Britain has betrayed its children Our political class has broken its generational contract

A manifesto for children! Big votes for eliminating all bedtimes and free pick ’n’ mix! Except actually, the ambitions of the children in the research are modest and reasonable: an end to child poverty, proper support in schools, fairness for foster children and places to play in. These are not radical flights of juvenile whimsy. They’re the kind of things that a country with any interest in its young people should be investing in anyway.

That this is not a country with a great deal of interest in its young people is hardly worth pointing out by now. Over the past week, the news cycle has been dominated by stories that are effectively about old people retaining their perks. First, there were the “WASPi women”, who claim to have been unfairly caught in the Government’s plan to equalise the state pension age, so that rather than collecting their pension at 60, women collect it at 66 alongside men.

It’s very hard to mount an argument against this in principle, given that it effectively eliminates a residual perversity in the system from the days when female wage earning was seen as an eccentricity. Yet the parliamentary ombudsman found that the DWP had failed to adequately inform the affected women, and should pay compensation of between £1,000 and £2,950 per person; campaigners had been asking for an eye-watering £10,000 each.

That strikes me as inordinately entitled — and so far, the DWP is declining to pay up — but pensioners are used to being indulged. As this story was being debated, chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirmed that the retention of the pension triple-lock would be a Tory manifesto commitment — meaning that the Government will raise publicly funded pensions annually by whichever is highest out of average wage growth, inflation or 2.5%.

It’s an astonishingly generous settlement, unmatched in any other area of public spending, and one that has proved immune to austerity economics. The reason for this is straightforward: older people get what they want because there are a lot of older people and they tend to vote. No one ever lost an election pandering to the grey vote. All noises from Labour suggest that they have no intention of rescinding it.

Meanwhile, the generation whose hopes and dreams are captured in the Children’s Commissioner’s report have the privilege of being taught in schools that are literally falling apart, while the £4 billion hole in council funding means ambitions of safe, open spaces to hang out and play are unlikely to be realised. The more complex recommendations in the report around foster care and prevention models for young offending are hopelessly remote.

These terrible facts of national life can seem too entrenched to even think about changing. And yet, as the report points out, these young people know from their experience of lockdown that governments are capable of sweeping — and effective — action. At the same time, lockdown may also have taught them that these powers are highly unlikely to be exercised in their favour.

The errors of the pandemic years must be forgivable given the number of unknowns and the huge risks that insufficient caution might have had, but it seems obvious now that closing the schools was a terrible overstep. That decision cut children off from their education. For many of those who were unhappy at school already or suffering from a chaotic or dangerous home, it denied them an academic future, let alone an escape.

In short, these children have paid a high price in order to protect older people from Covid, and are going to be asked to pay a high price again when they enter employment, at which point they will likely be working to fund a standard of living for pensioners that they will never be offered. Why won’t they be offered it? Because while the UK is in a slightly more robust place than Japan demographically, a birth rate of 1:49 means we are still facing the future with an ageing population. Eventually, economic logic dictates that old-age perks will become unsustainable.

The tragedy of all this isn’t hard to glean. A society that relies on young people should treat them well. Even if children aren’t quite as scarce and precious a resource as toddler Kuranosuke is in Ichinono, they are still too valuable to be taken for granted. Their taxes will keep the welfare state creaking along; their hands will perform the care that older people inevitably need. But the rewards they will receive for that are highly uncertain.

So, at the very least, they should be listened to now — if not exactly worshipped. For the older villagers of Ichinono, the tributes they pay to their child king are an act of hope: a promise that perhaps their village won’t die and leave them forgotten. Similarly, a more generous attitude to our own young people would show that this country has a future. The alternative option of elders hoarding their wealth and political interest would send the exact opposite message, and tell children they have nothing to look forward to but their own decline. There could be no surer way to break down the generational contract holding society together than that.

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Sarah Ditum is a columnist, critic and feature writer.

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