Today, those frustrated hopes and freezing afternoons appear in a different light — as the first signs of the generational divide that has come to define the country. After Labour’s humiliating defeat in the 2015 election, many of those involved in the student protests went on to support Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the party. In the 2016 Brexit referendum, three-quarters of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds voted Remain, while two-thirds of over-sixty-fives favored Brexit. Then, when a snap election was called in June 2017, Corbyn made abolishing tuition fees a flagship policy of the party’s manifesto, and Labour defied expectations to bring about a hung Parliament. Youth turnout climbed to a twenty-five-year-high; the generation gap was the widest since polling records began.
Myers chronicles the trajectory of this privatization push, which began with Tony Blair’s New Labour government — a period in which fees rose to £3,000 and private-sector activity in higher education grew from 32 percent in 2000 to 64 percent in 2007 (the EU average is 20 percent). The tripling of fees in 2010,” Myers writes, “did not emerge from nowhere.” Now, UK students are saddled with more debt on average — £50,800 — than in any other country in the world, partly thanks to extortionate interest rates that can be raised retrospectively at will. As one of the government’s own advisers on student finance remarked, if a company possessed similar terms they might attract sanctions, perhaps even prosecution. (In the United States, although the cost of tuition varies far more, the average debt burden on students is much lower at $36,000, or £27,900.) [...]
Most significantly, however, the demographic of these protests was different. Like the French student protests in 2005, the 2010 movement brought together a cross-section of poorer city youth — ethnically diverse and more disillusioned — with wealthier, middle-class students. These disparate groups had distinct motivations, but they had a shared feeling of being held in contempt.[...]
Again, this new alliance would endure after the collapse of the 2010 protests, helping fuel Corbyn’s ascendance to the top of the Labour Party. Support for Labour among black and minority voters rose by six points in the 2017 election, while turnout increased to a high of 64 percent. These communities have been disproportionately punished by austerity. Like students, they were asked to bear the burden of an economic crisis not of their making. As early as 2010 the Institute for Public Policy Research found that “mixed ethnic groups had seen the biggest increases in youth unemployment since the recession began, rising from 21 percent to 35 percent in the period.”
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