Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is concerned. But fear not! He has a solution. After reading all the Left-wing think pieces, in which the cure for crime is always — yes — more youth clubs, he has decided this doesn’t go nearly far enough. What we need is, in fact, youth clubs but on steroids: “a bold new model of National Service for 18-year-olds”.

Are the young enthused? As the kids say: lol. The general sentiment is outrage: the Tories locked them in their homes for two years, stunting education and proliferating psychiatric distress. They mortgaged young people’s futures to pay for a fleeting (and, in the end, largely illusory) sense of safety for their elders, leaving behind a legacy of zero growth, crippled businesses, and swingeing taxes to service stratospheric borrowing. They hectored young people about duty, while breaking out the cake and champagne for birthday parties. And now, they propose to impose yet another obligation to Pride and Duty and Cohesion on the young.

Among younger Right-leaning individuals of my acquaintance, the talk is less of voting Tory than of annihilating them. The more vengeful call for “Zero Seats”: a coordinated plan of tactical voting, with the aim of ensuring victory for whichever candidate is most likely to defeat the Tory one. Others, from anons to mainstream journalists, wonder if Sunak has chosen so rebarbative a proposal in a deliberate attempt to throw the election. But I don’t think this is quite right. Rather, it’s a logical consequence of the Tories’ electoral bind, whose nature we can discern in the location he chose to announce the policy: the Mail on Sunday.

There, he told us cheerily that National Service would become a “rite of passage”. It would, he insists, “create a shared sense of purpose among our young people and a renewed sense of pride in our country”. We might, should we be so inclined, snort at Sunak’s delusional effort to reverse engineer a sense of national belonging, by reheating a policy that was only politically palatable in the aftermath of Second World War because that sense of national belonging already existed. We might gesture at the gulf it highlights between the majority-white and broadly patriotic Middle England retirees at which this dead cat — let’s not call it a policy — is addressed, and the increasingly multi-ethnic and post-colonial British Zoomer cohort now reaching maturity.

But what would be the point? Given the current state of polling, no one seriously imagines Sunak is ever going to have to implement this. It’s a fantasy proposal, launched in a newspaper whose average reader is 60, owns their own home, and lives in the South East. It’s addressed, with bleak cynicism, at an electorate whose likelihood of voting Conservative more or less rises in a straight line by age, with the 18-24 group least likely to do so. In other words: this policy is proof positive that Sunak has simply written off younger voters, and opted to speak over their heads to their boomer elders — the Conservatives’ steadily dwindling electoral base — as though the young were simply not there.

Nor, we’ve since learned, does this even represent peak Tory gerontification. Yesterday gifted us the “Quadruple Lock”: yet another guarantee for the state pension, clawed from the stagnant wages of Britain’s shrinking corpus of working-age adults. But if the Quadruple Lock is bare-faced clientelism, National Service is a wholly fake policy whose principal objective is to distract those boomers still solipsistic enough to vote Tory from the fact that, just as before Brexit, there’s little to distinguish the Conservative Party from the rest of the uniparty.

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After the election, everything is unknown

By Richard Vinen

This uniparty, which comprises every mainstream political representative of the zombie-liberal consensus, views the British nation-state as effectively obsolete. It’s content-free. It has no culture, no people, nothing to offer other than tourist tat, a flaccid trading zone, and some services that may be obtained on a gym-membership basis by just showing up.

Our foreign policy has long been set by the United States. Our immigration policy is set internationally too, by a mix of corporate interests and international regulations. As for economic policy, the brief and lettuce-like reign of Liz Truss demonstrated (no matter how bonkers you thought her proposals) that any deviation from the City’s preferred approach results in prompt defenestration. Even environmental policy has mostly become a smoke-and-mirrors mix of Davocratic posturing and corporate subsidies, as evidenced by the simultaneous moves to reduce aviation emissions through complicated regulatory mechanisms, while also nodding through expansions to every major UK airport.

Perhaps, in time, we’ll look back on the older nation-state system and shake our heads at its insularity and instability. Meanwhile, though, the emerging system (let’s call it Our Democracy) still has some teething problems. For one thing, it affords no obvious feedback mechanism for managing popular disapproval of truly hated policies. Nor does it offer any basis for larger-scale solidarity, other than identitarian special pleading by “communities”: in practice, an engine for accelerating sectarianism, whose benefits are (to say the least) unevenly distributed.

