Today’s thirty- and fortysomethings are no better off than their parents. The economy is failing its people and the political class has let down voters
Remember “Labour isn’t working”? It was the election poster that summed up the tail end of the 1970s and helped to sweep Margaret Thatcher into power. It showed a long dole queue snaking out of an unemployment office, it turned Labour politicians puce (“selling politics like soap powder,” harrumphed the then chancellor Denis Healey) and it made the front pages. There was always less to that photo than met the eye – literally. The supposedly ordinary folk pictured were, in fact, members of the Hendon Young Conservatives group in north London, only 20 of whom had bothered to turn up. They had to be photographed again and again to fill out the space.
The jobs market has long shaped our politics, but were that poster to be updated to reflect today’s reality, it would sport a different title. We might call it “Work isn’t working”. Because after four decades of politicians of both main parties promising to “make work pay”, the truth is that it doesn’t – not as much as it once did. A new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) shows that workers born in the 1980s and on the median wage earn no more than those born in the 1960s did at their age. Put bluntly, Thatcher’s children have been diddled. Today’s thirty- and fortysomethings were taught that work was how to get ahead, but they are no better off than their parents. In fact, when you factor in exorbitant house prices, they are far poorer. You could ask for few clearer signs of an economy that has failed its people, and a political class that has let down its voters.
