The Lost Generation

Baby boomers took all the good jobs, the free education and the cheap housing and left their kids with nothing but the credit crunch and the bill for their pensions.

Our parents had free education, fat pensions, and second homes. We’ve got student debt and a property ladder with rotten rungs. Thanks very much, says Andrew Hankinson.

Last week a man in the jobcentre handed me a letter summoning me to a Back to Work session – come on! Back to work! Break’s over! A week later, I sit on a blue settee and wait to be called into a meeting room. A man with a goatee beard and ponytail sits on the blue settee opposite. He’s reading a book. To my left is another man on another blue settee, reading a newspaper. I flick through some notes. We share the daunted look of the new unemployed. I look at a poster on the wall – “You can find a job” – next to a picture of an ecstatic woman. Finally, the three of us are ushered into a room. The man who was reading the newspaper claims he attended a session last week and is immediately excused. Smart move. Two of us remain. A few minutes later a third claimant/loafer/tax thief enters. There were supposed to be 12 of us – damn buses and slow shoes. I sit with a bundle of government leaflets in my lap and one of the three staff members explains the Job Vacancy Pie. It’s impressive – a big chart showing where the jobs are. Hidden, apparently. No longer advertised. We should ask contacts instead, or come to the recruitment drives by the armed services and the new Morrisons down the road.

“We can also help with business plans,” a man in a beige suit adds, “though whether you’d be thinking of that in this climate, I don’t know.”

The claimant who arrived late opens a bottle of Coke and poses a theoretical question about what would happen if he had worked for McDonald’s and quit after three weeks because he didn’t like it. I decide to treat it all as research and start scribbling, detaching myself from the drudgery; unemployment is like being locked in a room with Tim Lovejoy and no gun. A university- educated man shouldn’t experience this. I amassed student debt in the belief that graduation would be followed by a huge bubble bath filled with sexy young jobs and beautiful, cigar-smoking status symbols. Not joblessness. I did my year working at a Newcastle-based call centre (where a degree was a requisite). I stuck it out, asking the team leader for permission to use the toilet. I did my time. I got a journalism qualification from Darlington College. I chased that job I wanted: working on Arena magazine (now defunct) in the dazzling capital. But then came redundancy. I took a job at another magazine. Redundant again – unemployment down south! Now I live with my girlfriend in a one-bedroom rental with collapsing ceilings (the landlord won’t fix a leak) and pillowcases for curtains.

The Back to Work session finishes. The goody bags are disappointing – forms to fill in and badly photocopied brochures. It’s time to get away from the jobcentre’s sour odour of bad hygiene, bureaucracy and mass failure. I head past the security guards and sidestep the terror dog tied to the railing. There’s goatee man. I say hello and ask his story. He’s 22 years old and called Alan. He lives with his parents in south London and got an A and two Bs at A-level. After that he went to Lancaster University to study English literature. This is his second stint on the dole. As we walk, I tell Alan I’ve been unemployed for 13 weeks.

It’s easy to sympathise with Alan. I’m 29, so I had some good years before my income (the dole) and assets (nothing) became a tiny fraction of my debt (£10,000 in student loans). But those arriving now are being shellacked. They already have a nickname – the lost generation, due to the 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds who are looking for work. It’s even hitting those traditionally saved by educational life rafts – one in every five graduate recruitment schemes has been scrapped and an estimated 40,000 of last year’s graduates were expected to be signing on six months after returning their mortarboards. The government’s answer is the Future Jobs Fund (a promise of 150,000 jobs for 18- to 24-year-olds who are unemployed for a year) and the Graduate Talent Pool (a website enabling firms to recruit 2008 and 2009′s graduates on minimum wage or unpaid internships).

“People are feeling incredibly angry,” Wes Streeting, president of the National Union of Students, told me. “They have debts in excess of £20,000 after being told they would get a job at the end of their degree and earn more money. Instead they’re just heavily indebted.”

The anger is due to intergenerational unfairness. Baby boomers had free education, affordable houses, fat pensions, early retirement and second homes (150,000 at the last census), but when we got to the buffet table – oh look, a couple of manhandled sandwiches. We’ve been left with education on the never-never and a property ladder with rotten rungs. Our work ethic is slurred and our salaries are stagnant. Any hope of promotion is paralysed by the comatose grey ceiling clogging every hierarchy. Overtime is unpaid and pensions are miserly. And the financial system which made our parents rich has left us choosing between crap job or no job. It’s like we’ve been handed the keys to the family castle only to discover the family sold it to Starbucks. And we’re going to have to work there.

