Songs of Innocence (34 page)

Put in those terms, it seemed obvious why so many had plumped for the second option; why so many were, to put it bluntly, choosing not to confront their future, opting instead for a series of
coffee-shop jobs – the life of the perpetual backpacker.

‘I can guarantee our Depression-era ancestors, living in the cardboard boxes of their Hoovervilles, thought little past the evening’s cabbage soup,’ Moss wrote. ‘We live
a blind
carpe diem
that avoids eye contact with tomorrow but with the future so precarious, and with no real choice in the matter, successes and failures are measured by the day.’

Across the Western world – certainly in Britain – young people have been drawing much the same conclusion – although perhaps most of them haven’t articulated it with
quite the same pristine clarity. This generation is set apart from those who suffered in the recessions of the 1980s, or even of the 1930s, by a major factor: the loss of hope.

This is the generation in which the great twentieth century social project came to an end; the generation for whom, for the first time in well over a century, there is little hope of being
better off than the last; it is the generation for whom the likelihood of being better educated, more fruitfully employed, better housed and better provided for in old age than one’s parents
came to a grinding halt. A child born in 2000 will be more or less as likely as his or her parents to go to university, but much more likely to come out with an enormous debt caused by the payment
of higher fees.
⁷
He or she will have a much-reduced chance of a graduate job, and will struggle
to get on to the housing
ladder before starting a family. While the next generation will live longer than the last, its chances of having an adequate pension to live on will be much reduced.

However, a historian might say it isn’t the lack of opportunity that ails today’s youth – in comparison with their forebears of a century earlier, they have ample opportunity
– even in the depth of the worst recession for a generation. The real problem is the lack of optimism; the sense of having to work ever-harder yet constantly sliding backwards and that no
matter how hard they try, it won’t be enough to make them better off than their parents were. It’s fundamentally, grindingly alienating and, slowly but surely, it’s sucking the
motivation out of the young. In a media age success – in the form of money, fame, top-brand stuff – is always near at hand, but it’s often just out of reach.

‘iPhones! Xboxes! Everything! You can get whatever you want!’
⁸
read one of the BlackBerry messages directing the rioters to
trouble spots in London in the summer of 2011. When the young of Britain’s cities went to war, it wasn’t the police they were fighting, or the state. Not really; not in any coherent
way. They were fighting the Battle of the Bored; the battle of the generation that has lost its reason to defer gratification. For the youth of the eighties there was the hope – borne of
generations’ worth of positive change – that if you stayed on the right road, you’d get there in the end. For this lot, there isn’t much to lose.

In Salford, the local paper suggested the atmosphere during those outbursts was more like the television programme
Shameless
than Spike Lee’s
Do The Right Thing
: ‘This
was more of a party than an angry riot, as youngsters handed old people packs of cigs, and tins of Carlsberg freshly liberated from LIDL... All that was missing was the DJ. This was a very Salford
riot.’
⁹
Of the Tottenham riots a young resident said succinctly: ‘It was summer, people had nothing to do.’
¹⁰

Conditions in twenty-first century Britain are still, in absolute terms, fairly good. Indeed, the early twenty-first century might easily be portrayed as a golden age for
the youth of the Western world. Whereas a child born in 1910 could expect to live to be fifty, a child born in 2010 will likely reach the age of eighty. Of every thousand born in the UK in 2010,
just five will die before their fifth birthdays; of those born a hundred years earlier, 140 will do so. Before World War Two, about three in every hundred children could expect to go to university;
by 2010, about half. A child born in 2010 is actually less likely to be in a lone-parent household than he or she would have been in Victorian times – only now family break-up is usually
caused by divorce rather than death.

When it comes to employment, however, the situation of the young today is far worse than it was even in the 1930s. Adult unemployment in the thirties stood at about three million, or around
fourteen per cent.
¹¹
But youth unemployment was much lower, at around five per cent. In 2012, adult unemployment stands at a little more than
eight per cent; youth unemployment at a massive twenty-two per cent.

