Why does government hate young people?
For eye watering student debt -thanks Clegg.
For PFI in the NHS allowing public health funds to be
channelled into private bank accounts undermining the service for future
generations - thanks Blair – oh and for global instability as well.
For weak financial regulation which helped bring about
financial collapse, the repercussions of which we won’t see the end of any time
soon - thanks every administration since 1979.
And for the growth of zero hours contracts, the unceasing
attacks on the welfare state, effectual abandonment of the idea of a secure
pension plus the ever disappearing retirement age etc. - thanks Osborne.
[Watch Osborne’s latest budget tomorrow. I
absolutely guarantee there will be more pulling-up-the-ladder leaving the under
35s flailing in a land of unaffordable rents, Neverland mortgages, debt, poor
job security and a flimsier welfare system while the comfortably off stay –
comfortably off.]
In fact you’d be hard pushed to find social
legislation of any significance since Thatcher that doesn’t damage the
prospects of upcoming generation.
House ownership is at an all-time low and those lucky
enough to get a foothold are juggling student debt as well as mortgage debt. It’s
a wonder the increasingly high suicide rate is not higher. Certainly the
numbers of young homeless, homeless families and homeless ex-servicemen is a barely
hidden scandal and personal debt has gone nuclear.
‘Build more houses’ goes up the eternal cry –
usually from those with a home (or homes) of their own. Where? The easy line, we-don’t-have-enough-houses,
is only partly true. Yes, as part of the on-going UK jumble sale, social
housing has been obliterated. However, in the same way that we hear,
innovate-to-create-higher-crop-yield, as a solution to world hunger, these false
prophets neatly step over the obvious hurdle which is unfair distribution – or
GREED to put it in easy biblical terms. There is currently enough food on the
planet to feed everyone. It is imbalanced distribution, waste and corruption
that fails us. Equally with some imagination and a lot less greed we could
house many more people. Those with huge properties or more than one home get
off lightly as things like the infamous council tax favour the wealthy as do
the very low interest rates. Unfortunate, poor and disabled tenants who have
more space than the government decrees they require, are maliciously penalised
with the notorious bedroom tax or left at the mercy of Rachman landlords.
From Pharaoh and Herod to Blair and Cameron there
seems to be a non-too subtle grinding down of the following generation. Not
their own kids obviously – just everyone else’s.
Just what is it that turns those who’ve had every
advantage of a post WWII West into the mean, spiteful, youth-averse, gits who
rule? Thatcher may have been famous for taking free school milk from the mouths
of primary school children “Thatcher, Thatcher - milk snatcher” but subsequent
leaders also seem intent on obliterating the future for those below them.
It makes the government seem like the child snatcher
from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, it really is pretty shitty.
Ok – I know young people are self-obsessed and smell
and listen to awful music and think it’s time well spent posting online pictures
of what they had for breakfast but this is not fair.
Is it because some adults forget they were young?
Maybe they had disturbed childhoods and don’t see why others should be happy
(the current crop of boarding school brats?)
It’s morally wrong (yes I am banging on about morals
again – how old fashioned am I?)
If government fails year on year to tackle tax
loopholes that let their pals off paying their dues in the country they derive
so much benefit from thus degrading the economy, public services, education ,
health, infrastructure - that government is morally in debt to the ones who
will be left in the fiscal wasteland.
If the food industries are not tackled when they
fill their produce with crap for profit so we have record numbers of obese
children with diabetes, is the government not culpable?
Then the elite (and the media) non-too-subtly pick
the easy fall guys – ooh look – it’s the scary migrants. And a handful of
morons pick up that baton and run with it. (See this
week’s cartoon – click on the orange Amanda Baker top right)
I was lucky enough to grow up in Britain’s socially
responsible age when if you were bright enough you could do a degree without
incurring life obliterating debt. The health service was reliable and you
didn’t have to spend half your free time online to privatised utility companies
trying to work out which one was ripping you off the most.
This shower of bastards – and their predecessors –systematically
dismantled the post war dream. The shame is that the majority of them benefited from what was bequeathed to us by a generation stripped of their
pride by the experience of world war.
Maybe the Child Snatcher is too kind an analogy.
These leaders are more like the blind voracious monster from Pan’s Labyrinth.
*
Thanks for reading and yes – copy and pass around
the cartoon if you like.