A Brighter Future for the Next Generation

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Thursday 13th May 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

We all want a brighter future for the next generation, but the experience of this Government over the last 10 years —although they try to kid us that they are brand-new—shows an abject failure in support for our young, which the contents of this Queen’s Speech do little to fix.

Levelling up should encompass intergenerational readjustment rather than simply reward gerrymandered Tory-voting territories. Coronavirus has been cruel to all of us, but its effects have been no more acutely felt than by the young. They are already reeling from the effects of an imbalanced housing market and stuck in precarious employment—generation rent now forced back into the bosom of the parental home; boomerang generation. With rocketing youth unemployment, an education system in disarray and a mental health crisis, all those natural expectations of youth in the carefree phrases, “You’re only young once” and “Your lot will always be better than your parents’”, have been shattered. And in the middle of all this we have a Queen’s Speech of missed opportunities and broken promises, viewed with disbelief by young people for whom, for instance, a flat of their own costing £200,000 might be something they dream of but who then see refurbishment by a Prime Minister in very questionable circumstances for the same price.

There is no renters’ rights legislation here and no new cladding protections: so much for no one losing their home to covid—another discarded assurance from a Prime Minister “never knowingly undersold”. We all remember him lying down in front of the bulldozers to stop Heathrow expansion, but there is nothing here to combat climate change. It is the most important issue of our generation and everyone’s generation, and is particularly championed by the young, as we have seen with Greta Thunberg and the school strikers—although all schools have been away for the last year.

We have no employment Bill here to tackle zero-hours contracts that the young are so familiar with from the gig economy, and nothing to tackle the repugnant, immoral practice of fire and rehire that companies exploiting the crisis have been up to while we have all been distracted by the virus. There is nothing on child poverty. The sectors and working ways of the young have been hardest hit, such as hospitality and start-ups; they have been shafted and punished for their courageous forays into self-employment and freelancing. Some 3 million people have had no Government support for over a year because they fall between the cracks. At every turn of coronavirus, it feels as though the young have been an afterthought, forgotten or even sacrificed, as seen in the exams shambles of last year or the unhappy situation of undergraduates hoodwinked into paying full fees for a barely functioning student experience compounded by their usual lifeline of casual work being gone, too.

The artificial situation of millions of the young on furlough is another bubble soon set to burst when that is withdrawn as we lurch from cliff edge to cliff edge. Where is the commitment to the jobs of the future that Labour’s green new deal would deliver or any kind of jobs guarantee? Instead, people are paying more and more to be less and less secure.

I must be getting old, because I am looking fondly at my own youth—I think we were called generation X in those days. We were able to benefit from Erasmus, which is no longer open to generation Y—now called the millennials—and generation Z, who instead have the inferior, more monoglot, distinctly Anglophile Turing scheme. It is a startling fact that nobody born after the year 2000—21-year-olds and everyone younger, which is a sector set to grow and grow—has had any say on Brexit, and they are the most opposed to it.

What do we get instead in this Gracious Speech? An imagined war on the woke, with solutions to non-existent problems. It is funny how the usual parroted line we get about casework on universities—they are autonomous institutions—is ignored for this so-called academic freedom legislation when figures show that the number of speaker events that it would apply to is less than 1%. In other words, it is more than 99% not needed. However, there is no action on student hardship, mental health support or education cuts.

I actually agree with the Scottish high Tory Ruth Davidson on a second non-existent problem, also mentioned by the hon. Member for Argyll and Bute (Brendan O’Hara), which I wish to identify—the Trumpian tactics of voter suppression via the need for photo ID. I believe the adjective she used on TV last night rhymes with Jackson Pollocks. We had an electorate of 47 million at the last general election. How many cases were there of personation—the thing this measure is meant to tackle? One solitary case. This is a youth issue, because they are the people less likely to have a driving licence. It is also an equalities issue, because black people and non-binary trans individuals are the kinds of people who will fall foul of it, and they are already over-represented in the 3.5 million voters who currently have no photo ID. Cut-to-the-bone councils already have enough on their plates to be dealing with that as well. We have seen how they have had to axe low-hanging fruit such as libraries and youth services. It is another wrong priority, and there is nothing at all for the biggest item of local government expenditure everywhere: social care. We were promised a clear plan—oven ready, I think it was. We have a demographic time bomb coming down the track, but there was nothing on that specifically. Life cycle means new generations. People my age are talked about as being the sandwich generation, caring at one end for offspring and, at the other, for parents.

Look, I want to end positively, so I will quote Dua Lipa from the Brit awards. Things are opening up and the vaccination programme is rolling out, but she identified another thing missing from the speech: an NHS pay rise. There is still time for that, and the Government could do it if they wanted. To really level up, we should look at intergenerational rebalancing and not just pitting people and regions against each other. The other thing that was missing was Dennis Skinner.