The most vociferous complaint came from 23-year-old George Lewkowicz after the CBI proposed raising tuition fees. His furious letter to the Guardian last September roared that his generation has been “shafted”. He attacked unaffordable housing and unemployment, and suggested that those who received their university education for free – like the CBI’s Richard Lambert – forgo their “patio heaters” and pay a university windfall tax, applying interest since they graduated. He appeared on Jeremy Vine’s Radio 2 show twice and was written about in newspaper columns. The letter was posted on dozens of blogs and forums. “You’ve made this mess,” he concluded, “so you can pay to clear it up.”

In Newcastle we call that a proper radge. I meet him for a pint, and he’s still angry and stands by his letter. He says his friends are equally riled and he’s considering formalising his campaign: the credit-crunch generation’s Robin Hood. Asking around friends, it’s not hard to find him a gang of angry followers: Olivia, 23, philosophy graduate, currently studying a business skills course – “I’m furious at paying another £4,000 on top of university fees merely in the hope of getting a job”; Catherine, 27, psychologist – “I got a first-class degree and ended up serving frothy soya milk to posh mums”; Ali, 24, anthropology and sociology – “I got my degree but everywhere needed more: more experience, more qualifications. So now I teach English in Japan”; Will, 25, unemployed –”A degree from a good university counts for nothing, as universities are flooded with people who shouldn’t be there”; Hollie, 24, fashion graduate – “I lost my job and live in a crummy house share with my landlord’s Thai bride. Yes, I’m miffed.”

I widen my hunt and find internet forums and blogs venting intergenerational bitterness. And OK, the internet is just a massive two fingers from everyone to everyone, but it indicates which way the mad herd is stampeding: “baby boomers reveal themselves to be simply the most spoilt generation in the history of the entire planet”, “a parasitic generation”, “thanks for looking the other way”, “it’s a generational mugging”. Even playwright David Hare noted it in The Power of Yeswhen a 24-year-old banker reproaches the baby boomers with: “You’ve taken everything and left us with nothing.”

But before we work ourselves into a mob, maybe I should double-check. Take George Lewkowicz. It turns out he’s doing OK: private education, a job in the City, parents paid for his university costs. And there’s me: got a 2:2, refusing to change industry despite publishing hitting the iceberg years ago. And take Alan. I thought he was the perfect specimen – student debt, lives at home, unemployed – but he wouldn’t stop talking and he spoiled it. He told me he quit university after a year and went to Australia because he “wasn’t inspired by” his studies. He got a job at a solicitor’s office but couldn’t get his “head around Microsoft Office” (despite a grammar school education). He doesn’t have “the right sort of mind” to fix electronics like his dad. And he was a roadie, but got fired. It seems as if Alan has had a few chances, and perhaps he’s just not that keen on work (the boring kind that our parents did). And it’s this fundamental reassessment of what is required to make money (ie, that boring work) that we have to face up to. I ask Alan what he wants to be.

“A poet,” he replies.

Our generation: inculcated with dreams, hampered by the economy, scuppered by our own ineffectiveness. And then there’s our spending. We do spend. I’m told that in the past, people would save for years to buy a house, then live with no carpets and save again. Now we splurge on the Ikea elves who fly around on a giant credit card, furnishing our homes in time for house-warming parties. Student loans = textbooks? Incorrect. A duck-feather jacket was my folly. Mobile phones and iPods, DVDs and Uggs, ISPs and olive bars. And then there’s the holiday epidemic. Above my desk is a photograph of a baseballer (£12 for a large print and £55 to frame), which I took in Central Park (£1,500 for flights, hotels and spending money). I expect a large chunk of mortgage deposits is circulating the bars of New York and the hash dens of Morocco. But we learned to spend in childhood and it’s become instinctual, like disliking Ashley Cole. And the instinct has been amplified through the generations – Grandma shopped around for the cheapest meat, Mum went to Marks & Spencer, I ask the waiter for medium-rare. Unfortunately, we’re struggling to fund the habit.