As such, whenever these shortcomings become too obvious, Our Democracy has a tendency to fall back on invocations of solidarity in the older nation-state style. Here you’ll find the phantoms of “solidarity” or “patriotism”, usually invoked to stifle objections or to wring a few more drops of tax from what’s left of the faltering middle class. The first and starkest case in point was the international decision, after the Global Financial Crash, to use Quantitative Easing to nationalise the unsurvivable losses of “too-big-to-fail” banks that had spent the previous decade privatising the upside of their casino-finance practices. There have been many more since, of which the most recent and egregious is surely nationalising the costs of Human Quantitative Easing, in the form of crumbling infrastructure, GP appointment scarcity, escalating rents and ill-tempered public spaces, all while privatising the increasingly negligible gains in GDP growth.

Are we a nation, or are we not? We aren’t a nation, when there’s any question of preferential treatment based on shared history, heritage, culture or ancestry. We are, though, when it’s a question of coughing up to bankroll whichever set of client-group subsidies this iteration of the uniparty would like to prioritise. Perhaps you think I’m being cynical here, and perhaps I am a little. But the point is a serious one. Were Sunak’s National Service proposal a serious policy, designed to be implemented rather than simply fulminated over in the press, it would be crippled from the word go by a profound structural problem. That is: you can’t de facto abolish the nation state and then demand the yoof all do National Service.

National Service both presumes a nation and also a sense of belonging and futurity, such that “service” feels like paying it forward. But it’s being proposed by a government which recently locked young people in a cupboard for two years, then deflated the value of their degrees and increased the price, then capered about making nativist gestures while starving public services and stoking a housing crisis via mass migration. Given this, young voters might be forgiven for thinking that they have neither a nation nor much future to speak of, and react with derision to the proposed inculcation in their breasts of “renewed pride in our country”.

But what is Sunak to do? He cannot escape the electoral death trap that is the Tories’ ageing base of Middle England homeowners: the Mail readers who will nod at the prospect of making all those scruffy bus-shelter loiterers with their pronouns and weird little videos stand up straight and contribute to society through some gratifyingly coercive state intervention. And given everyone knows the Tories are going to lose, and that it’s really just a question of how badly, nuking an already written-off youth vote for a few more boomer X’s is — albeit in a short-termist way — grimly pragmatic.

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How London killed the Cockney

By Mary Harrington

So I doubt Sunak is trying to throw the election. This policy is less deliberate self-sabotage than a tragedy in slow motion: yet another sign, lest we needed one, that the Party of House Prices is circling the drain. And with each orbit of the abyss, his party grows more resigned to the death spiral. With each orbit, the young, bellicose, underground Right turns ever more bitterly away. What, after all, would be the point of trying to reform a party that doesn’t even seem to be aware of your existence, save as a fantasy bloc of doomscrolling skivers in need of improvement via Mental Elf, bans on TikTok and tobacco, and maybe a government-mandated stint wiping bottoms?

Meanwhile, beyond the event horizon of Tory annihilation, a new world beckons. It’s one in which One Nation Tories are no longer the gatekeepers of the Right. One in which the 30% of the youthful electorate who no longer believe in liberal democracy are old enough to wield real power. One in which, perhaps, we’ve stopped pretending that a now comprehensively post-national Britain is in any meaningful sense continuous with the pre-war entity of that name. And one in which we’ve resigned ourselves to a public life whose basic components are NGOcratic hectoring, trading-bloc standoffs, and multipolar post-liberal ethno-narcissism.

What politics will look like at that point is anybody’s guess. But somehow I doubt it will be as preoccupied with nostalgic clickbait.

Both conflicts are being shaped by new economic realities, principally a largely sluggish world economy that is, particularly in Western democracies, further hamstrung by a growing push for “Net Zero”. The adoption of green “de-growth” philosophy impacts both on the youth of the West, who face a consciously scaled-down quality of life, as well as a new generation in developing countries desperate for growth.

In high-income countries, the youngest generations already face fewer opportunities than their parents and grandparents. Slow growth and lack of opportunity mean they can look forward to a future characterised by a greater economic insecurity, poorer living conditions, less chance of owning a home or car, or even eating well. Such attitudes are exacerbated by the relentless hysteria poured out by the green movement and its media minions. Indeed, according to one recent survey, a majority of young people around the world see the planet as essentially doomed by climate change.

