. The survey of 13,000 Britons found Labour ahead of the Tories when only younger voters were taken into consideration.
Among 18 and 19-year-olds, Labour enjoys a 21-point lead, while those aged between 20 and 24 favour Mr Corbyn over Mrs May by 42 per cent to 24 per cent. If you fall into the 25-29 demographic, more than four in ten of your peer group will be voting Labour compared with less than a third who want to see the Conservatives returned after June 8.
Contrast this with older electors. Those in their fifties are the polar opposite of teenage voters, preferring the Conservatives by a 21-point margin, while Labour languishes 40 points behind Mrs May’s party among those aged 60-69. The Tories are ahead by an extraordinary 51 points for those over 70
IT should mean the incumbents have a tricky time on their hands but Team Tory is aided, as ever, by the failure of young people to turn out on polling day. What is set to be a blue landslide could be tempered somewhat if under-30s took 20 minutes to visit their polling station on June 8, but there is no evidence they will buck their apathetic trends.
And there you have a twin indictment of the millennial generation, the age group to which I unenthusiastically belong. They sympathise with the most extreme, wrongheaded and incompetent leader in Labour’s history but they can’t even be bothered to put their feelings into action by marking a cross on a piece of paper.
earlier this month, one broadcaster was ridiculed on social media for a broadside in which he execrated millennials ‘with their thin skins, wobbly chins and sense of immediate entitlement to unearned greatness’.
his remedies to toughen up the Snapchat softies were boarding school discipline and national service. Such prescriptions can carry the air of the retired headmaster flexing his obsolescent rattan, wistful for an imagined golden era of unquestioning deference, impeccable manners and bobbies on every street corner. And it’s true there was a time when people could leave their door unlocked but it was because they had nothing to steal.
Whatever the changes in morals and mores, the social, economic and technological advances of the past 50 years far outweigh the slipping in standards elsewhere.
While pining for past glory and lost innocence is a dead end, there is more than a hint of truth to the description of my generation as feckless, entitled and overly sensitive.
We millennials are known derisively as ‘snowflakes’, though I prefer the term Generation Me. Generation Me can be clearly distinguished from those who went before. We are self-obsessed and selfie-obsessed; an entire industry, telecommunications, has arisen around our compulsion to document every mundane detail of our lives, from our waking thoughts, which we announce on Twitter, to our evening meal of kale and quinoa, pushed and prodded into perfect formation before being pictured and published on Instagram for the ego-enhancing approval of strangers. #humblebrag, as we like to say.
Generation Me is mostly still living at home, mooching off parents and putting nothing aside for our retirement. We have deferred our entry into the big, bad world by four years – but not to gain a career-opening degree that will boost our financial standing.
NO, we prefer to while away our subsidised party years on media studies or gender politics or any number of courses that lead nowhere other than public sector jargon-making, academia or, worst of all, media.
Locked in eternal juvenility, unversed in the economic realities of life or the sacrifice involved in raising a family and starting a business, it is little wonder that we favour Jeremy Corbyn. his fuzzy Marxist utopia fits our worldview perfectly: From each according to attention span,
to each according to position in the hierarchy of victimhood.
Previous youth cultures wanted to end war or ban the bomb. Millennials want the right never to have to grow up and take responsibility for themselves.
Economic policy bores us; we’d rather talk about our exciting multiplicity of identities, genders and sexual preferences. Of course, it’s much better that we live in a world where people can be open about these things – but could we maybe recognise the world outside our Tinder profiles?
Contemporary identity politics is especially pernicious because of its potential for totalitarianism. It is no longer concerned with fighting discrimination in the political and economic realms.
That’s the olden days of second wave feminism and the civil rights movement, when the personal and political were indivisible but not determinative.
Where you came from mattered but not as much as where society was going through collective action.
Nowadays, the self is all that matters and it is hardly surprising that those who place themselves at the centre of the political universe increasingly want to patrol the boundaries of acceptable opinion on questions of sexuality and gender, politics and culture.
After all, if it’s all about them, any politically dissonant voices are going to sound like a personal attack.
The politics of Generation Me run wild can be seen at its most laughable, and yet utterly earnest, in the United States today. Rightwing polemicist Ann Coulter has been forced to cancel a speech at the University of California at Berkeley after the administration warned it could not guarantee her safety.
Coulter is a professional liberalbaiter and Berkeley the maternity ward of 1960s radicalism – but if anywhere could provide a platform to a controversialist, surely it is the home of the Free Speech Movement.
