Sutherland - The War on the Young

T HE FOLLOWING WAS reported in The Times, 4 October 2017:

LIVE FRUGALLY, STUDENTS TOLD

Students who are short of money could adopt a frugal existence, Jo Johnson told the Tory conference yesterday.

The universities minister was responding at a fringe event to Martin Lewis founder of the website Money Saving Expert, who said that some students could not afford to live on their maintenance loan. These range from 7,000 to 11,000 a year. Maintenance grants were scrapped this year, meaning even the poorest students must take out loans to cover their living costs while at university.

Politics Home reported Mr Johnson saying: There may be a gap but that doesnt necessarily mean its a gap that must be filled by parental contribution. They could work as many, many students do, they can also save. What is also so important to bear in mind is that students have many different choices about the kind of lifestyle they want at university. Some students want to live very modestly and have a frugal existence, focusing on their studies.

Let them eat gruel. But how, however straitened their lifestyle, can they buy books, computers and other tools of the student trade? How, if theyre whizzing around on mopeds delivering pizza all hours of the night, will they have the time or energy to study?

The Times report concluded, grimly, that 40 per cent of the poorest students graduate with average debt of 57,000, compared with 50,000 for all students. These poorest students will, quite likely, get the poorest results. They do not have the head-start enjoyed by luckier peers. Poor students from universities which score towards the bottom of the performance league tables (lets not call them poorest) can expect poor placement after graduation. In 2015, half the graduates from London Metropolitan had found no professional work six months after leaving. Why were they encouraged to indebt themselves for life? What follows will offer an explanation.

Johnson (nicknamed, apparently, Johnson Minimus) is a member of a famous and high-performing clan (his brother Boris was getting bigger conference headlines in 2017).

As to lifestyle. When at Oxford, judged in 2017 to be the best university in the world, four members of the Bullingdon Club in the Cabinet. Mufti was permitted in No. 10.

Dickens should be living.

But perhaps we should make do with Johnsons fellow Tory Benjamin Disraelis verdict: We are two nations. Disraeli meant the rich and the poor, and foresaw violence if the gulf between them were not bridged. But there are another two nations in conflict at the moment: the young and the old.

Where, unlike his brother, he got a First; hes proved elsewhere to be a very able minister.

I PUBLISHED The War on the Old in 2017, in Bitebacks Provocations series. Theyre now books: newscast-fast. But reflective as well as provocative.

The War on the Old was well received, from the Daily Mail(s) to The Oldie, via The Guardian.

Im aware that most of those papers readers (and their writers) merit the self-deprecating label oldies. Who, still in their freshness of youth, reads tree products nowadays? As quaint as having a Swedish wood-fired computer.

Most oldies, in my experience, feel hard done by. Embattled. However, there are typically two sides in a battle, both of whom have a casus belli. In this follow-up polemic I switch sides to look, with my rheumy eye, at the intergenerational conflict as it may appear to this countrys and North Americas brighter-eyed populations. These (the UK and the US) are where I have spent most of my life. And my career has been spent in the company of the smart young adult. They are a category of human being now under attack. I sense a rumbling tremor of something earth-shaking to come.

I lived for forty years (194989) of my life in fear it could end with four minutes warning. Flash, heat, blast, radiation and it would be all over. I was employed in southern California, earthquake country, for twenty-five years (19832008) in daily expectation of the Big One the seismic event that will destroy the state and put America back fifty years. I feel, not to be apocalyptic, a somewhat similar apprehension today: a breakdown of the intergenerational civilities that make our civilisation work. Patronage on one side, deference on the other. Perhaps I should get a couple of sandwich boards and walk up and down Oxford Street or Rodeo Drive warning The End is Nigh! Ive written these two War books instead.

In the fog of war, opponents identify themselves by recognisable uniform and insignia. In the generational war I write about, no uniform is necessary. Count the wrinkles, look at the head of hair, listen for the slur. Whos their favourite pop star? Madonna and David Bowie means old; Elvis Presley and Barbra Streisand means really old. Me? I still have a soft spot for Bill Haley, the first rock star to die in an old folks home, rocking around the clock no more.

In The War on the Old, I used Sinbad and the Old Man of the Sea as an illustration. Briefly summarised (there are many written and oral variations) this is how the main narrative line goes. Young Sinbad the Sailor, sole survivor of a shipwreck, finds himself washed up in what looks like the garden of paradise. Among its lushness, he comes across a wizened old man sitting down unable to stand, apparently. Poor old chap. The old man feebly requests to be hoisted onto the young voyagers shoulders so he can pluck the fruit that hangs out of his palsied reach.

Good naturedly, Sinbad does as the old geezer asks. Big mistake. The old mans legs suddenly clamp in a vice-like grip round the young mans throat. Sinbad must now carry the fruit-guzzling oldster until one of them dies. Most likely it will be Sinbad, from exhaustion and inanition (the OMS is not a sharer of the good things in life).

What happens next is crucial. Sinbad cannily gets the old man (who likes a drop) falling-down drunk with fermented fruit juice and, once free of the vice around his neck, the youngster takes up a great stone and batters the oldsters brains out.

A happy ending.

There are two salient features in the fable: the first, clearly, is that the old use the young to get what they, the old, need or crave. The second, which merits more careful thought, is that the old are deuced cunning. Its called crabbed age for a good reason they can have a nasty nip. Not just the thighs.

The old man may be taken as every old man (and many old women, in these egalitarian times), AD 2017 and the young Sinbad as youth, AD 2017.

And where are we now as a society? Just at that point, I suggest, where the legs of the old man are beginning their throttling grip round the neck of the young man.