Which is why the woman at the jobcentre sent me on a compulsory seminar for “unemployed professionals” (code for: been to university, probably owns a suit). The sessions are occurring all over the country as part of the government’s effort to get people like me working again. This one is near London’s Liverpool Street and is being run by a recruitment firm called GR Law. I’m expecting the usual stuff about formatting CVs and not swearing too much during the interview, but John, the presenter… Well, I’m shocked. The jobs market has changed vastly since the recession hit. I pull a face when John mentions Twitter, but he says 346,683 jobs were uploaded on Twitter in the past 30 days worldwide. That’s compared with no jobs on Twitter nine months ago. And the Job Vacancy Pie was right – around 70% of jobs are not advertised. Facebook is a necessity. LinkedIn is a necessity. And we shouldn’t wait until the application deadline, because recruiters stop opening emails after the initial 20 CVs.

“You’ve never looked for a job in a market like this,” says John. “Even if there’s nothing wrong with your CV, you’re up against 50 others who have nothing wrong with theirs either.” I sit slack-jawed, like John’s just played the Zapruder tape and pointed out a guy on the sidewalk with a smoking gun and a big clown hat. The seven others in the seminar are a lawyer, a digital media graduate, a young offenders worker, a fashion graduate, a property researcher, a former British Gas call centre manager and a criminology graduate. They’re smart and confident. Rajiv Nawbatt is one of them. He’s a recruiter’s dream: studied law at Sheffield University (2:1), worked in the City for a year, did a postgraduate legal practice course, worked as a paralegal for a year and completed his two-year training contract with a “silver circle” law firm. But they didn’t hire him permanently, and now he’s 27 and has been claiming the dole for two months. I pour myself a cup of tea (life support, mini-break and Christmas bonus for the unemployed). The criminology graduate is Christine Babicz, 22, from Essex. After graduating, she worked at the National Centre for Social Research, but temporary staff were let go and now she’s doing a research internship at the Magistrates’ Association. She’s been on the dole for a month and hates it. The jobcentre says she has to give up the internship. Her student debt is £21,000 and she’s getting desperate. Unfortunately there aren’t enough jobs to go round.

Economist David Blanchflower, a labour expert and former member of the Monetary Policy Committee (and sage of the recession), is equally worried about our prospects. He explains what needs to be done: raise the education leaving age to 18, more teachers, no National Insurance for under-25s, and guaranteed work for the long-term unemployed. Most worrying for graduates is his final bit of advice. “Young people have not seen anything like this before,” he says. “Their expectations were different, but they will have to adapt to this new world. If they have to lower their expectations, that’s what they have to do. If that means less money, that’s what you do. If that means delivering pizza, that’s what you do.”

Delivering pizza? I ask Rajiv if he’d deliver pizza, considering the time and money he and his family have spent. He says he might, but not at the moment. Christine says she would if she could drive. But even if she learns to ride a scooter, is that work even available? I phone my local pizza takeaway and ask – “No, no jobs, sorry Sir.” I’m not disappointed, because there are acceptable down-jobs (labouring on a building site, helping an old man strip narrow boats, acting) and there’s delivering pizza. I would have to work nights. My boss would be… not a graduate. I’d have to chat with other deliverers – is that the job title? – who stack deodorants and empty beer cans on their bookshelves rather than books. Who probably don’t even have bookshelves. Who probably think a digestif is a biscuit. And then there’s my friends: they’d show interest initially, but after four weeks, three months… What if they ordered pizza? And what if I were unable to claw my way back out of the social quicksand?

No. I’m part of the digital generation. I’m an email and adjustable-seat kind of worker. Maybe I can invent an iPhone app to deliver pizzas. Perhaps an entire series of iPhone apps. One of them could scoop cigarette ends out of urinals, another could be polite to customers. What’s wrong with me? Why am I not like Dad? Dad would deliver pizzas. I remember when his building business folded in the 1990s. He didn’t sign on. He knew he was going to end up in a flat above a shop, but he stacked Thomson directories in the front garden and asked for help delivering them. I said no, because friends might see us schlepping up those long driveways. Life was easier when he had a Mercedes and Mum had a Porsche. Instead, he was riding a bicycle to the paper shop; not to buy a paper, to work there – the shop where I had a round! He was furious when I said no, but he delivered the directories himself, worked in the paper shop, bought a van, started another building business, paid for my university accommodation, had a stroke, got walking again, went back to work, bought a nice house and built a large pond in his massive garden. And I will never forgive myself for not helping with those directories. Nice work, son.