Perhaps the 2011 riots were born not of poverty, nor of failure, nor even really of anger, but of hopeless aspiration. Of the daily frustration of being able to see a good, prosperous life
– on the streets, in shop windows and on the endless stream of girl- or boy-next-door superstar television shows – but of not being able to reach it. Of the feeling that there’s
nothing doing, that things, when compared to the situation of the preceding generation, can only get worse. And of the perception that if what ails you is the lack of the best clothes, the newest
electronic and electrical goods, then you might as well consider a strategy of grab and run, because you haven’t got that much to lose. ‘This country is quite cold – greed,
advertisement, money, adverts on TV, greed, greed, greed. Like the iPhone advert: “If you haven’t got it, you haven’t got IT’”, a Peckham youngster told researchers
after the riots.
¹²
Another described the pervasive sense of excitement: ‘It was like a movie.’

Most children still live lives that are safe and emotionally secure, of course. And most still feel hopeful, most of the time, about the future. Take Florence Bishop,
aged seven and living in the south of England with two professional parents. She travelled to her private school each morning after a hearty breakfast; she came home each evening to homework and
piano practice and expected, quite rightly, that all would be well for her.

Take Stanley Kasumba, aged seventeen and from North London. A little uncertain, perhaps, about the future, but still optimistic. Proud of where he came from. Still hoping his education and maybe
a good degree would see him through.
¹³

Take the nineteen year-old girl from Tottenham who was interviewed recently by the fashion page of a national newspaper, showing off the high heels and fabulous head tie she wore to church. She
was studying health and social care at college, and she worked hard, she said: ‘Plan A is to become a doctor. If that doesn’t happen, I’d like to be a nurse. If that doesn’t
happen, I’ll be a footballer.’ What would become of her, when reality slowly dawned? Disillusionment, a sense of failure?
¹⁴

Sometimes those hopes sound just a little unrealistic. Desperate, even.

There is a grim truth underlying all this youthful optimism: the education system has been forced, in the last forty years, to pick up where the economic system left off. In the early 1960s
youth unemployment in Britain stood at around three per cent. Most young people didn’t even aspire to a good degree, because they knew they had little chance of it. In any case, their mothers
would get them a place at the clothing factory, or their fathers at an engineering works or on the docks. Not any more.

Another convenient fiction has crept in to accompany the one perpetrated by the parents, but this time it’s the educationists doing it. If the young don’t achieve in the education
system these days,
they rarely achieve at all. So the professionals in that system find it hard to step on their students’ dreams. With good reason, of course:
motivation comes with self-belief, with confidence, and the belief that you’re going nowhere is quite likely to lead to disaster: ‘We were shocked by the number of young people we spoke
to who had no hopes or dreams for their future,’ the government’s riot commission remarked in its interim report.
¹⁵
It’s
imperative that the young are encouraged to believe, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that they can win by sticking to the approved educational route. Their teachers and
their advisers often conveniently fail to tell them the truth. Either way, the young seem to have been given the idea that all things are possible, just as the tide has turned; just as that great
aspirational post-war project for intergenerational social mobility has ground painfully to a halt.

We live in an age where the messages from the media are all about living the dream. We’re told we can all do whatever we want, and that we should. But for many, that can only lead to
dashed hopes, alienation and a grinding boredom that – for some – can only be alleviated by thrill-seeking and risk-taking.

If the twentieth century was the time when children were given a sense of self, a sense of entitlement and opportunity, then surely the twenty-first must be one of retrenchment. Yet it is hard
to imagine that the future for today’s young people will be in effect a return to the black-and-white world of the 1950s. The genies of binge drinking, under-age sex and illegal drug will not
go meekly back into their bottles, and nor will the expectation of a comfortable life in which consumer goods are cheap. But likewise it is hard to imagine the young retaining the freedoms they
have gained and the spending power they were granted in the post-war years.

