Neo-puritan young people are a threat to freedom and democracy -

I am an optimist. Tomorrow, in aggregate at least, will be better than yesterday. Our knowledge grows, technology improves lives and, given a fair chance, free markets raise further thousands from abject, life-shortening and painful poverty. But I am just a little bit worried as I peer into my scratched, dull and flickering crystal ball.

Pew found that 40% of respondents ages 18-34 said they agreed that offensive statements could be outlawed.

The over-65 generation does not accurately represent our country, because they are overwhelmingly white and actually vote. So, unfortunately, we're going to have to bar them from voting.

Millennial support for populist and authoritarian candidates conforms to several recent studies showing widespread youth disaffection with the whole idea of democracy. Only about 30% of Americans born in the 1980s think it’s “essential” to live in a democracy.

These are just three examples from a host - from support for bans on drinking through fat shaming to turning genuine concerns about harassment into witch hunts led by a frothing media mob. Everywhere I look I see attacks on the fundamentals of what I see as liberal democracy. It's not merely that young people - like just about every past generation - start off foolishly believing there's a better way to improve our world than freedom and choice but that they've gone beyond this to embrace a neo-puritanism that is anti-freedom, anti-democracy and definitely anti-choice.

And my worry isn't just that I don't agree with this neo-puritan authoritarianism - whether it's the young Austrians and Germans voting for the populist Right or British and American youth embracing the left-wing equivalent. Or for that matter "centrists" wanting to limit democracy because they don't like its results. No, my worry is that democracy and liberty will be restricted by governments seeking to pander to this neo-puritanism - an ever wider definition of "hate speech", classing any heterodox behaviour or belief as anti-social, banning of books and videos, all mixed in with cults of health and the idea of the 'good person'.

This anti-liberty, anti-choice new-puritan doctrine will be used by governments to stifle debate on-line, to close down challenging (and sometimes inaccurate) platforms or websites as 'fake news', and to police private behaviour to a degree never seen before. Each of these attacks on choice and freedom will be presented as protective of young people (allowing them to grow without fear of witnessing such unpleasantries). And, as we''ve seen with the response to Jo Johnson suggesting universities should promote free speech and open debate, many authorities with smile benignly as the mob screeches and screams at the few brave enough to challenge the right-thinking of neo-puritan youth.

If there is one thing people who believe in liberty and choice should do in 2018, it is to speak out - again and again - against these affronts to the core values of our society. For all our talk of "British Values", we seem very coy at saying that free speech, free assembly and democratic choice are right at the very heart of those values. Nor should we allow these neo-puritans to indulge their cult of health, to let them tell us that somehow we are not responsible for our own bodies and that the NHS is somehow greater and more important than our rights.

This isn't a resolution - I've been challenging the attacks on liberty for some while - but, as they extend their reach, we need to make more effort to say that freedom and democracy cannot be sacrificed on the altar of youthful insecurity, disappointment or distaste. They are too damned important for that.

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Young people are neoliberals - they just don't realise it yet so let's help them.

It seems to me that the real issue young people have is feeling excluded from the benefits of our capitalist, neoliberal society not that capitalist, neoliberal society itself. And this seems a reasonable gripe to me. Here's a tweet from lefty journalist John Elledge:




This - perhaps not all that considered - comment tells us a great deal. Mostly that the real irritation of the emerging graduate generation is that they feel unable to afford investment assets like houses. For me this is one of the essential failures of UK government over the last thirty years - the idea of a property owning democracy was ignored as we got ever more excited about the seemingly endless rise in house prices.

Some people want to blame all this on my generation - the boomers - who took advantage of cheap asset prices in the 1970s and 1980s and rode the bubble to the point where the house my Dad bought for £3,250 in 1963 in now 'worth' over £400,000 (Dad sold the house in 1975 for about £14,000). I am absolutely with all those people who feel that they're outside this bubblicious world - not just the young or poor but a whole load of people from 'Up North' who've not seen anything like the gains those 'Down South' have seen.

Add to this that we told young people that the way to get into this bubble world was to get a good degree (in fact any old degree as Blair's enthusiasm for book-learning led to the numbers going to university getting up towards half of 18 and 19 year olds). And because these degrees were the gateway to a world of wealth and power, we told young people they could have a load of (cheap) borrowing that they'd spend half their life paying off so as to get the degree.

