Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth

Why can so few young people afford to buy a house? Why do even top graduates struggle to find jobs? And when they do, why are those jobs poorly paid and unstable? Why does politics - from voting to protesting - seem so pointless? Why is Britain not just 'broken' but also broke? The jilted generation - those born after Thatcher came to power - face hard times. While their parents were handed free education, the jilted will be spend decades paying for theirs; while previous generations got jobs for life and bought homes to return to, the jilted generation are being locked out. But if Britain's young people are insecure, unstable and poor, their parents are the richest generation ever to have lived and they have flatly failed to share the wealth. Twenty-something journalists Ed Howker and Shiv Malik tell the sad, maddening story of how their generation's future, once alive with possibility, is being strangled by the culture of short-termism; how the baby-boomers - their parent's generation - seemingly squandered a nation's communal wealth, turned their back on society and broke all barriers in a lifelong quest to express themselves. Instead of creating a new world, their actions fostered a nation riddled with inequality, elitism and political corruption. Jilted Generation sets out how the next generation might succeed where this one has failed.

About the Author :
Ed Howker, 29, is associate editor of The Spectator. He has worked for Channel 4 Dispatches and The Independent. Shiv Malik, 29, was listed among the Evening Standard's most influential Londoners in 2008. Between them they have written for the New Statesman, Observer, Private Eye, the Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph and have appeared on Sky News, Front Row, Newsnight, the Jeremy Vine Show as well as Radio 4's PM and The Moral Maze.

Review :
"Jilted Generation is a tirade of fury... Ed Howker and Shiv Malik stake out their complaint with a waspishness which comes from personal experience - the struggle to find somewhere to live in London, and to find a secure job...the evidence of pokey overpriced housing and endless unpaid internships piles up convincingly." Madeleine Bunting, Guardian "Following those books a fourth has just come out. Only last week we had the launch of an excellent book, The Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth by Ed Howker and Shiv Malik. They mount an argument very similar to mine with powerful evidence of the raw deal for young people in the jobs market, in housing, and in pensions and savings." David Willetts, in speech to the Policy Exchange There's a new and noisy book just out which you must read to discover why the young and the old are shouting at each other over the supper table in a way I've not heard since those great divides over drugs'n'rock'n'roll or even the Iraq invasion.A" Margareta Pagano, Independent Howker and Malik extend their analysis beyond an it's-not-fair tantrum to knit together a taut and analytically rigorous narrative of 25 years of political myopia and mismanagement, outlining a series of gross policy errors that have disproportionately benefited the old at the expense of the young. These mistakes are likely to loom large over the UK for decades.A" Miles Johnson, Spectator. Jilted Generation...brilliantly analyses the problems faced by today's generation of young adults.A" Joyce MacMillan, Scotsman The book is hard to argue withA" Bright Green, August 2010 ProvocativeA" Robert Colvile, Telegraph.