Youth is never wasted on the young
Don’t be young. So far, that is the driving narrative of the election campaign. If you are young, well, tough – give us your vote anyway!
It was not so long ago that there were loud noises about supporting young people who had suffered during lock-down. It was recognised that formative years were being damaged. In the normal run of things younger people would have been out in the world, discovering themselves and their place in it, exploring how relationships work, getting jobs, building up some hope for the future. Instead, they were shuttered. Horizons narrowed.
As lockdowns eased, the Local Government Association published a report calling for children and young people to “be at the heart of plans to rebuild communities”.
The Sutton Trust, a charity focused on social mobility and life chances, particularly for low and middle-income school students, found that 80% of young people said their academic progress had suffered as a result of the pandemic.
State school pupils were more than twice as likely to feel they’d fallen behind as private school counterparts. There were many similar documents from many organisations, governmental and third sector. As a nation, we have not yet fully dealt with the mental health hammering young people took. However, for a moment it seemed that a generation would see something positive come out of the dark days. Get real.
It’s time for national service. Do your duty! Government cuts have decimated numbers of the army, so, see you 18-year-old, you’re going to be in fatigues by sundown! It will be interesting to see how that message is implemented in parts of Northern Ireland.
Such was the speed and resulting fallout mess from the making-it-up-as-he-went-along Sunak GREAT PLAN that it was quickly refocused to be less about the army and more about volunteering over months of weekends. Have a part-time job you need to do and no rich parents behind you? Suck it up. Labour, while making light of it, weren’t exactly strong in their list of alternative plans for younger voters.
As for education, the only idea that seems to have moved headlines was a Tory plan to scrap ‘rip-off’ degrees. I’m not sure what rip-off means here, though the metric for judging these included poor drop-out rates and job
