If I had to give one piece of advice to Britons under 30 it would be this: go. Leave. Skedaddle. Get one of those work visas for New Zealand or Canada and start a new life. Fret not over the details. Those can be worked out once you’re there. Don’t make excuses, don’t defer, don’t delay. Trust me, you’ll regret it one day. Think of Britain as the creepy, cobweb-bound manor from a thousand schlocky horror movies: get out while you still can.
Aptly for a horror flick, the call is coming from inside the House. In delivering his Autumn Statement to the Commons, the Chancellor announced ‘the biggest ever increase in the state pension’. This rise, a fulfilment of the triple-lock pledge, will mean an extra £870 for every pensioner from next April. Addressing ‘the millions of pensioners who will benefit from this measure’, Jeremy Hunt said: ‘Now and always, this government are on your side.’
You could quote those nine words to anyone born after 1980 and they would be able to guess, with a 100 per cent accuracy rate, which demographic they were addressed to. The Conservative party has no principle, no policy, no purpose except for taking money from workers and using it to buy the votes of boomers.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they targeted the money at boomers on low incomes. But that would involve prioritising those most in need and that seems to be anathema to the Tories. It’s not even that they cling to the outdated notion of pensioners as the poorest age group, as some in the general populace still do. No, it’s simply that the Conservative party cannot pass a wealthy person without trying to make him even wealthier.
The Chancellor did announce an uplift to the national living wage of 92p per hour and while any increase is to be welcomed, the new £10.42 rate is still 48p less than the real living wage. The rise must be seen in the larger economic context in which millennials and Generation Z live their lives. They are the most extensively educated generations in Britain’s history and yet they are living through what the TUC calls ‘the longest and harshest pay squeeze in modern history’. Average wages fell this year by 4.5 per cent, the largest drop since 2001.
For those born in the late 1980s, career progression has either stagnated or gone into reverse. Millennial men were twice as likely to start work in lower-paid jobs than the generation before them and they are taking longer to climb the career ladder. Millennial women entered the labour market at the same occupational level as late boomers or early Gen-Xers born two decades before them. Median wealth for a millennial is 20 per cent lower in their early thirties than it was for a Gen-Xer born a decade earlier.
Robert Menzies said the home was ‘the foundation of sanity and sobriety’ and ‘the indispensable condition of continuity’ whose ‘health determines the health of society as a whole’. No such continuity for millennials. In 1989, 51 per cent of 25-to-34 year olds owned their own home. Today, the figure is 28 per cent. The social costs of delaying or denying home ownership – less marriage, deferred parenthood, cultural atomisation – are of acute concern to social conservatives. The economic costs are an issue to those who prioritise growth. Economies of precarious private renters are likely to be less innovative, more risk-averse and will struggle to attract skilled migrants. Not being especially bothered about social cohesion or economic dynamism, the Tories aren’t troubled by such matters. What should trouble them is the political cost: a generation with nothing to conserve will have no reason to vote Conservative.
The Conservative party has not stood idly by in the face of these destructive trends. It has muscled in on the action, appointing itself the parliamentary wing of Nimbyism and keeping the housing supply choked in the interests of its older, rural and semi-rural voter base. The Tories once imagined themselves the party of home ownership but today they are the party of home owners, home owners content to see others denied the same opportunity. They have allowed Britain to become a crumbling, sclerotic gerontocracy, the world’s first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council.
Younger people must not speak of these things. To do so risks accusations of rudeness or disrespect, as though objecting to damaging societal developments is a personal insult to those who have benefited from them. To point out that, at £116 billion a year, the state pension is by far the most expensive welfare benefit, and the second-largest spending commitment in the entire UK budget, is to be met with sputtering rage. To talk about how prohibitively expensive it is to buy a house is to get dazzlingly clueless counsel about avoiding takeaways and holidays abroad. Deliveroo is the reason you can’t buy a house, not the fact that they cost 9.1 times the average salary today compared to 3.5 times in 1997. Not all boomers are oblivious, of course, but it sticks in the craw to be lectured on manning up and practising frugality by the most pampered generation in history, in particular those who have pulled up the ladder behind them.
