When Shiv Malik hears I study at Edinburgh, his response is immediate and forceful. “You’re fortunate, really, really fortunate.” In his view, by escaping England’s top-up fees, I’ve dodged one of the traps awaiting an entire generation.
Malik and his fellow author Ed Howker have caused a media storm with their book, Jilted Generation, a declaration of war against the political and economic systems which they claim have “bankrupted” Britain’s youth.
Both aged 29 and some of the first to pay tuition fees a decade ago, Howker and Malik rail against a culture of tuition fees, exorbitant rent payments and the unpaid “slavery” that entraps graduate interns searching for full-time jobs.
The book portrays a culture of political short-termism shaping society around the whims of the vast and aging “baby boomer” generation, grown fat on profits from the buy-to-let industry. Individualistic liberalism is attacked from both left and right, and no government in the past 30 years comes out of it well. While Malik is on the staff of the centre-left Prospect magazine, Howker works for the solidly right-wing Spectator, and at a Conservative think-tank, although he says he’s “not a card-carrying member of the party”.
Jilted Generation mixes themes more usually located firmly on either the left or right, with globalisation, exploitative landlords and the ‘benefit trap’ all coming under fire. Howker tells me: “As soon as you undertake any kind of approach to politics and society that is evidence-based rather than ideological, what you find is that left and right makes less and less sense.”
In conversation, both authors come across as passionate – Malik’s speech a succession of torrents, while Howker is more laid-back. The main thrust is that government should do more to intervene in areas where young people have problems, although both seem wary of rhetoric that could be seen as pushing for a “nanny state”. “When we say government, that’s people collectively. It isn’t a separate thing from us. It’s there on our behalf to do something for us as a community,” Malik says.
On the subject of fees, the anger is at its rawest. Malik describes any future rise as “ridiculous and absolutely outrageous”, adding: “The maximum [universities] will cost is about five billion a year – that’s nothing in government terms. They’re not funding us because-” here he stops for a few seconds, momentarily overheated. “We don’t know why. There doesn’t seem to be any particularly good reason, except that we aren’t political. We haven’t stood up for ourselves and gone: ‘Hang on. You should be spending this money on us as a generation.’”
Howker adds: “The situation for students now is pretty dire for a couple of reasons. The first is that, obviously, going to university is incredibly expensive... It’s a curious policy, and the most curious aspect of it is that Tony Blair, who was responsible for passing the legislation on the funding of higher education, was somebody who believed very strongly that the forces of globalisation, global capital, could only be tackled by educating the population, so that they were sufficiently skilled to be able to demand decent wages in a globalised economy. However, having given prominence to education, he had actually failed to fund it, so we all have to pay for it ourselves.”
Having both spent much of the last ten years struggling to find a job and a place to live in London, the authors are keen to target the rental sector, the lack of social housing and the job market as areas where young people have been stripped of privileges enjoyed by the baby boomers. Malik is blunt: “We worked out that there’s an inequality of security...We don’t have stable homes, we don’t have stable jobs, we don’t have any way of saving for a pension. When you get to the age where you might want to settle down, maybe at 30, you find that you can’t. It doesn’t have to be like that.”
Internships are portrayed as little more than modern-day slavery and “essentially illegal”, given the volume of work done by graduates on so-called work experience fighting for permanent jobs. In the job market, Howker accuses the government of dereliction of duty.
Now we’ve got almost 40, 50 percent of school leavers going to university, so we don’t know what the net effect of them all having degrees will have on their earning potential. Anybody who tells you otherwise, including government ministers, is just misrepresenting what they know...All they’ve done is take some averages from polling for the last 20 years, and the situation is now completely different.
“We have this incredibly bad employment market. People are saddled with debt, they don’t know what they’re going to get out of it, because the claims that the government makes are at best a bit iffy and at worst completely meaningless. This presents a huge challenge to people. It doesn’t in any way represent a serious ‘manning-up’ and a serious tackling of the issues related to globalisation.”
There’s little sign that Howker and Malik are likely to be too pleased with the current government  either, as Malik argues: “Universities Minister David Willetts said that students are a burden on the taxpayer. That’s a crazy thing...Once students get a job they’ll be taxpayers too. What he means is they’re a burden on the taxpayers at the moment, older people. They’re a burden on old people.  We should say ‘Who do you want to pay for the NHS when you retire?’ We accept that they’ll get state pensions. Who’s going to pay for those state pensions? If there’s a burden, then older people are a burden on young people.”
Asked if there are any solutions, Malik and Howker stress that any individual action is more or less futile. Howker says: “It’s not sufficient to pretend that we’re all individual and people can look after themselves. They really can’t...Getting involved is incredibly important – actually they’re the only way we can try and shape our future. We’ve been told constantly to be individuals and that our freedom is absolutely paramount, but it turns out that as individuals, politically speaking, we’re actually much weaker than when we act in groups.”
On the subject of student activism, Malik is wistful about his own student days, which he says were “a very apolitical time”. At the end of our interview, he says “these are the sorts of debates I’d have loved to have had as a student”. While the authors are both confident that students are becoming more political – which Malik partly puts down to the influence of fees – they shy away from any clear statement that they expect great things of a student movement. The book may be a call to arms, but Howker and Malik are still waiting for a response.