Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth

by Ed Howker & Shiv Malik

(Icon Books, £8.99)

FIRST published in 2010, this substantially updated edition of Jilted Generation is a bleak analysis of the future facing 20-35 year-olds and a damning indictment of society and the political class.

In the last few years there has been some acknowledgement by politicians that there are problems but tackling them appears to be further from their minds than ever.

Debts are on the increase, jobs scarcer and life is getting tougher for young people. The free market and failed policies of the political parties have undermined future generations entering - or trying to enter - the workforce and there's scant hope of future prosperity.

Short-term British democracy, eye-watering debts, part-time and short-term contract jobs, unaffordable and unsuitable homes are piling up problems for tomorrow.

They are obstacles to be surmounted by a generation already ruined by successive governments who have sold off our collective inheritance and legacies. It's a generation crippled by personal debt, with poor or no job prospects, which is caught in the benefits trap.

Britain, according to a 2009 audit, now has a debt equal to 510 per cent of GDP accumulated through bad management of the economy by cowardly politicians too scared to face, or tell, the truth.

Long-term policies no longer exist. The under-35s will have to pay for the disasters of PFI, a hand-to-mouth state pension close to collapse and massive debts incurred by government. The generation muddling through this mess will be the least well equipped for that work of any in centuries.

Detailed, closely argued and lucid, Howker and Malik's analysis of Britain's future is as bleak as can be and the figures shock. This is a must-read for anyone who wants to know how we got into this mess, right back to the time when the Callaghan government decided that aiming for full employment could no longer be a priority, followed by the Thatcher "experiment" and then Blair.

They draw attention also to post-war baby boomers, educated at public expense, who have introduced tuition fees, profited from buying houses before runaway inflation in the 1970s and now reap the rewards of occupational pensions mostly unaffected by Gordon Brown's plundering. Is Britain on the brink of becoming a failed state?

This book ought to make you very angry.

Gwyn Griffiths