No government lasts forever, even if some feel like it, and this one will give way eventually to different faces and different rosettes. If the polls are anything to go by, an alternative government is on the cusp of power, and surely that will change things. This is more cope than hope. There are people who see a prime minister in Keir Starmer. It escapes me, but that hardly matters. There are people who see Jesus in their Shredded Wheat and who am I to tell them otherwise? But the notion that a Labour party desperate to regain then retain power will make an enemy of the most powerful voting bloc in the land is wishful. Unlike the Tories, Labour understands the plight of young Britons. It even cares about their situation. But it has neither the economic radicalism nor the political guts to do anything transformational.
That’s all well and good, and a valid argument. How to address it? Run away…
This government has gotten a lot wrong. But, the constant need to placate the elderly is screwing this country.
The young people who are decently skilled are being forced to look at other countries to be adequately compensated. This in turn creates a skills shortage filled by more immigrants. And we all know how half this country feels about them.
The hilarity of this situation is, we were taken out of the EU to apparently have more say over our country. Yet it feels like the EU were the ones stopping us from going full harakiri.
Disclaimer: I have no issues with the elderly or immigrants. I just don’t understand what the conservatives are trying to accomplish.
>If I had to give one piece of advice to Britons under 30 it would be this: go. Leave. Skedaddle
A shame the same outlet argued to strip them of that choice.
Apart from the question of how to afford any of it or how to cope with moving hundreds/thousands of miles from your usual support network, unless things get truly dire I’d rather not become part of another diaspora of the fortunate, privileged people who ran, instead of fighting to make their home worthy of the name again.
Idk why people are getting butthurt about this comment. Make your excuses to yourself, I don’t really care either way what you do. I was speaking for myself alone.
The way this country has governed itself, it has more than earned several separate brain drains. But for myself, I refuse to give up on my home just yet.
I really, really regret coming back to the UK. I was living in Japan, ffs.
Almost 29 now but will be trying to move there again by 33
Already left, as the UK has nothing left to offer young people. Good luck trying to replace all the tax from the high earners fleeing the country.
I run my own company and left the UK about 8 years ago and have no plans on coming back.
I feel like I’m exactly the sort of person the UK should be trying to keep in the country (creating jobs, mainly export sales so bringing a net inflow of money into the country), yet I felt zero benefit to stay compared to moving to lower tax countries, with a higher quality of life.
Let us die young or let us live forever… Oh no esa es letra de Alphaville
Other countries aren’t any better though. It really depends on your qualifications. The USA is the best if you work in tech, I’ve heard Australia is good for manual labour, farm work etc, Germany is good for engineering/manufacturing.
Most of these countries face similar issues in all of the big cities with cost of living, house prices and so on. This article doesn’t really provide any solutions to those problems either.
That’s the end result of everything the Spectator has been shilling for over the past ten years or more? Brilliant.
I do wonder how long until Britain cracks down on people leaving and just not paying their student loan back.
It’s another big incentive to leave. Leave for warmer climates and not pay back 300 quid a month for 15 years.
Don’t go to Australia. It will be so badly impacted by climate change that it will become a nation of refugees within a couple of decades.
DOWNVOTES from the Australians. They get so butt hurt when their little country isn’t constantly cheered as the greatest place on earth. Pity they’re all gonna drown or fry within their lifetime.
Idk why the title says young men as if it’s fine for young women.
Anyway, I’m finay getting out again next year. Just a year long contract, but it will hopefully lead to better things.
I first left the UK at 19 and returned at 25, to what felt like a complete different country. I don’t regret so much coming back as returning here got me a lot of experience in my area, but I do regret what this country is like.
I’m 31 now and have a year long contract doing something I’ve dreamed of doing for about ten years. I can’t wait. If I could I’d get a flight out there tomorrow and start work already.
Look, I love New Zealand and I’ll probably move back there some day but it’s not going to be a magical cure all. Wages are low, very low compared to here. Housing and infrastructure are also struggling to keep up with demand and food is extortionate.
