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The Social Distance Between Us

Generation Crunch

It’s a little known fact that in the West every generation is just two glasses of cheap wine away from a nuclear argument about who has had it tougher.

The baby boomers bought all the houses but Gen X got YouTube and Facebook. Those snow-flaky millennials don’t lift a finger, apparently, but now need to pay for those gold-plated pensions of their predecessors. But none of these lazy generalizations are helpful, especially at a time when everyone, like it or not, is caught in generation crime.

Host, Ross Ashcroft, met up with Writer, Abi Wilkinson and Author, John Sutherland, to discuss the inter-generational time-bomb.

Lazy generalizations

The mainstream media commentariat love lazy generalizations because they reinforce existing partisan narratives, and it’s this that sells. What is less appreciated by the chattering classes, is nuance because it doesn’t generate headlines. The preferred caricature when describing millennials is the term, ‘snowflakes’. For the baby boomers, ‘greedy’ is the defining adjective.

But regardless of which way we look at it, it’s difficult to deny the enormous political divide that exists between the two generations. The young millennial writer, Abi Wilkinson, contends that this is best exemplified by the disparity in income and security between the two groups. By contrast, elder statesman, John Sutherland, looks at the issue in a more personalized and subjective way, claiming that the young do not notice him.

“When I’m walking along the streets in Camden on my way to Waitrose”, says Sutherland, “I’m quite often bumped into. And I know why. For the women I’m not a sexual object. And for the men I represent no threat. They don’t see me as a combatant. So you get this strange feeling of being a ghost. You feel like you’re walking through sort of a grave yard of your own past.”

There is an added component to the sense that older people are ignored. The question that arises, is can the sense of invisibility outlined by Sutherland be explained as an age-related issue, or is it indicative of a tangible shift in human behaviour over time that’s generally less friendly and mutually respectful than it was when Sutherland was a young man?

Nostalgia

When we talk about the generational crush or the inter-generational conflict, often it can be painted in nostalgic terms. Is Sutherland’s sense of invisibility really nothing more than a projection, a desire to return to a sort of golden sunny, idyllic past? Many young people would probably suspect that it is.

Wilkinson is more circumspect in her analysis:

“I don’t know when things were great. When I hear people talking about the past, it sounds like in previous generations, there was more racism, and that sexual harassment in the workplace was pretty bad”, says the writer.

Sutherland contends that the phenomena described by Wilkinson reflects the dull homogeneity of the 1940s when people were pretty much cut from the same cloth compared to the kinds of energetic multicultural society of today.

The author neither recognizes the disparagingly smug attitude many of the baby boomer generation have towards the young, nor the commercial motivations of advertisers and big business whose financial interests are best served by perpetuating the notion of a generational divide.

The reality on the ground, is that baby boomers and millennials invariably experience similar class interests. Many pensioners, for instance, live in dire poverty, and their young counterparts are laden with debts.

Camouflage

Wilkinson’s own real-life experience working as a journalist in an insecure deskilled environment, illustrates how the so-called generational divide often camouflages the class divide. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that there are key differences between the life experiences of baby boomers and millennials.

Wilkinson, for example, notes that to get their foot on the property ladder, young journalists today require multiples of income far greater than their baby boomer counterparts would have needed. Consequently, 76 per cent of those aged between 65 and 74 own their own home, while the young have been frozen out of the property market completely.

In the absence of the bank of mum and dad, the only realistic choice young people are faced with is either to spend what limited disposal income they have socializing with their friends or to over-stretch themselves, financially, by committing to a huge mortgage debt (mortgage translates as ‘death grip’).

For Wilkinson, the decision to opt for the former, is a no brainer:

“It seems unrealistic to have any kind of security. Because my work is freelance, I never know if I’m going to be as fortunate as I’m right now. I just think I’m going to live my life now and it just doesn’t seem realistic to try and save up. I think you can focus on people like me, feckless millennials, going on holidays instead of saving up. When actually a lot of young people are working and it’s just as insecure working zero hour contracts. They’re getting called in for 45 minutes and then sent home again paying more on transport”, says Wilkinson.

Precarious

The precariousness with which the millennials are invariably forced to navigate contemporary neoliberal society contrasts vividly with the experiences of the baby boomers. Not only were the latter able to more readily access secure and relatively better paid jobs and affordable housing, but they also had access to free higher education.

As Sutherland points out, this was part and parcel of what became known as the post-war settlement between capital and labour that emerged in the wake of the privations of WW2. The baby boomers also currently benefit from good private pension deals buoyed by the economic growth of the 1980s and 1990s.

But the affordability of their retirement has created an economic time-bomb for subsequent generations. Modern pensions are much more exposed to market risk than the ones the baby boomers used to pay into. Employer contributions keep dropping as more profit is extracted in shareholder dividends and spiralling executive pay.

The damage done to UK pension funds by companies maximizing shareholder payouts and corporate bonus culture has been huge. Ninety per cent of UK pension funds are in arrears to the tune of about £300 billion, which is 20 per cent of their future payout obligations.

This means that many company schemes are revising what they’re going to pay out in the future and putting millions of workers at risk of retirement poverty. The problem has been exacerbated by the inability of debt-ridden millennials, who spend a higher proportion of their income on rent.

Culture war

Add to all that the growing social care funding crisis and the notion that the millennial generation will unlikely be able to retire in their 60s, it is easy to understand that the concerns of the young are legitimate. However, it’s perhaps worth keeping in mind that these concerns are predicated on conscious political choices and that the so-called inter-generational conflict is fundamentally driven by a media-induced culture war.

How we begin to start thinking about putting this back together in a way that allows people to have decent retirements and decent jobs is an open question. For sure, the UK political establishment has no intention of reversing neoliberalism and returning to the consensus ideology of post-war years.

The reality, as Wilkinson says, is that we have a government that across the board is cruel. This government directs its policies towards a certain, mainly elderly and relatively wealthy, core Tory-voting demographic that seems to relish in this cruelty.

It’s the perpetuation of the class divide by politicians which represents the real conflict in society. The inter-generational aspect, as Wilkinson remarks, is merely a distraction to further the political establishments divide and conquer strategy.

Wilkinson is not convinced that the solution to the inequities in society are to be found at the ballot box:

“I think one of the main problems at the moment is people don’t believe politics can change our lives. I think we could elect a government that could make change. But you’ve got to persuade people it’s worth fighting for. The biggest barrier to making things better is convincing people that it’s possible. I wish I knew the answer”, says Wilkinson. .

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