Recessions don’t last for ever, of course. Economically speaking, there will be better times ahead. But the problems the young face go deeper: even during the boom years of the 1990s,
youth
unemployment remained stubbornly high – not least because the industrial labour market which used to mop them up in their thousands is gone forever. The truth is
that although that the adult world has spent half a century telling the young about their ‘rights,’ telling them that if they believe in themselves then everything will come good; the
young know better. They know their place in the western world is an increasingly tenuous one.

Ask today’s parents what their children are for, and they’ll talk – as they did to those Canadian researchers – about love and emotional investment. But love isn’t
enough, and the young of today know that. When we talk about self-worth, surely what we’re really talking about is economic worth, a sense of assurance that we are on solid ground in
financial terms. Everything else, by and large, stands or falls on that foundation. So when the adult world frets over its children’s diets, the discipline in their schools, the clothes they
wear and the computer games they play, it protests too much. All the hype, the false expectations and the spin, are about disguising an unpalatable and immutable truth. The one thing we really need
to give the young is a clear economic path through life; a path on which they’d be able to give something back to their parents’ generation, to make all the hard work and the expense
worthwhile. And we’ve failed. Parents know today’s children –
their
children – are facing an uncertain future. And – whisper it – deep down, they know
they’d be better off without them.

Introduction

1
. Alice Foley,
A Bolton Childhood
, p.23, Manchester University Extra- Mural Department and the North Western District of the
WEA, Manchester 1973.

2
.
Daily Mail
, 17 February 1993.

3
. http://www.portsmouthhigh.co.uk/­general/junior-introduction. Accessed 23 January 2012.

4
. Portsmouth High Junior School Prospectus: http:­/­/­www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk­/­content­/­all_you_need_to_know­/­commissioner. Accessed
23 January 2012.

Chapter 1: Victoria’s Children

1
. How One Girl’s Plight Started the Child-Protection Movement. American Humane Association:
http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/­who-we-are/history/mary-ellen-wilson.html. Accessed 5 October 2010.

2
. American Humane Association, op. cit. How One Girl’s Plight Started the Child-Protection Movement.

3
. NSPCC history, http://www.nspcc.org.uk/what-we-do/­about-thenspcc/history-of-NSPCC/­history-of-the-nspcc_wda72240.html. Accessed 5
October 2010.

4
.
The Times
10 September 1896.

5
. Jane Jordan,
Josephine Butler
, p.226, John Murray, London, 2001.

6
. Louise A. Jackson, ‘Family, community and the regulation of sexual abuse: London 1870–1914’, in A. Fletcher and S.
Hussey (eds),
Childhood in Question. Children, Parents and the State
, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999.

7
. Alice Foley,
A Bolton Childhood
.

8
. Ibid, p.17.

9
. http://www.manfamily.org/PDFs/­M%20L%20Man%20Mans%20of%20Kent%20DiaryA.pdf. Accessed 6 October 2010.

10
. Andrew Davies,
The Gangs of Manchester: The Story of the Scuttlers – Britain’s First Youth Cult,
Milo Books,
Preston, 2008.

11
.
Hansard
, Nov. 9, 1888, column 830, volume 330. http:hansard.millbanksystems.com/­commons/1888/nov/09/#column_830. Accessed 6
October 2010.

12
. 29 October 1900.

13
.
Hansard
, June 19, 1882, Column 1575, volume 270 http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/­commons/1882/jun/19/#column_1575. Accessed
6 October 2010.

14
. B. S. Rowntree,
Poverty: A Study of Town Life
, p.314, Macmillan, London, 1901. Reprinted 2000 by the Policy Press,
Bristol.

15
. John F. Shaw,
Froggy’s Little Brother
, by ‘Brenda’, 1875, London.

16
. Diary of Atkinson Skinner zDDX389/11 April 1882–26 June 1888, East Riding of Yorkshire archive and local studies service.