Britain is no country for people who aren’t rich, more like.
The Spectator pretending to care about this issue is very cringe worthy
Got me EOI for migration to Oz lodged already. Saw everything falling down a few years back and knew I needed out. Hopefully get an invite soon…
Yeah myself and 4 nurses in my team, as well as my wife who’s a nurse, are emigrating in the next 6 months. From an NHS Trust already at 19%+ vacancy rate.
I’ve gone from economically comfortable in 2010 to my household bills having gone up over £1k a months and with childcare I now under up in debt at the end of each month.
In Australia I would start with a payrise of over 75% on my current wage.
If not there, we’d have probably gone to Canada or New Zealand.
I’d second qhat others are saying, if you can move do so. You have no idea how much easier it is elsewhere. What we’re experiencing here is not normal.
I have spoken to two pensioners separately in the past two weeks who have both said (unprompted) how easy their life is now and that money keeps getting thrown at them… they were not even prudent just worked semi decent jobs and contributed the statutory minimum for work pension…
I’m doing my PGCE and then off to Asia. Fed up with this sh*t. Ironically even on worse money I have friends in Taiwan living more comfortably than some 1000 room in LDN
And women.. ! I’ve lived abroad for 6 years and I’ve come back to the UK this year. The continous shit show that is our economy and politics has solidified for me that I am moving away and this time probably for good.
As a young man (20) who left school with no GCSEs, I can’t thank this country enough. I work very hard and am rewarded for that.
The country isn’t perfect but if half the people at university dropped out and got useful qualifications we would be a lot better qualified as a nation.
Question is, which country is any better? Every developed country seems to be neglecting housing, jobs & opportunities for native young people in favor of mass immigration.
Tragic and sad. It’s almost sounding like a third world country over there. I fear the US may not be too far behind if we don’t change.
Every generation in recent decades has ignored pensions and got away with it. Millenials are in for a nasty shock.
Talk about a misleading headline. The article is about young people in general, why focus on just men? (Apart from let me guess sexism).
27 comments
If I had to give one piece of advice to Britons under 30 it would be this: go. Leave. Skedaddle. Get one of those work visas for New Zealand or Canada and start a new life. Fret not over the details. Those can be worked out once you’re there. Don’t make excuses, don’t defer, don’t delay. Trust me, you’ll regret it one day. Think of Britain as the creepy, cobweb-bound manor from a thousand schlocky horror movies: get out while you still can.
Aptly for a horror flick, the call is coming from inside the House. In delivering his Autumn Statement to the Commons, the Chancellor announced ‘the biggest ever increase in the state pension’. This rise, a fulfilment of the triple-lock pledge, will mean an extra £870 for every pensioner from next April. Addressing ‘the millions of pensioners who will benefit from this measure’, Jeremy Hunt said: ‘Now and always, this government are on your side.’
You could quote those nine words to anyone born after 1980 and they would be able to guess, with a 100 per cent accuracy rate, which demographic they were addressed to. The Conservative party has no principle, no policy, no purpose except for taking money from workers and using it to buy the votes of boomers.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they targeted the money at boomers on low incomes. But that would involve prioritising those most in need and that seems to be anathema to the Tories. It’s not even that they cling to the outdated notion of pensioners as the poorest age group, as some in the general populace still do. No, it’s simply that the Conservative party cannot pass a wealthy person without trying to make him even wealthier.
The Chancellor did announce an uplift to the national living wage of 92p per hour and while any increase is to be welcomed, the new £10.42 rate is still 48p less than the real living wage. The rise must be seen in the larger economic context in which millennials and Generation Z live their lives. They are the most extensively educated generations in Britain’s history and yet they are living through what the TUC calls ‘the longest and harshest pay squeeze in modern history’. Average wages fell this year by 4.5 per cent, the largest drop since 2001.
For those born in the late 1980s, career progression has either stagnated or gone into reverse. Millennial men were twice as likely to start work in lower-paid jobs than the generation before them and they are taking longer to climb the career ladder. Millennial women entered the labour market at the same occupational level as late boomers or early Gen-Xers born two decades before them. Median wealth for a millennial is 20 per cent lower in their early thirties than it was for a Gen-Xer born a decade earlier.
