This summer I’ve been reflecting on the conversations I’ve had with so many young people over two decades whilst building my charity, www.workingrite.co.uk, I must have spoken to hundreds.

It feels like a privilege to have heard the individual stories of a generation when they were teenagers, about to embark on their working adulthoods.

They came from all over Scotland; most had left school as soon as they could, usually without any sense of what they wanted to do. We helped get them into jobs with a future, usually apprenticeships. The oldest are now in their mid-thirties, many with children of their own. Some have since started their own businesses.

Nearly all the conversations were the same: what next for their lives?

They wanted a future: the right job for their skills, enough money to support their needs and desires. None wanted to go to university,

I think it’s the impact of speaking to so many of the same age, from a similar class background, over such a long period, that has given me an insight into a particular recuring agenda for them that doesn’t hit the headlines, and yet is so important to all our futures.

I was struck by some stark statistics in an article recently: birth rates across the nation, and around the world are falling, whilst the over 65s’ tier of the population continues to increase. In Scotland, the so-called baby boomers now comprise nearly a fifth of our society.

A society where we have fewer new wage-earners to generate all the taxes the state needs to, amongst other things, finance the older generations’ longevity. Perhaps a debate as to whether this deal is fair or not, is one worth having. Otherwise, the notion that the next generation should have an improved quality of life than the last one, flounders in the face of impossible statistics.

I can now see how fortunate I was to be born in the mid 1950’s. I saw most of my contemporaries benefit from the post-war investment in our futures with many enjoying their grant-funded time at university. Jobs were aplenty, as was affordable housing and mortgages.

Until the end of the 70’s things chugged along in a familiar pattern. Then came two key government initiatives, one in the 80’s and the other in the late 90’s, both of which have reshaped the deal within and between the generations and sowed the seeds of a new class divide, shaped by inherited wealth.

The first was the Thatcher government’s experiment in social-engineering to create something called a ‘property-owning democracy’, by selling off the best council houses under the catchy label: Right-to-Buy. Long-term result: affordable decent social housing was condemned to the fringes, which has resulted in a major housing crisis for todays and future generations.

Evidence of who the winners were from the ripple effect of Right-to-Buy became clear when property prices rose by 130% between 1997 and 2004. Family wealth began to be measured not by earned household income but by property value. Despite the 2008 crash, the Sunday Times ran the headline in 2021: “Golden Oldies – 1 in 5 pensioners are millionaires”, a quadrupling over the previous decade. Indeed, more than half of all pensioners now live in households with over half a million in assets.

So, what are we/they doing with their wealth? For many it’s about becoming ‘the Bank of Mum and Dad’. The pressure on asset-rich baby-boomer parents is full on: student fees and loans, first time deposits, childcare, grandkids, family holidays. They are the lender of last resort - and I don’t blame them. If I had children, I would do the same.

But I don’t have children, and so my attention is on the young people I have known and spoken to over the last 20 years. Also, on the households they were brought up in, where their parents, who missed out on the property bonanza back in the 80’s and 90’s, have been struggling ever since to bring their kids up well in the parts of their communities that housing associations and some councils have been able to salvage.

Then, as the millennium approached the second policy to sow the seeds of a new class divide came from Tony Blair. Remember his mantra of ‘education, education, education’, which in hindsight seems more like a university confidence trick: a hollow promise of a better job with a higher income, in exchange for disappointing wages, crippling student debt, and continuing reliance on the bank of mum and dad.

Poor housing and long-term debt; a real double whammy at the start of adulthood. But let’s not forget that not all baby boomers benefited from the post war bonanza and the property boom. Only those who did are able to pass their wealth on. Good parents, but maybe not such good citizens.

Now I know that it’s human nature to look after your young. That’s not where my gripe is. Maybe these housing and education policies were inevitable, doesn’t matter, they’re here now. We as a society, including the elders, now need to learn how to deal with the consequences and shift the focus more towards the next generations, including the young people I have been speaking to, the offspring of those other baby boomers who took the brunt of the assault on the working class in the 80’s – ‘Thatcher’s grandchildren’.

Of course, the chances of that kind of systemic change are slim. In terms of numbers eligible to vote, the over 60’s outnumber the 18–25-year-olds by 3 to 1. To make it worse, over 70% of pensioners consistently vote whereas the under 25’s voting figures rarely reach more than 40%.

But the young vote can rally sometimes. Jeremy Corbyn won the student vote in the 2017 general election, when he deprived Teresa May of a majority, capturing the university towns, but losing the English red wall seats. Bernie Saunders did something similar in the States in the run up to the first Trump presidency. And Nick Clegg did it back in 2010, and his party have paid the price for his monumental betrayal ever since. The young vote was very much in evidence in both referendums too, but given the figures above, it’s hardly surprising that the young find themselves on the losing side each time.

Campaigns to register young people onto the electoral register or creating consultive ‘youth parliaments’ won’t crack the problem. Only policies that speak to young peoples’ needs, student or not, will make a change. Such policies would mean investment and budgetary choices.

So, are there any politicians out there who are brave enough to take on the pensioners? ■