Today’s student protesters do not demand freedom to express their opinions but freedom from the opinions of others. They scorn America’s First Amendment and its protection of even hateful speech – and every view that offends them becomes ‘hate speech’. This is not your father’s counterculture any more.
AGENERATION has reached semi-adulthood which does not share previous generations’ assumptions about the right of the individual to speak and write freely.
Recently, the editors of the student newspaper at prestigious Wellesley College declared: ‘The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging… If people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.’
In Portland, Oregon, a community parade was this week cancelled after far-Left activists threatened violence if it went ahead. They warned organisers that hundreds would descend upon the carnival if it allowed Republicans to take part.
As the unimpeachably right-on Atlantic magazine notes: ‘So long as threats of violence succeed in causing events to get shut down by their risk-averse organisers, more threats will be made. One wonders who this faction on the Left will next label a Nazi or a fascist in order to justify their own use of fascistic tactics.’
Millennials have been taught that non-offensiveness is a virtue and freedom of speech, where it exists at all, is conditioned on the ‘privilege’ of the speaker and the likelihood that their words might ‘trigger’ unwanted thoughts or feelings. Theirs has been an education in self-knowledge, preparation for a world being built daily around us in which identity trumps economics and feelings overpower facts.
This situation can be seen across the Western world. The emerging middle – those who in ten years will make up the middle-aged, middle-income, middle-class and middle-ground of politics – are encountering bleaker economic circumstances than faced their parents and perhaps even their grandparents.
Generation Me may be the first since the dawn of popular capitalism to be left a world in a worse financial state than it was found. Millennials may prefer to talk about equality over equity and sexuality over savings because their prospects seem so dismal.
In 1991, one-third of 16 to 24year-olds and two-thirds of those aged 25 to 34 owned their own home. Today, less than 10 per cent of the former own their house and only one-third of the latter do.
Of course, the awesome impact of the global financial crisis cannot be ignored. It is no bit player in a morality play about why young people are solely to blame for their predicament. But contemporary trends have only exacerbated the problems caused by the crash.
Nowhere has this been more damaging than in the undermining of individual choice and responsibility, the alpha and omega of functioning liberal societies.
Government has mostly stopped policing our virtue and not before time. Allowing for those ‘periodical fits of morality’ observed by Lord Macaulay, few of us yearn for a return to the days when the Lord Chamberlain shielded theatregoers from scandal and the film censor’s scissors snipped away at the latest teen slasher flick.
But are such spectacles any less ridiculous than the hectoring Hollywood of government TV adverts that now scolds and cajoles us out of bad habits?
Count those calories! The theory behind this, ‘nudging’, has been hailed as a benign form of paternalism in which government employs behavioural science rather than prohibition to spur us into healthier lifestyles.
The idea is not to remove unhealthy choices but to make it easier to make healthy ones. Nudging has the added benefit of sounding intellectually robust, thus making it attractive to politicians bereft of ideas of their own. Naturally, David Cameron was all over it.
Like all interventions in the market, there is a distorting effect and in the case of nudging, choice has been the victim. The idea that individuals should be responsible for themselves and their families has given way to the comforting fiction that government is nothing more than a remote parent, doling out the cash, putting a roof over our heads and tucking us in at night.
That is why Jeremy Corbyn and his pipe-dream programme appeal to so many under-30s. He tells them that they never have to grow up and can prolong their youth indefinitely.
The hard choices of adulthood can be put off for another year, and another. Come and suckle at the bosom of state-engineered paradisiacal socialism.
This is no libertarian manifesto. Government has a role in our lives but it is that of an enabler, one that creates opportunities, supports the weak and vulnerable and then gets out of our way.
MY generation is embarrassing in its economic ignorance and political naiveté; its embrace of Jeremy Corbyn only confirms this. But instead of nannying us, instead of acting as centralplanning parents, government should be freeing us up to make our way in the world.
Don’t cover our tuition costs or place a cap upon them if we are going to use university as a boozed-up four-year exercise in extending our teenage years.
Take the politically painful but necessary decisions about the housing stock, regulation and limits on development so home ownership becomes the norm for Generation Me.
Don’t just laugh off our sobbing demands for safe spaces and jazz hands instead of clapping; tell us to grow up, get off our backsides and get a job.
Above all, recognise that political and economic immaturity are linked and by tackling one, you will vastly improve the other.
No one owes us anything. No one owes us a free university education. No one owes us protection from the mean views of people we disagree with.
But as long as government and institutions such as universities continue to pander to our narcissistic whims, we’re going to behave like overgrown brats.
It’s time we flew the nest but we could do with a shove to get us started.