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(If you are a divorced father, see here for advice and support).
If I had to give one piece of advice to Britons under 30, or otherwise disadvantaged (including divorced fathers like myself) it would be this: go. Leave. Skedaddle. Get one of those work visas for New Zealand or Canada, for example and start a new life. Fret not over the details. Those can be worked out once youâre there. Donât make excuses, donât defer, donât delay. Trust me, youâll regret it one day. Think of Britain as the creepy, cobweb-bound manor from a thousand schoolboy horror movies: get out while you still can.
Aptly for a horror movie, the call is coming from inside the House. In delivering his Autumn Statement to the Commons, the Chancellor announced âthe biggest ever increase in the state pensionâ. This rise, a fulfilment of the triple-lock pledge, will mean an extra ÂŁ870 for every pensioner from this April. Addressing âthe millions of pensioners who will benefit from this measureâ, Jeremy Hunt said: âNow and always, this government are on your side.â
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 the working poor and using it to buy the votes of boomers. (Who, of course, could afford to buy property and rent it out to take the money, and grow even wealthier, buy imposing ÂŁ1000+ PCM rents on those who will never get on the property ladder as prices are extortionate and high rents make saving for a deposit impossible. If this is not inequality in action, I frankly do not know what is.
It wouldnât 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. Itâs not even that they cling to the outdated notion of pensioners as the poorest age group (although plenty of them still are, but certainly not all!), as some in the general populace still do. No, itâs simply that the Conservative party cannot pass a wealthy person without trying to make him even wealthier.
My dream lies elsewhere. And my plans would surprise the majority. But the facts speak for themselves, even if my family chose to blank them out. A fact you do not like is a fact nonetheless. It is something they conveniently ignore. And a fact which will lead me to take the future of the family in a new direction. I am setting a course away from these shores. Forever.
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 ÂŁ10.42 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 Britainâs history and yet they are living through what the TUC calls âthe longest and harshest pay squeeze in modern historyâ. 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 âthe foundation of sanity and sobrietyâ and âthe indispensable condition of continuityâ whose âhealth determines the health of society as a wholeâ. 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 â less marriage, deferred parenthood, cultural atomisation â 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. (And let us not mention Brexit). Not being especially bothered about social cohesion or economic dynamism, the Tories arenât 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 as 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 worldâs 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 ÂŁ116 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 canât 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.
And whereas I will most certainly welcome a Labour government, I feel that as I contampate my looming 50th birthday, time is certainly running out for me. Having survived many situations which almost cost me my life, I will not waste my remaining years hanging around to flog the economically impotent dead horse that the post Brexit UK has become. I write this as I am preparing to set sail for pastures new. Just as the Irish did when they rejected the potato famine and Britain's indifference to it when they boarded ships bound for the New World in search of a better life.
And once my plans are well under way, I am established and I no longer have to keep certain details, confidential for various reasons, I will write on my experiences and provide advice to those (divorced fathers like myself, the younger generation and others so disadvantaged) on how to jump ship and follow in my wake.