When the dust has settled and this mess is over, our younger generations will want a number of questions answered. They must make their voices heard to achieve this.
There are, of course, many groups that will suffer both during and after this crisis, in particular those on low incomes and ethnic minorities.
However, this is an article about our young.
After all, it is young people who bear the burden of the short-sightedness and misjudgements of prior generations.
Just consider the global financial crisis. After our financial leaders and regulators crashed the global economy in 2007, tuition fees tripled from £3000 to £9000 in order to bolster our decimated public finances. To add insult to injury, many students will have to pay what is frankly an extortionate interest rate on these loans.
COVID is, of course, somewhat different to the financial crisis. The sacrifices we are making today are indisputably necessary and righteous.
Protecting the weakest in society, sure thing. And for this we will happily forego our social lives, our final years at school and our day to day freedoms.
Yet in these differing examples, the same old indifference to young people lingers on.
So far, “disrespectful teenagers flouting rules” has been the most our esteemed journalists have had to say about COVID-19 and young people.
Not once have I heard an elected official or journalist comment on refunds for tuition fees, the problems around examinations, or the challenges faced by our nation’s young self-employed workers and entrepreneurs.
Indeed, as far as I’m aware the most compassion that has been displayed is the promise of safety nets by some universities. A small, sensible policy that students up and down the country have had to fight tooth and nail for.
However, we should be more concerned about what the world looks like, post COVID.
In the post COVID economy it is the young that will struggle most as they return to a labour market that will provide few opportunities for them.
It is also highly likely that key public services will be squeezed to compensate for our spending during the crisis. Education, community centres, the arts; no doubt it will be the services we cherish most that will be the first to be plundered.
And in this chaos, it is unlikely that our leaders will ask the most basic and important of questions: “is our international economic system fit for purpose?”.
After all, do we really need such an integrated global economy? As global trade and finance have grown in scale and ubiquity our exposure to systematic risk increases. As we saw in 2008 a shock in the US housing market morphed into a global crisis that led to the worst recession since the 30s.
Now in the grips of a pandemic, it is a small virus that so graphically lays bare the fragility of this system.
For young people this will be especially painful. Not only will the aftermath of this crisis fall disproportionately upon their shoulders; it is also the product of a system that many of them oppose.
Personally, there is much about globalisation that appeals to me. A global financial system buoyed by free capital flows & able to accommodate risk has led to a wave of innovation through VC financing; globalism has also been a powerful force for economic development throughout the world, dragging millions out of poverty.
However, up and down the country, from the young people struggling to find opportunity in the husks of once great manufacturing centres, to the environmentalists that quite rightly understand the relationship between our dying planet and a ‘made in China sticker’. Bearing this burden for a system they question will be a hard pill to swallow.
It should also be noted that while things look bleak now, they pale in comparison to a potentially far larger global catastrophe. With it's roots in the same global economic order as COVID and the financial crisis, the ominous shadow of climate change stoops over the horizon.
However, despite these grim possibilities we must muster our resolve; the future remains unwritten and it's trajectory is still dependent on what we do next.
So, to our elders, remember that in your time of need we did not let you down. We waited patiently indoors, keeping you safe.
And, to our younger readers, a call to action. As you pay a full year’s tuition for just over half a year’s teaching (not including strikes); as you struggle to find employment in the coming months; or as you watch our natural world collapse around us, remember that good things come to those that ask.
Regardless of what you believe in, be it a person, a policy or even amending a global economic system. You are owed nothing, and if you do not fight for it someone else will win.
We are often told the future is ours, it is time to claim it.
Comments