Perhaps as a result, when it comes to politics, many new voters seem comfortable rallying around polarising and extreme figures. In the 2016 primaries, Bernie Sanders amassed more votes from people under 30 than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton combined. In France, meanwhile, Le Monde described this “political de-socialisation” as having fuelled support for the likes of both the Trotskyite Jean-Luc Mélenchon and far-Rightist Marine Le Pen.

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Why we need the Generation Wars

By Jenny Bristow

But alienation, rather than radicalisation, is a more fitting description of the emerging Western generation. The biggest problem lies not in lack of jobs or even skills, but a population that is increasingly “unengaged”.

Nor is this merely confined to the West. Evidence of a “great resignation” is also emerging in East Asia. In Japan, young adults, according to David Pilling, are “pioneering a new sort of high-quality, low-energy, low-growth existence”. In China, meanwhile, the children of largely upwardly mobile parents face an increasingly fraught economic future. Xi Jinping may hope for a generation that will follow the path of devoted Stalinist Stakhonovites or Maoist Red Guards, but confronts a generation more concerned with 20% unemployment and limited options than ideological fervour. As in Japan and the West, China now sees a generation — including an increasingly underemployed surplus of educated people — who eschew their parents’ work ethic, embracing instead a desire to “lay flat” as they essentially avoid the congestion and stresses of urban life. 

Combined with rapid demographic decline in East Asia, Europe and the United States, the mass disengagement of the young will make building a stronger world economy an even greater challenge. The remarkable economic boom of the past century sparked a population explosion — 75% of the world’s population growth was born in the last century. Yet, birth rates are now dropping, especially in more developed nations. Globally, last year’s population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see declines.

And as workforces shrink, growth will suffer, as has been the case throughout modern history. In the United States, workforce growth has slowed to around a third of the level in 1970, and seems destined to fall even more. Nearly 70% of US counties have seen declines in their under-25 populations, a trend particularly marked in big coastal metropolitan regions.

China faces a similar dilemma, with its senior population expected to have more than tripled by 2050, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history. The transition will be made particularly tough by a welfare state that is underdeveloped, and whose ranks of retirees are soaring: the Chinese retirement age is 60 for men, and just 50 for women.

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Boomer Europe is dying

By Aris Roussinos

All this sets up what may be the biggest generational conflict of all — between the still-youthful developing world and the ageing high-income countries. Demographic decline and slow growth in high-income economies threaten to undermine the future of developing countries, notably in Africa. By 2050, UN projections suggest that nearly 55% of world population growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa, where fertility rates remain relatively high. However, during the following 50 years, that share is projected to account for all growth as populations plummet elsewhere. With workforces shrinking in China, East Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase by upwards of 700 million. And with this “youth bulge” across the developing world not expected to peak until later this decade, Africa could well be, as the Brookings Institution suggests, “our last hope” in the West to forestall demographic and economic decline.

Essentially, high-income countries face a choice. They will feel enormous pressure to restrain imports from places such as sub-Saharan Africa to keep their own economies running and the pension system solvent. In the US, more than 40% of boomers have no significant retirement savings and the successor generations appear even more bereft. Without an East Asia-style boom, the only option for the developing world’s youth will be more migration to the West, both legal and illegal, which is expected to average 2.2 million annually through 2050.

This would represent such a surge that Europe, in particular, would be ill-equipped to prevent, let alone assimilate. Indeed, often despite promises to the contrary, immigration, legal and illegal, is at record levels in Britain and Germany, and remains at historically high levels in France. In response, despite crushing labour shortages, many countries — including the Netherlands, France, Denmark, Norway, and Germany itself — have tightened their immigration controls. The resulting migrant populations of unemployed and underemployed people have created social unrest in Europe’s cities, much as we have seen in America.

Some, such as Fred Pearce, author of The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future, consider such demographic shifts to be “no bad thing”: “We need a breather. A stable, sagacious society that has lost its adolescent restlessness and settled into middle age sounds appealing.” Yet this view ignores the ramifications of a generational conflict that seems certain to intensify as both young people in high-income countries as well as those in the developing world face a potentially frustrating future. Like the generational conflicts both within societies and between them, the global demographic crisis is just beginning. And in the meantime, the West’s adolescent restlessness can’t simply be wished away.