Robert Menzies said the home was ‘the foundation of sanity and sobriety’ and ‘the indispensable condition of continuity’ whose ‘health determines the health of society as a whole’. No such continuity for millennials. In 1989, 51 per cent of 25-to-34 year olds owned their own home. Today, the figure is 28 per cent. The social costs of delaying or denying home ownership – less marriage, deferred parenthood, cultural atomisation – are of acute concern to social conservatives. The economic costs are an issue to those who prioritise growth. Economies of precarious private renters are likely to be less innovative, more risk-averse and will struggle to attract skilled migrants. Not being especially bothered about social cohesion or economic dynamism, the Tories aren’t troubled by such matters. What should trouble them is the political cost: a generation with nothing to conserve will have no reason to vote Conservative.
The Conservative party has not stood idly by in the face of these destructive trends. It has muscled in on the action, appointing itself the parliamentary wing of Nimbyism and keeping the housing supply choked in the interests of its older, rural and semi-rural voter base. The Tories once imagined themselves the party of home ownership but today they are the party of home owners, home owners content to see others denied the same opportunity. They have allowed Britain to become a crumbling, sclerotic gerontocracy, the world’s first retirement home to have a seat on the UN Security Council.
Younger people must not speak of these things. To do so risks accusations of rudeness or disrespect, as though objecting to damaging societal developments is a personal insult to those who have benefited from them. To point out that, at £116 billion a year, the state pension is by far the most expensive welfare benefit, and the second-largest spending commitment in the entire UK budget, is to be met with sputtering rage. To talk about how prohibitively expensive it is to buy a house is to get dazzlingly clueless counsel about avoiding takeaways and holidays abroad. Deliveroo is the reason you can’t buy a house, not the fact that they cost 9.1 times the average salary today compared to 3.5 times in 1997. Not all boomers are oblivious, of course, but it sticks in the craw to be lectured on manning up and practising frugality by the most pampered generation in history, in particular those who have pulled up the ladder behind them.
No government lasts forever, even if some feel like it, and this one will give way eventually to different faces and different rosettes. If the polls are anything to go by, an alternative government is on the cusp of power, and surely that will change things. This is more cope than hope. There are people who see a prime minister in Keir Starmer. It escapes me, but that hardly matters. There are people who see Jesus in their Shredded Wheat and who am I to tell them otherwise? But the notion that a Labour party desperate to regain then retain power will make an enemy of the most powerful voting bloc in the land is wishful. Unlike the Tories, Labour understands the plight of young Britons. It even cares about their situation. But it has neither the economic radicalism nor the political guts to do anything transformational.
That’s all well and good, and a valid argument. How to address it? Run away…
This government has gotten a lot wrong. But, the constant need to placate the elderly is screwing this country.
The young people who are decently skilled are being forced to look at other countries to be adequately compensated. This in turn creates a skills shortage filled by more immigrants. And we all know how half this country feels about them.
The hilarity of this situation is, we were taken out of the EU to apparently have more say over our country. Yet it feels like the EU were the ones stopping us from going full harakiri.
Disclaimer: I have no issues with the elderly or immigrants. I just don’t understand what the conservatives are trying to accomplish.
>If I had to give one piece of advice to Britons under 30 it would be this: go. Leave. Skedaddle
A shame the same outlet argued to strip them of that choice.
Apart from the question of how to afford any of it or how to cope with moving hundreds/thousands of miles from your usual support network, unless things get truly dire I’d rather not become part of another diaspora of the fortunate, privileged people who ran, instead of fighting to make their home worthy of the name again.
Idk why people are getting butthurt about this comment. Make your excuses to yourself, I don’t really care either way what you do. I was speaking for myself alone.
The way this country has governed itself, it has more than earned several separate brain drains. But for myself, I refuse to give up on my home just yet.
I really, really regret coming back to the UK. I was living in Japan, ffs.