“You’re a Geordie. They’ve got a strong work ethic in that part of the country.”

That’s Lord Tebbit, and he’s talking about people like my dad, rather than me, but I steal the compliment. For those who weren’t born in the olden days, Tebbit was employment secretary from 1981-83, then trade and industry secretary, before becoming Conservative party chairman until 1987. He was also Thatcherism’s boogie man (not the dancing kind).

“I don’t think you could make the case that there’s been some generational change in the youngsters themselves,” he says. “Given good leadership, good advice and good education they could be every bit as good as their fathers and grandfathers. But an awful lot have been misled into acquiring a pile of debt and finishing with a qualification which is not of very much value, at universities which don’t have a great deal of credibility with employers.”

I ask who misled them.

“The schools. False expectations were raised. I also think there’s an element of young Brits wanting the job they want and not being willing to take a job. They haven’t got from their schools the idea that the best way to get to the top of the ladder is to get on one of the lower rungs and start climbing, as opposed to expecting someone to lift you up and pop you halfway up the ladder.

“A bit of personal experience here. We have carers for my wife and we advertise on an internet site called Gumtree. It’s quite an instructive thing to do, to find out who replies to an advert for that sort of job. It’s not badly paid – £350 a week, and they get good live-in accommodation. Far more people from central Europe are applying for these sorts of jobs than Brits, and I wonder where the equivalent Brits are – the 20- to 25-year-olds who say they can’t get work.”

I phoned Tebbit because in 1981 he famously suggested rioters should get on their bikes and find a job. We don’t have proper riots any more, but I thought he might have some advice for today’s equivalent – the angry internet commentators and grumbling graduates.

“It was much easier to set up in self-employment in the 80s,” he says. “The regulatory environment was much easier. I find it surprising how many people come up to me and say: ‘I took your advice to get on my bike’ – advice which I never actually gave, but that’s the way it came out – ‘and I made a great success of it.’ I think perhaps that’s lacking from the ambience now. There’s a lack of belief in one’s ability to change one’s own circumstances.”

I have a coffee with Martin Bright, ex-home affairs editor of the Observerand currently political editor of the Jewish Chronicle. He’s been campaigning for the revival of the Enterprise Allowance Scheme (the 1980s’ most lamented policy) since the recession started, having benefited from it during two years of continual unemployment, despite a 2:1 from Cambridge.

“I found being unemployed and not meaningfully employed really demoralising,” he says. “It knocks your confidence. What stopped me from being totally demoralised was the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which I went on twice. The first time was as a printer. We did an advert for a taxi firm and that was it. Failing was fantastic experience, though. Then I was a self-employed journalist. The scheme gave me the freedom not to have to sign on every week, and to call myself a journalist.”

Or a dance instructor, builder, pizza chef or a poet. The rules were: if you were unemployed for 13 weeks (later eight) and had £1,000 capital, you could stop signing on, start a business and for a year you’d receive a slightly higher allowance than the dole. Hundreds of thousands of businesses were created, including Creation Records (which signed Oasis) and the Superdry fashion label, and everyone could be their own boss – “That’s the third shoulder pad I’ve sold today; might knock off early and catch Crocodile Dundee at the Odeon.”

Bright wants to make sure (through his creative industry coalition, New Deal of the Mind) that the Future Jobs Fund isn’t simply about cheap labour. He cites Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was formed during America’s Great Depression, when writers wrote public pamphlets and builders built public buildings, rather than everyone immediately queuing for a shovel and pretending they never listen to Radio 4. He suggests today’s unemployed graduates could be hired to collate Britain’s oral history or work on similar projects. I ask about delivering pizzas.

“I think that’s a defeatist attitude,” he says. “It’s precisely the wrong message. People should raise their expectations. My fear is, if there are fewer jobs across the board and people want graduates to do the shittier jobs, those who would have done those jobs are going to do even worse ones. And those below them will spend even longer on the dole. That’s a recipe for social breakdown.”