The modern world’s cultural divide dates to the Sixties, a sort of second Reformation that was to start with a generational conflict between a cohort raised in sacrifice and patriotism, and one that wanted to change the world with peace and love. And shagging, obviously.

As it transpired, only the Who’s drummer Keith Moon died before reaching middle age, while lead singer Roger Daltrey would go onto become a prominent supporter of Brexit, the biggest generation-dividing issue in British political history.

It’s fitting, for an age cohort which first popularised generational warfare has gone onto become its biggest punchbags. Today the “Boomers” are the subject of intense rage among their impoverished descendants; although just as Henry Kissinger famously said that the Battle of the Sexes can never be won because there is too much fraternisation, so too with generational jihad.

Still, Britain’s twenty-somethings have just spent a year under house arrest, losing money and, even worse, one of their best quality of life years (it doesn’t get better, I’m afraid). This was ostensibly in order to protect that most beloved of baby boomers, the NHS, but in reality the generation most vulnerable to Covid and who account for the majority of NHS spending — those born before 1960. Now they are being asked to put their hands in their pocket once again to help pay for the elderly care of the luckiest generation in history.

Britain might not have leaders as old as America’s but it’s arguably more of a gerontocracy. When in 2017 Theresa May suggested that people’s assets might be needed to fund their increasingly expensive care needs, the proposal, dubbed the “dementia tax”, helped destroy her electoral prospects. Her successor Boris Johnson will not make the same mistake, and so the money to pay for care will instead come from a new, additional form of National Insurance, paid by taxpayers across all age ranges — including the 89% of young people who have no housing assets.

The Tories seemingly have no choice. While British politics has gone through a great realignment since 2016, with political loyalties now based on values rather than economic views, it’s also about home ownership, car use, rural v urban — but most of all age. This latter divide is not only unprecedented in British political history, but is far more pronounced than the age divide among our neighbours; indeed, in France and Italy the young vote more for radical Right parties than the old.

It is most of all in Britain where there has grown a great divide between the Sixties generation and their descendants. It is here where the governing party serves the interest of older voters so devotedly, without any real consideration about what happens next. But then it’s fitting for a generation which never thought about posterity.

“Baby boomer” is an Americanism, first used to denote the enormous rise in fertility that took place in that country from 1945-1960, a result of the unprecedented prosperity of post-war America, and the sexual conservatism that followed the conflict. Britain had a slightly different experience, with a relatively small baby-boom in the late 40s and a later surge that peaked in 1965, five years later than the States (the latter cohort, sometimes referred to as Britpoppers, also have outsize generational weight).

Whatever we call them, those born in the late 1940s or 50s have been blessed with a freakish level of good fortune, something that my generation could never hope to enjoy. As for the group younger than me — doomed to perpetual exclusion from the London housing market, a Black Mirror-style dystopia where everything they do remains on record, and a brutally unequal dating market that resembles the world of Steppes warlords — the idea of paying more tax to ensure that the luckiest generation in history has a smoother exit must be infuriating.

The blessed generation didn’t have it easy to start with. Around 3 in 100 children born in 1950 died before their fifth birthday, compared to about 1 in 100 when I first appeared in 1978 and around 1 in 250 today. (But for the baby-boomers’ parents, 1 in 10 didn’t make it.) Absolute poverty would have been by today’s standards dreadful, with half of all household’s lacking even a bath. Today’s lucky “Zoomers” can of course expect to have a shower in their first flat-share, even if it might be en suite in the kitchen.

Growing up in the 1950s, things like flu and pneumonia would still have been a serious threat, and I imagine that a great deal of generational attitudes towards Covid risk were informed by this relative life experience; the Asian Flu of that decade was far more dangerous to teenagers than Covid, but no restrictions were ever really considered.

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Life is one big status game

By Ed West

But if you survived those early years, you were officially part of the luckiest generation in history – especially since we tend to compare our lives with our parents, and their mums and dads had a terrible time.

Assuming you were born after May 1946 at the latest, you would have avoided losing a father in the war. You would have dodged National Service, abolished in 1960, and so unlike your American counterparts had no fear of being sent to Vietnam.