Young people don't want to be socialists, they want the entrance fee to our neoliberal world of valuable assets, to that property-owning democracy we were all promised. And this is why they've dumped the capitalists, the people who they think are stopping them from joining the glorious free market rat race. "Have free university tuition". "Here's a subsidised mortgage". "How about a big pay rise". "Or a higher minimum wage". "Free child care". "Discounted rail travel"...

It doesn't matter how much others ask where all this cash is coming from, people aren't listening. Or rather they see those telephone number house prices and say, "y'all can afford to pay for this stuff, get on with it". And Labour offered them everything they were asking for and some things they weren't - no questions asked. Is it any surprise that folk who are outside that wealth bubble flocked to this banner?

Young people - and plenty of the not-so-young - want to know when it's their turn to play the free market, asset-owning, property-speculating game. They don't want socialism, they want what their parents and grandparents had - the chance to have a real cash stake in their society, the thing that Margaret Thatcher promised to my generation (and largely delivered). This isn't about nationalisation for all that people tell you the government should run stuff (they always have done by the way even at the height of Maggie's pomp). No, it's about us renewing the promise we made to the post-war generation and to late boomers like me - play your part, work hard, be a good citizen and we'll make sure you can have that real cash stake in Britain.

Right now we're still telling people to play their part, to work hard, to borrow to fund education and to be a good citizen but government has reneged on its side of the bargain, that cash stake in Britain. And the single-minded focus of any new government should be to renew that offer and make it work. Those young people really aren't baby ideologues desperate for some sort of socialist New Jerusalem. They're just like you and I were 30, 40, 50 or 60 years ago - bothered about our own futures, the things we care about, in that thing Adam Smith saw as the driver of a better, richer society: self-interest.

So let's start offering people that chance. Let's free up the planning system so more houses get built were people want to live. Let's revisit the idea of tax relief or other support that backs individual, personal investment in our society. Let's liberate the innovative instincts of property and finance people to meet the aspirations of today's ambitious young people - 21st century capitalists, budding neoliberals every one. And let's do this knowing that the alternative, Labour's market-fixing, price-controlling, 'magic money tree' programme carries in it the seeds of disaster, the crash that socialism always brings.

I'm with you if you want to bash at those folk farming grants and corporate welfare. I'm on your side if you want to try and stop well-funded lobbyists getting government to fix a market or a system to suit their clients. I'm right there if what you want is to stop rent-seekers freeloading on free health, welfare and education. And I agree with you when you say people should pay the taxes they owe - on the nail not just after a long-winded and expensive investigation.

But this isn't about socialism just about getting a free market that works for all of us. It's about setting economic liberty - the idea that, more than anything else, is responsible for the health and wealth nearly all of us enjoy today (even if we can't afford a house) - at the heart of government policy. The more we try to control the market the less liberty we have and the more power we hand to the commissioners, the lobbyists and the corporations protected by the government fix.

What we all want is a real stake in the nation we're a part of - not just a vague notion of citizenship but a real sense of being a part of the place, of having roots. And that means renewing that promise made by Harold MacMillan in the 1950s, by Ted Heath in 1970 and by Margaret Thatcher in 1983 - Britain isn't just land and institutions but its people, all of them. And all of them should have the chance to take a real, solid, tangible stake in their nation.

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You don't want to live there, do you? A comment on sky-high house prices

I know, I know. You don't want to live on the edge of Woodside, a former council estate on the Bradford side of the Bradford-Halifax boundary. Location, location, location as the saying goes.

But stop and think for a minute. Just recently the resolution Foundation had this to say:

HOME ownership among young people across Bradford and West Yorkshire has halved in a generation.

The findings have been announced by think-tank The Resolution Foundation which said it counters “the popular perception that the struggle to get on the housing ladder is largely confined to London and the South East”.

So here we have three flats that will be sold at auction rather than through the regular market and which will end up in the private rental sector. Yet finding £5,000 for a 10% deposit and borrowing £45,000? Is this really unaffordable to working young couples in West Yorkshire?

