“Do your parents love you?” asks Neil Boorman. “Of course they do — but it hasn’t stopped them from robbing you blind.” Boorman’s new book, gleefully entitled It’s All Their Fault, is one of a clutch of works to have emerged this year that analyse the socio-economic crisis facing today’s young people. Books like David Willetts’ The Pinch and Radical Future, published by the journal Soundings, are easing into motion the rusty gears of generational conflict — and not a moment too soon.
After the crash of autumn 2008, Generation Y realised with a rush of horror that no matter how good we were or how relentlessly we hammered our minds and bodies into the grooves laid out for us by our parents and teachers, everything was definitely not going to be fine. Instead, we are going to spend our lives paying for our parents’ excesses, who have bequeathed us a broken economy, a stagnant job market and a planet that’s increasingly on fire. This sudden understanding of just how blithely our future has been mortgaged has been festering for a full 18 months, and now a rash of books has broken out, angry and sore, across the body politic.
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