This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
The American prize draw company Omaze has been grabbing people’s attention of late by offering up the chance to win hotel-sized houses in some of the dreamiest parts of the country with a six-figure cash sweetener usually thrown in to boot. For a nominal contribution, Brits are being offered the chance to become overnight millionaires living in stately homes with ample garage space for the brand-spanking new car they’ll probably get the keys to. Such is the popularity of the contests Omaze now commits £1 million as a minimum donation for their charity partners as well as taking a nice profit on top once all costs have been accounted for. Not a bad bit of business, all told.
Yet if Omaze was to offer all young Brits the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of free higher education, a guaranteed job offer with a competitive salary and a house for a fraction of their annual wage it would surely be the most subscribed competition they would ever put out. The remarkable bundle of giveaways would liberate them of £45,000-worth of student debt, tens of thousands of pounds in annual rent payments and hundreds of thousands of pounds on an eventual house purchase should such a rare opportunity present itself. They could even throw in the chance to work and live in any one of the EU’s 27 member states or study there via a funded exchange programme if they wanted to really spoil them.
Not long ago, that was the reality of life in the UK for many young people who were rightly seen as the generation with the country’s future prosperity in their hands. Give them a bright start and you will reap the rewards later in life, or so the theory went, with the Treasury’s coffers bolstered by high tax receipts and the country’s services manned by the best and the brightest. Suella Braverman, of all people, certainly didn’t need to be reminded of that when she took advantage of the EU’s Erasmus scheme to study in France for two years where she gained a love of language and culture. It’s an opportunity that others in a similar position today will no longer be able to enjoy thanks to policies extolled by the very same person.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine a cohort of society that has been more roundly trounced on over the past fourteen years than Gen Z. They had no part to play in the financial crash wreaking havoc on public finances or Brexit limiting their prospects or climate-wrecking industries being given free rein to destroy the planet, but they will have to live with its consequences and worse, face being told that they haven’t got it bad enough by the very people who dealt them such a crummy hand in the first place. As the former editor of The Sun David Yelland put it, “a few years ago our children could work, travel and live all over Europe. Now they’re being told they are ‘snowflakes’ and should ‘do National Service’ by a generation that has failed them, failed the planet, failed us all”.
In that context, Andy Burnham had it right when he pointed out that the only national service we need from our young people is to vote for change on 4th July. It’s either that or they’d better boot up. Army barracks await those who once were handed university dorms.
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