Bradford's median full time working income is about £450 per week (was £447.1 in 2014) - let's call that two grand a month between friends. And let's further assume that twentysomethings earn two-thirds of median. A typical Bradford young couple (if such a thing exists) should be able to afford - with comfort - one of these flats.

But then, of course, you don't want to live there do you!

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How Jaywick and West Texas tell us the Intergenerational Foundation's research doesn't say what they think it says

The Intergenerational Foundation has done some research - it's pretty good and you can read the full report (pdf) here. The IF look at 'intergenerational segregation' - the extent to which people of different ages tend to concentrate in the same areas. And both the IF and also the media has focused on how the increasing geographical segregation of young and old in England is a consequence of housing problems such as lack of choice and affordability.

Here's the BBC's 'OMG this is terrible' report on the research:

Young families are being "ghettoised" in inner city areas by the housing crisis while older homeowners become isolated in the suburbs, a report says.

The Intergenerational Foundation study says the number of areas dominated by over-50s has risen sevenfold since 1991 as young people move into the cities.

Even within urban areas, older people, children and young adults are living increasingly separate lives, it adds.

I'm sure this pattern will be repeated across other media and will be reflected in reports on similar research in the USA and continental Europe. And the argument that it's all about housing costs will be repeated again and again without question or criticism. Put simply we are more age segregated as a result of older people being unable to move to more 'age appropriate' accommodation because there isn't enough of that housing so young people aren't able to cycle out from the cities into the suburbs. And young people are renting in the city because they can't afford to buy the limited number of houses that come available in those desirable suburbs.

The problem here is that this really doesn't match what the IF's research is saying. Here's a chunk of those findings:

...places with the highest median ages are predominantly in rural parts of the country, particularly around coastal areas, while urban MSOAs stand out for being more youthful.There is also evidence of a north-south divide, as the broader south east surrounding London contains a number of lighter MSOAs – which represent comparatively youthful smaller towns and cities in the region such as Watford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge – whereas the MSOAs which are outside the large northern cities appear to be shaded darker. This pattern supports the finding from previous studies that there is a substantial net inflow of internal migrants who are in their 20s from northern towns and cities to London, while the out-flow of former London residents in their 20s and 30s tends to be to other towns in the south east.

I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem with housing supply (in general or specific to particular needs or demands) but rather that the IF research doesn't really provide an argument supporting the typical description of that housing crisis - young people unable to afford to buy property and, therefore, trapped in rented accommodation. Nor does the work really tell us that these affordability and supply issues are the reasons for England's 'age segregation'.

To understand this, we should note that the highest median ages are 'around coastal areas'. Other than for parts of the South Coast like Brighton and Bournemouth, England's coastal towns are pretty affordable and characterised by high levels of multiple deprivation:

An Essex seaside village is the most deprived neighbourhood in England, according to official statistics.

The community east of Jaywick near Clacton-on-Sea has again topped a list that measured deprivation in 32,844 areas across the country, the government report found.

But all of the local authorities with the highest proportion of deprived neighbourhoods are in the north - Middlesbrough, Knowsley, Hull, Liverpool and Manchester.

And of the top 10 neighbourhoods, Blackpool, the ‘Vegas of the North’, has five in the list, and eight in the top 20.

We see this pattern repeated in other seaside towns - Great Yarmouth, Skegness, Bridlington, Minehead - where an ageing population doesn't have the sort of characteristics popularised by those who want to blame all our problems on 'Baby Boomers'.

John Byford, 48, councillor for Skegness South, said: “Opportunities around here are few and far between. There’s no industry. People like it that we don’t have the fast motorways, but that’s also a problem because it means we don’t get the industry.”

The recently released movie 'Hell and High Water' features two brothers robbing banks so they can pay off the debts on their late mother's ranch. Based in West Texas the film is a contemporary Western nodding to the themes and storylines we're so familiar with from the traditional genre. One thing that strikes you watching is the utter, abject poverty of West Texas with shacks and shuttered shops frequented by tired, old people. These are dying communities without young people and kept going only by the fortune of oil and gas, at least until that runs out too.

