For the Tories, young people don’t exist until they need someone to blame

For the Tories, young people don’t exist, until they need someone to blame. “Don’t kill your gran”, health secretary Matt Hancock begged young people earlier this month, despite elderly people with Covid being sent back from hospitals into care homes. Then there’s Boris Johnson warning young people against “complacency”, urging freshers not to spread coronavirus in the bedroom, before promising to crack down on parties. Now after a month of sending people out to pubs and restaurants (which new findings suggest contributed to a spike in infections), the government is again trying to blame young people for rising cases and a second wave.  

I work in a pub and I have seen drunk idiocy from young people, the middle-aged and baby boomers alike. Breakdowns in social distancing in pubs cannot be limited to one age group.  

It is also telling that young people are being chastised for having parties. The last decade saw an austerity programme that decimated youth services and forced the closure of 750 youth centres, meanwhile, wages stagnated. There is very little public space set aside for young people and many cannot afford to socialise safely in places like pubs, bars and restaurants. Parties during a pandemic are obviously not the best idea, but it is not surprising that private gatherings are how young people are meeting.  

The prime minister insisted that the reopening of universities in time for the new academic year was critical, but he had nothing to say about the students forced into paying the exorbitant rent on student housing despite their courses being online. He is silent on an issue that affects the material conditions of young people, but finds the time to scapegoat freshers in advance of a second wave. Any spikes in the number of cases in university towns are down to the government failing to maintain an effective test and trace system. The blame should not be laid at the feet of anxious 18-year-olds in an unfamiliar setting.

The government consistently neglects the young. For example, the calamitous failure of the exam grade algorithm that left thousands of A-level students devastated was visible well before results day, but ministers pressured Ofqual to stick with the system before an eventual U-turn on the system.  

And in London, free travel for under-18s was cut as part of a government bailout deal for Transport for London, which saw passenger numbers plummet during lockdown. TFL relies very heavily on fares compared to similar cities like Paris and New York because of a deal Boris Johnson cut with the treasury when he was mayor. This unsustainable funding model was instigated by Johnson, not, as Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey has suggested, because Sadiq Khan mismanaged the finances.  

This pattern recurs time and again. The lack of rent relief and the consistency with which the government acts in lockstep with the interests of landlords disproportionately targets young, working class people. So too does the new 10pm curfew on pubs and restaurants, which without any attempt at compensating workers, just amounts to a cut in hours for the hospitality sector’s overwhelmingly young employees.  

The Tories can get away with this because young people are not part of the Conservative’s electoral base. Equally we are useful fodder in a political war in which the right tries to polarise the values of the electorate around social or cultural issues to shore up their base, without needing to concede on popular, progressive economic policies. Older voters are already falling for this blame narrative hook, line and sinker. A YouGov poll shows that 67 per cent of Britons hold young people responsible to some degree for the increase in cases, this rises to 77 per cent among the over 65s. Once again Britain’s elites are getting away with blaming young people for their own miserable failures.

Oliver Haynes is a bartender and  freelance journalist.