Young people are sick of being pushed around
There is a story retold by historian, Robert Darnton, about a series of
ritualistic murders of cats in the printers’ district of pre-revolutionary Paris
that shocked and horrified its residents. It turned out that the cats were
killed by the apprentices as revenge for the ill treatment, low pay and little
chance of career advancement at the hands of their masters and their masters’
wives.
Now, whilst it is unlikely that the modern young will descend into such
craven acts of animal cruelty en masse, the frustrations of the young in Paris
in the eighteenth century are similar to those of their twenty-first century
counterparts.
David Cameron has once again highlighted the proposal to cut housing benefits
to the under 25s, the Coalition government’s repeated protestations that the
austerity measures were designed so that the nation’s ‘children’ would not have
to pay for the mistakes of the adults in the financial crisis looks increasingly
weak. What their patronising attitudes disregard is the fact that we are already
paying for the crisis now.
One of the justifications trotted for raising tuition fees is that it should
increase competition and thus standards in UK universities. However, along with
their additional fall in spending and universities cutting corners by laying off
lectures, reducing contact hours and cutting less high demand courses, this
excuse has fallen flat on its face. Similarly, the idea that young people will
not be put off going to university fails to account for the idea that young
graduates are now expected to work for free for six months or more after
building up all that debt or in the case of workfare, simply to keep the meagre
£56.25 a week they are given in benefits seemingly in order to help Tesco keep
their wage cost down.
Now that Cameron is proposing building on SAR, the Shared Accommodation Rate,
which was introduced in 1996 and restricts childless under 35s to only claim
help with renting a room in shared accommodation, homeless charity Shelter
predicts that more young people will at risk of being made homeless. In 2011,
10,000 young people were thrown onto their streets by parents that did not want
them at home anymore. Without being able to claim housing benefit and unable to
find a job without a permanent address, these young people would be destitute.
Similarly, of those lucky enough to have loving, supportive parents with very
little money, are effectively priced out of the graduate job market being too
geographically undesirable and poor to work unpaid. Even those willing to work
unpaid full-time during the week and doing any low paid work they can at the
weekends, will find there are simply not enough hours in the day to support
themselves.
Furthermore, unlike Cameron’s millionaire, tax avoiding parents, many parents
cannot afford to have their adult children move in with them. Therefore if you
take room and board out of a young person’s dole money, there is not a lot left
to save up to break out on their own.
The government has created a Catch 22 employment situation, where you are
expected to move to find employment (in this case normally the south east) and
yet are not supposed to move out of the house. Anyone with half a brain would
see that was unworkable and unfair.
I do not believe this is a giant conspiracy against young people or even poor
people. I think that the government, and to a certain extent the establishment
in general, just do not care. The under 25s are the least likely to vote in any
election so our opinions do not matter.
Why participate when you get no return? Who would we vote for? Labour, who
got us into this mess? Conservatives, who are making it worse? Or maybe the
Liberal Democrats who sold us down the river for the keys to the kingdom? No
wonder we keep occupying things. As a result we get protests like the storming
of the Millbank centre in 2010 and the subsequent protests; young people are
sick of being pushed around, told what to do and being expected to ‘respect’
it.
While the so called ‘adults’ are busy wrecking the economy and denouncing us
as unruly mass that needs to be kept out of sight until they get a mortgage,
they stopped even pretending to listen to what we say. When the criticism for
this article comes (which inevitably it will), I will no doubt be seen as whiny.
It is true that there are many out there that are sympathetic to young people
and the gap between education and paid work that we seemed to have fallen
through. But to truly understand why we are so angry you have to understand our
frustration.
Why not vent your anger with disobedience and rebellion? The brutality of the
printing apprentices in 18
th century Paris is understandable if not
excusable in the context of the way they were treated by their masters.
Similarly smashing up the Millbank centre or swinging on a war memorial may not
be the most sensible way to get your point across but it is indicative of the
anger amongst young people today. We’re not inherently ‘feral’ as some
right-wing papers would have you believe, we’re just mighty pissed off.
We will respect our elders when they respect us