After coffee I sign on. My appointments have become weekly; the assessors are stroking the “any job” trigger. There are more claimants bearing iPhones than there were three months ago. Back then, everybody looked like the boy sitting next to me, a flat look on his face and dirty clothes – in 40 years’ time I’ll realise I would have gone double, treble, quadruple on my student loan not to be him. I ask a member of staff about a self-employment credit Bright told me about. Apparently you need six months of unemployment and it’s only £50 per week (£14 less than the dole) over 16 weeks – “Even then it’s far from straightforward,” says the woman. Not great. Unfortunately the Department for Work and Pensions says there are no plans to expand it.

In fact there are no plans to do anything ambitious, despite the hardship ahead (Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, prophesied it will be 2011 before the economy is full-blooded again). I ask Dad how he coped with recession. He left school at 14, started as an office boy (“fetching the senior partner’s tobacco”), learned his trade and created a company from nothing. Then suddenly his business was liquidated in 1993 and he was working in a paper shop and delivering Thomson directories.

“Absolutely. Anything to get cash,” he says. “Any number of smaller jobs – put them together and make a decent living. Then I started again, just me on the tools with a van.”

I ask him why younger people think it’s harder these days. “Aspirations are greater. You lads go to university these days and come out full of hope, but you end up full of debt and the job market crashes. It’s hard. You’ve tasted redundancy twice and you’re only 29. It doesn’t bode well for the way this country’s performing. You’ve got to keep that entrepreneurial spirit going.”

But I’m struggling. My industry is collapsing and jobs are scarce – I’ve applied for dozens, with no interviews. Instead I’ve been focusing on hundreds of pitches for freelance work, grafting day and night. So far I’ve had £2,000 of commissions. That’s in four months. And an email has already arrived cancelling £500 of that, with no compensation, but a note asking if I have any celebrity contacts they could use. Also, a £600 portion has been cut to £200, once again with no compensation. And a big chunk of what is left has been pushed back two months. Suddenly no money for rent. And I start crying before breakfast. Never done that before. Can’t sleep either. I rip a chunk of hair out of my head because I’m so angry and helpless. And each morning before my girlfriend goes to work she sincerely asks me not to kill myself. I won’t, but I consider going to one of the commissioning editors’ offices to punch (throttle, gouge, thump so hard, stamp on, scream at) him. I don’t though. I’m too worried he might tell acquaintances and cost me further work. I’ve abandoned my dignity.

Someone takes me for a drink and asks how long I’ll give it before trying something else. I don’t know how to answer. I’ve put in years on the bottom rung. I never got off the bottom rung. I started out doing captions at a property magazine, and did horrible shifts for a pittance before I got myself on the bottom rung at big magazines and earned praise. I sat with a literary agent who was taking my book to publishers. Now he doesn’t even answer my phone calls, and nor does anyone else. I’m tortured by the drip-drip of unanswered emails. The industry doesn’t want me. I should do something else, but even David Blanchflower, a labour specialist, says nobody knows what people should train in yet – the future is unknown. And how do you afford retraining anyway? But more than that, I fought hard to get here. Really hard. I’m not from this kind of background. Why should I abandon it all to those with posh parents, posh educations and posh voices? I earned it. So when people ask how long I’ll give it, I tell them I’ll stop when I’m dead.

And OK, I realise refusing to switch industry is my fault, not the older generation’s. But me being unemployed is their fault. It’s the fault of rotten managers who coasted in a cushy economy, relying on the nation’s growth and rising house prices to make them rich rather than learning how to make better products. They made us casualties of balance-sheet adjustment while keeping fat pensions to themselves. They sold every small company to a bigger one for a few bits of silver, leaving it to be milked dry by shareholders. Where’s the moral integrity? And regarding university, it was the older generation who opened up the financial markets, which meant we had to compete against globalised labour. Now it’s even more of a necessity – what else do you do if even call centres require university education? All of which makes it hard not to be bitter.

No doubt the older generation will have a good time with their free bus passes and villas in Spain. They’ll enjoy the pensions and property. Shame about the smashed unions that might have got us decent wages and pensions. Shame about houses only being affordable to trust-funders. Shame about the abandonment of industry and its replacement with… coffee? Shoes? Credit? We’re just cheap labour, here to fund a bit more wealth. We know that now. And don’t worry, we’ll pay off the debt.

Have a nice life.?