Your childhood would have coincided with the least violent years in British history, and crime would not reach its catastrophic modern levels until you were out of adolescence (and so most at risk of street violence). Muggings, a ubiquitous misery for the next generation raised in London, would have been unknown to you; indeed, this Americanism was not even popularised until you were already grown-up.

You would have been the last free-range children, able to walk a huge amount on your own, partly because there was far less fear of crime, although much of our urban fabric had already been surrendered to cars and your chance of being killed by one was high.

You might have gone on an extended hippy trail, visiting Iran, Afghanistan and a wider Islamic world that has become increasingly dangerous for subsequent generations (although eastern Europe was largely out of bounds). You would have enjoyed the great satire boom, and the decline of cultural restrictions, before the arrival of their newer — and in many ways more intolerant — replacements.

You would have come of age at the most perfect time in history to be young; although the sexual revolution in reality started a fair bit earlier than the 1960s, it certainly accelerated with the use of birth control and more permissive attitudes. This coincided with a uniquely creative period in music, led by the greatest band of all time.

Penicillin had become widely available during the Second World War, and the first cases of HIV would not be noticed until the late 1970s, so you would have enjoyed a unique period with no real fear of sexually transmitted disease. When I was growing up in the 1980s the Government was busy bombarding us with terrifying adverts featuring tombstones, warning us that if we so much as unzipped our trousers we’d end up with an incurable wasting disease. As it turned out, the risk to heterosexuals from HIV was low, but the same was not true of chlamydia, and today one in 20 young people in some parts of London have the illness.

But then, inevitably, the downsides of the sexual revolution weren’t going to affect those directly involved in it, but rather their children and grandchildren. It was a Ponzi scheme as much as the welfare system serving the baby boomers is a Ponzi scheme, with later generations being left with the bill; already Generation X and Millennials have worse health than their parents, partly due to far greater drug and alcohol use that came about following the Sixties. Similarly, the decline of marriage and the nuclear family only hit Britain in the 1980s, the actual 1960s generation largely unaffected.

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Is it the Tories who are doomed?

By Ed West

As a young baby boomer you probably didn’t go to university, but then you would have lived in cheap, central accommodation surrounded by lots of other young people with opportunities for fun, and complete independence; effectively the sort of setting universities try to recreate today, because it is otherwise unavailable.

A modern-day time traveller visiting Austin Power’s Swinging Sixties, as seen in the 2017 documentary My Generation, would have been startled by how young it felt. Not only was London youthful, but so were its desirable areas. Today the most noticeable thing about high-end London districts like Chelsea or Highgate is the ancientness; few young families can live there, let alone people in their 20s. This is, of course, relates to the real issue at the heart of the generational divide: the catastrophe of housing costs, which means even far less salubrious parts of London are unaffordable.

It was long assumed that rising house prices were a healthy sign, the tabloid obsession with the subject being a running joke. Not enough people cared that it was a bubble, and that with all bubbles it would eventually become too expensive for new players to join. Few pointed out that we should have been saving instead. No one observed that during that remarkable period of growth, late 19^th–century Britain, house prices actually declined. Victorians wouldn’t have tolerated runaway housing costs because they cared about posterity.

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Are ABBA afraid of death?

By Mary Harrington

Housing inflation is one reason that the percentage of millionaire-pensioners has risen from from 7% in 2008 to 25% in 2018. It’s why, when the baby boomers were young, the average pensioner was much, much poorer than the population while today there are more pensioners in the top fifth than bottom. They have enjoyed immense asset wealth, never to be repeated.

It is not their fault as individuals that the housing bubble coincided with the lifetime of the generation that had everything. But it’s unfortunate for those that follow, and unfortunate for the Tory Party which, being dependent on the support of homeowners, has therefore increasingly come to rely on older voters as a voting block.

I wouldn’t say those born around the millennium are the unluckiest of people – 1895 would have been a bummer. But, growing up after the financial crisis and austerity, and with house prices still increasing 10% per year, it must seem hopeless at times. It is especially frustrating for younger voters who align with the Tories on cultural or economic issues and dread a Labour government, yet see a party entirely devoted towards serving the luckiest generation.

Boomers, the group that got to enjoy the Beatles and the Stones, Hair, the Isle of Wight Festival and the hippy trail, have grown old to become synonymous with an aimless and short-term vision of conservatism, locked in a deathly embrace with the Tory Party, the last chapter in the incredible story of a truly lucky group of people.