Newspaper Article

UK's squeezed generation

Hennessy, Mark

2010

Overview

Fees are but the start of it, according to Ed Howker and Shiv Malik, authors of The Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth, who argue that \"Thatcher's children\" - the ones born after 1979 - have been left a poisoned chalice. It is a bleak perspective. Nearly a third of men and 18 per cent of women aged 20 to 34 in Britain are still living with their parents. Dubbed Kippers (kids in parents' pockets eroding retirement savings), iPods (infantile posse of over-indulged drunks) or one of a host of other unflattering acronyms, some are at home because it is more comfortable, but for most it's because they cannot afford places of their own. Howker and Malik's figures show that first-time buyers between 1970 and 1997 paid 2.4 times their annual income to buy a house; between 1997 and 2007 it jumped to 3.4 times. Today it is 4 times. And the ratio is still rising. The generational time bomb was first looked at by the UK's treasury only in 2002, when officials warned that the ageing of Britain will have \"profound effects\" - a mandarin's code for \"Houston, we have a problem\" - on its society and economy. \"I think we are in danger of losing a generation of first-time voters, who have lost complete faith in the political process and will simply disengage from it. And there is a danger that some of them will drift to more radical movements. The majority don't want that - they don't want violence - but some could drift away,\" [Susan Nash] warns.

• Publisher: The Irish Times Ltd
• Subject: Howker, Ed / Malik, Shiv / Nash, Susan