So where have those young Texans gone? To the cities:

Texas’s spectacular growth is largely a story of its cities—especially of Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. These Big Four metropolitan areas, arranged in a layout known as the “Texas Triangle,” contain two-thirds of the state’s population and an even higher share of its jobs. Nationally, the four metros, which combined make up less than 6 percent of the American population, posted job growth equivalent to 30 percent of the United States’ total since the financial crash in 2007. Within Texas, they’ve accounted for almost 80 percent of the state’s population growth since 2000 and over 75 percent of its job growth. Meantime, a third of Texas counties, mostly rural, have actually been losing population.

Why would you stay in a dusty, isolated West Texas town like Post or Brownfield when there's no work and no prospect of work? Same goes - perhaps a little less starkly - for England. Young people are leaving what might be called secondary communities in the North - places like Oldham and Burnley as well as those coastal towns we've already mentioned. And if you've made up your mind to head elsewhere for work you're going to go where those prospects are best which in England means you head to London. It's this pattern of migration that the IF are picking up in their research not merely the consequences of England's failing planning and housing policies.

And the problem is that, while we can do something to make London less age segregated by housing policies, we'll struggle to respond to the desire of older people to live somewhere slower, quieter and more communal than a great big city. Or for that matter the wish of single, fun-loving young folk to live in big cities with great nightlife and loads of other young people. The problems IF identify are as much a consequence of wealth and choice as they are of sclerotic housing policies.

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There is no evidence linking sports sponsorship with children drinking

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A few days ago "...a group of medical leaders, public health campaigners and health charities" wrote to The Guardian calling for the banning of sports sponsorship by drinks companies:

Our children deserve a better future and we must take the opportunity to give it to them. Self-regulation of alcohol advertising isn’t working when it allows drink brands to dominate sporting events that attract children as well as adults, creating automatic associations between alcohol brands and sport that are cumulative, unconscious and built up over years. Evidence shows that exposure to alcohol advertising leads young people to drink more, and to drink at an earlier age.

The lead signatory of the letter was Professor Sir Ian Gilmore perhaps the UK's leading temperance campaigner and a man who has never knowingly missed the opportunity to exaggerate, embellish and invent statistics to promote his mission to limit, perhaps to prohibit, drinking. And our natural instinct to protect children is a high value trump card to the likes of Sir Ian.


So - given that drinks brands have been advertising their brands on the shirts of football, rugby and cricket teams for a couple of decades, we'd expect there to be more teenage boozers drinking more alcohol. The problem is that this isn't true (pdf see page 122):

Thirty two per cent of young people reported having had an alcoholic drink. This represents a significant drop-off from LSYPE1, when 55 per cent of young people reported having tried alcohol. This fall appears to have taken place across almost all groups of young people.

This comes from a detailed longitudinal study by the Department for Education which makes it pretty reliable as evidence. So over the period when drinks brands have been sponsoring high level sport the consumption of alcohol by children and young people has fallen by around 40%. This suggests that Sir Ian and his pals have absolutely no evidence to support their argument. Not that this makes any difference to them using the argument.

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...more about our sober children

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Top beer writer, Pete Brown has revisited the statistics about children and young people drinking. It's another 'must read' (although sadly they won't bother) for the public health crowd. Here's a sample:

Now the decline is so steep, and so sustained, that there's no getting away from it. Last week's headlines were unequivocal - under-age drinking is no longer cool:

• 39% of pupils said they had drunk alcohol at least once. This continues the downward trend since 2003, when 61% of pupils had drunk alcohol, and is lower than at any time since 1988, when the survey first measured the prevalence of drinking in this age group.
• 9% of pupils had drunk alcohol in the last week. This proportion has fallen from 25% in 2003.

Bouyed by this undoubted good news, the Portman Group undertook some research among parents of school-age children to learn if they were aware of the fact that their children are not drinking. 

Unsurprisingly given the media coverage the issue receives, 9 out of 10 parents had no idea about the 34% decrease in children who have drunk alcohol. The same proportion were similarly unaware of the 33% decrease in the number of kids who think it is OK to drink alcohol on a weekly basis.

 

We have (heaven knows how) spawned the most sober and sensible of generations and Pete Brown is right - a great deal of the credit goes to the drinks industry itself. Sadly, the prohibitionists and denormalisers won't have it that way regardless of the evidence.

