By Mike Robinson

The views expressed in this article are personal reflections.

Growing up, I always understood that there was a responsibility to society and community, and that particularly as I got older, and where I had benefited or had opportunity, I should give something back if I was able to. It was a simple but basic understanding that there is a ‘social contract’ between all of us in society – and that often the benefits I might receive are in part because of privilege, luck or opportunity that has come from society and our political choices, and perhaps were due to the humanity of others before me. Not that everyone benefits perfectly, and not that everyone behaves magnanimously, but I still think the large majority of people would concur with this philosophy. Those who can give back should give back, or society starts to falter.

It's encapsulated in the principle that we should hand over the planet in a better state than we inherited it. Hand over the economy in a better state than we inherited it. Give the next generation a better education than we had. Hand them over peace where we may have experienced conflict. Provide opportunity wherever we could and basically to seek to improve or correct our society for the benefit of next generations and those less fortunate.

However over the last 30 years, maybe longer, I have seen this principle become more and more eroded and diluted, and right now, it feels like we have completely broken this social contract with our children and our grandchildren.

If I wheel all the way back to the 80s and 90s, there was a political philosophy which lauded private profit, potentially at the expense of public good. This era spawned the Hollywood villain Gordon Gecko from Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street, a morality tale of rapacious greed and unethical behaviour which was meant to be a critique, but it back-fired and almost became a role model – a celebrated anti-hero representing the worst of us. This whole period saw a flagrant championing of all things selfish, in a society that was doing well, but as with so many things, there is often only so much to go round – and that includes money. If one person is uber rich, then lots of people have probably lost out - that’s just common sense, but even when the economy began to struggle, it wasn’t easy to derail this basic precept.

There was one very significant area of spend in government that many people really valued, trusted in and understood they would benefit from come what may - pensions. But way back in the 1990s that changed. Organizations realised that pensions were largely unaffordable, especially final salary pensions, which was then pretty much the norm. I was invited to a round table lunch meeting with Oliver Letwin MP in the late 1990s, who guffawed into his soup at the very notion that any Government could continue to afford to fund pensions, and even more at the suggestion that his government would even try. So instead of levelling the playing field, many businesses and charities chose instead to pull up the ladder. Anyone new to the business or the organization suddenly wasn't allowed to join the final salary pension scheme at all.

There is a huge inequity in this. The response to recognizing the unaffordability of the pensions bill for the whole country was to only let some people have a proper pension. The public sector managed to cling on to their final salary pensions for a couple of decades still, but for almost everyone now in work they are an impossible fantasy.

Another area which has changed dramatically is that of university fees for students (to be fair, more in England than in Scotland), which followed the American model of charging students to go to university. Again another nail in the coffin of that social contract in which the older generations support the education and development of younger generations in order to better society, in order to give them opportunities, perhaps that we didn't have (although ironically, in this case, opportunities that I think we did have). But rather than pay for that, we have burdened them with debt and called it something else.

This has predictably become more and more expensive, and yet clearly the model doesn't work, because every university in this country is struggling financially. The economic model doesn't work in America either. They charge so much money for student fees now that a lot of Americans who can and have the foresight are now looking to go abroad to study. But here’s the warning - theirs started like ours, low level contributions towards your education, which grew out of control… very, very quickly.

We have then abandoned young people to pay for their own education, in effect making them borrow money, because we don’t want to have to pay for it. Where is the social contract in that?

But at least they’ll be able to get a good job out of it, so why shouldn’t they pay, you might think? But that doesn’t stack up either. We currently have a situation where potentially two thirds or more of qualifying graduates can't then make a decent start. I've been told recently that even newly qualified doctors can't get a start. There are 3-4 times more doctors qualifying each year than the NHS have spaces. It's not that we don't need the doctors, we just haven't committed enough money to the NHS to employ them, so we are training doctors who are then struggling to find jobs – at least here in the UK.

Yet I’ve spoken to newly qualified holders of Law degrees who also can't get a start. I’ve met paramedics who report there are 4 times more paramedics qualifying than there are places. It’s true in many subjects. And now there is also the threat of AI hoovering up many of the remaining jobs. Young people with good qualifications, burdened by debt, end up working in a zero-hours role they could have picked up straight out of school.

So having burdened young people with significant debt (quite commonly in the order of £50-100k in the UK as a whole), and subjected them to ever increasing interest rates, the majority then can't actually get a job to pay it off, or actually can't get a job at all. Yet again, we have broken the social contract.

But it gets worse still. We have also created a situation where young people can’t afford a home. We have made it nigh on impossible for young people to make a start on the housing ladder. So even those young people who manage to get a job and manage to start paying off some of their debt, still can’t actually afford a house. Young people are either forced to live at home for another 10 years, share flats with friends in increasing numbers, often paying exorbitant rents (which often exceed what they would have paid in a mortgage), or live a very nomadic lifestyle. Settling down now takes years, not months.

It feels to me that on many levels we have given up on much of our responsibility to the next generation and yet much of our media and social media often blame them for it. We have elected to pull up the ladder and, to add insult to injury, are now criticising young people because they can’t reach the lowest rungs. It’s not because they buy too much coffee, or can’t be bothered to work, it’s because we have outcompeted them for houses, over charged them unaffordable rents, charged them for education and not provided decent job opportunities.

Our lack of concern extends to some of our policies in wider world as well. Young people understand that there is a climate crisis, but they also understand that we don't seem to care enough to properly try and solve it. I cannot tell you how many older people have shrugged and dismissed climate action as ‘nothing that will affect me’, as if that absolves them of any need to help. They understand that there's a nature crisis too, and the same is happening there. It's one rule for us and one rule for them. That is not how you build trust in a society. And if have we not done enough to support young people, is it even reasonable for us to expect them to ‘give back to society’ when their time comes?

I personally find all of this heartbreaking.

Who ever said that one generation or one group of people had the right to do whatever they wanted, even whilst watching another group suffer and struggle? There is no community in that. I think most people do understand and accept the principle of trying to hand over things to the next generation in good order, but by almost any account we have broken that social contract. I think it’s time to lower the ladder.