Almost 29 now but will be trying to move there again by 33
Already left, as the UK has nothing left to offer young people. Good luck trying to replace all the tax from the high earners fleeing the country.
I run my own company and left the UK about 8 years ago and have no plans on coming back.
I feel like I’m exactly the sort of person the UK should be trying to keep in the country (creating jobs, mainly export sales so bringing a net inflow of money into the country), yet I felt zero benefit to stay compared to moving to lower tax countries, with a higher quality of life.
Let us die young or let us live forever… Oh no esa es letra de Alphaville
Other countries aren’t any better though. It really depends on your qualifications. The USA is the best if you work in tech, I’ve heard Australia is good for manual labour, farm work etc, Germany is good for engineering/manufacturing.
Most of these countries face similar issues in all of the big cities with cost of living, house prices and so on. This article doesn’t really provide any solutions to those problems either.
That’s the end result of everything the Spectator has been shilling for over the past ten years or more? Brilliant.
I do wonder how long until Britain cracks down on people leaving and just not paying their student loan back.
It’s another big incentive to leave. Leave for warmer climates and not pay back 300 quid a month for 15 years.
Don’t go to Australia. It will be so badly impacted by climate change that it will become a nation of refugees within a couple of decades.
DOWNVOTES from the Australians. They get so butt hurt when their little country isn’t constantly cheered as the greatest place on earth. Pity they’re all gonna drown or fry within their lifetime.
Idk why the title says young men as if it’s fine for young women.
Anyway, I’m finay getting out again next year. Just a year long contract, but it will hopefully lead to better things.
I first left the UK at 19 and returned at 25, to what felt like a complete different country. I don’t regret so much coming back as returning here got me a lot of experience in my area, but I do regret what this country is like.
I’m 31 now and have a year long contract doing something I’ve dreamed of doing for about ten years. I can’t wait. If I could I’d get a flight out there tomorrow and start work already.
Look, I love New Zealand and I’ll probably move back there some day but it’s not going to be a magical cure all. Wages are low, very low compared to here. Housing and infrastructure are also struggling to keep up with demand and food is extortionate.
Britain is no country for people who aren’t rich, more like.
The Spectator pretending to care about this issue is very cringe worthy
Got me EOI for migration to Oz lodged already. Saw everything falling down a few years back and knew I needed out. Hopefully get an invite soon…
Yeah myself and 4 nurses in my team, as well as my wife who’s a nurse, are emigrating in the next 6 months. From an NHS Trust already at 19%+ vacancy rate.
I’ve gone from economically comfortable in 2010 to my household bills having gone up over £1k a months and with childcare I now under up in debt at the end of each month.
In Australia I would start with a payrise of over 75% on my current wage.
If not there, we’d have probably gone to Canada or New Zealand.
I’d second qhat others are saying, if you can move do so. You have no idea how much easier it is elsewhere. What we’re experiencing here is not normal.
I have spoken to two pensioners separately in the past two weeks who have both said (unprompted) how easy their life is now and that money keeps getting thrown at them… they were not even prudent just worked semi decent jobs and contributed the statutory minimum for work pension…
I’m doing my PGCE and then off to Asia. Fed up with this sh*t. Ironically even on worse money I have friends in Taiwan living more comfortably than some 1000 room in LDN
And women.. ! I’ve lived abroad for 6 years and I’ve come back to the UK this year. The continous shit show that is our economy and politics has solidified for me that I am moving away and this time probably for good.
As a young man (20) who left school with no GCSEs, I can’t thank this country enough. I work very hard and am rewarded for that.
The country isn’t perfect but if half the people at university dropped out and got useful qualifications we would be a lot better qualified as a nation.
Question is, which country is any better? Every developed country seems to be neglecting housing, jobs & opportunities for native young people in favor of mass immigration.
Tragic and sad. It’s almost sounding like a third world country over there. I fear the US may not be too far behind if we don’t change.
Every generation in recent decades has ignored pensions and got away with it. Millenials are in for a nasty shock.
Talk about a misleading headline. The article is about young people in general, why focus on just men? (Apart from let me guess sexism).