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"They wanted vodka" - a lesson in misplaced moral panic

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Chris Snowdon samples an article about alcopops (remember them) from the BBC and notes that, for once, the article is considered and that it contains some pertinent statistics. Chris notes this one especially:

Consumption of alcohol, having reached a peak in 2000, is declining in the UK. The number of people who never drink is rising. Alcohol sales are falling, with a drop of as much as 6-10% in the past 12 months, according to retail analyst Mintel. 

We are a remarkably abstemious lot and none more so than today's young people. Far from the popularly imagined idea of endless binge drinking, collapsing in heaps and general dissolution, young people are like this:

 "The image of the younger drinker going out and getting drunk is not very cool anymore," 

And this impression - from the folk at Mintel who have no interest at all in manipulating or distorting statistics - is backed up by the evidence:

Men and women of all ages are slowly curbing their excesses and drinking in moderation, according to the annual survey from the Office for National Statistics, which covers England, Scotland and Wales.

It suggests that heavy drinking is falling, abstinence is rising, and young people are leading the drive towards healthier drinking.

The decrease among some groups even pre-dates 2002, with men aged 16-24 drinking 26 units a week on average in 1999 and just 15 units a week in 2009, according to the ONS figures.

However, it was the observations of one academic quoted in the article (OK he's a sociologist) that most struck me:

Sociologist Dr Alasdair Forsyth believes that even in the 1990s the impact of alcopops on young drinkers was greatly exaggerated. During his research in that period he asked young people what alcohol they had consumed and whether they became drunk on that occasion. 

"The proportion saying they were drinking [alcopops] increased but the proportion saying they were getting drunk decreased."

Forsyth and fellow researchers found vodka and white cider were the real culprits.

"It was the complete opposite of what was said in the panic," he argues. "The alcopops were too expensive for the teenagers. They wanted vodka. They weren't interested in lemonade." 

The sweetest irony in all this was that, had we not destroyed the alcopops market with misplaced moral panic, we might have had fewer drunks not more.

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Sober young people in the news...

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For about the past two years or so I've been pointing out to anyone who'll listen that there isn't a massive alcohol problem in the UK and that the problem is least evident among the young. Finally, this news has reached the Daily Mail:

The latest Department for Health report shows just 17 per cent of women, aged 16 to 24, drank more than six units of alcohol on their heaviest day of drinking, compared to 27 per cent in 2005.

There was also a drop for men, with less than a quarter drinking more than eight units compared to 32 per cent in 2005.

The Smoking, Drinking and Drug Use Among Young People in England report also reveals 12 per cent of 11 to 15-year-olds drank alcohol the week before they were polled in 2011 compared to 26 per cent in 2001.

In 2010, more than half had never taste alcohol before, compared to 39 per cent in 2001, while 32 per cent thought it was acceptable to drink, a drop of nearly 10 per cent from 2003.

Have you got that all you health facists, nannying fussbuckets and New Puritans? Now go away and leave us to our lives.

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#AlcoholAware2012: Young people and drinking...or rather not drinking

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Alcohol Concern are off out from the traps in "Alcohol Awareness Week" with an opinion survey of 16-24 years olds. This leads them gently to agree with the prohibitionists view:

They told researchers that alcohol promotions encouraged excessive drinking, pointing out it was 'cheaper to buy a three-litre bottle of cider than buy a ticket to go to the cinema'.

Yet again we see false comparisons being made. I'm pretty sure that 17 year old Steve isn't going to impress his new girlfriend by saying; "we're not going to the pictures tonight, I've bought three litres of White Lightning. We can sit on the wall of the park and get pissed."

The real figures - the ones that Alcohol Concern prefer not to mention - tell us that this generation of young people is the most sober generation since the 1960s. Alcohol consumption among children has fallen significantly:

13% of secondary school pupils aged 11 to 15 reported drinking alcohol in the week prior to interview in 2010 compared with 18% of pupils in 2009 and 26% in 2001.

In 1998 71% of 16-24 year olds reported drinking in the previous week (that's any drink at all - just the one). By 2012 this figure had fallen to just 48%. This doesn't suggest that we have a problem with young people and drinking - quite the contrary, the strategy of being open about drinking, informing people and using persuasion has worked.

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