This is so fucking shit for young people

[ssd]

Yeah i know its shit for everyone before you pounce on me

But imagine being around 20 just now...no pubs, no nightclubs, no jobs around, no buzz in your town centre, no excuse to dress up in something new, or planning your latest night out, meeting your pals and all the excitement of the night ahead.

Its just so fucking shite.

I got the train home tonight from work, Glasgow city centre is a ghost town. Places that were always busy boarded up, of course everything except like of newsagents and tesco's shut. Its Friday night. It was always jumping when i was young, absolutely jumping. It was dead. On the train was a bunch if young boys, playing music a bit too loud, all singing along....going home from the city centre at 6pm!!!!. I could have cried watching them all, a nice sunny evening and the only place they are heading was back to mum and dads, or a local park maybe, i dont know. They were about 18, casual dressed, haircuts, all wanting a good time with their pals and probably hoping to meet a partner if they were single.

Where is the life for these kids???

This has gone on long enough. I dont care if i never see inside a pub again. I've had a brilliant social life at that age. Now they have fuck all.

Its too much.

I can remember watching 'Pretty in Pink' and being confused. What's a 'prom'? Why is it important? A load of fuss about nothing. OTOH youth unemployment and YTS was real.

There seems to be a lot of concern about stuff that really doesn't matter like proms and freshers (I expect there was the same concern from the middle classes about the decline of the World tour at the start of the 20th century) that only apply to a subset of young people anyway.

Aside from the pretence that all young people could access a shining future that they have sacrificed or has been ripped from them, we need to recognise that we are only part way through this pandemic and that history teaches us that viruses are not passive. There is no historical or current global reason to believe that only the elderly or clinically vulnerable are at risk and that the young and healthy are protecting others rather than themselves.

@Empressofthemundane That is a fascinating report, thank you for posting.

Concerns on this thread were echoed by the Bath pub landlord who today ejected Keir Starmer from his pub, for not questioning lockdown. The landlord reminded him that average age of someone dying with is 82 years and 3 months, when average age at death is 81 years. He swore at Starmer and accused him of destroying young people’s futures because ‘old people are dying’.

KOKO I agree with you about proms but not about the freshers - lack of contact from peers and learning online has caused stress, loneliness and amxiety. My ds is very low. My dd who is not doing her GCSEs isn't missing the lack of Prom, a meet up with friends is just as good and we won't waste money on a dress she'll probably only wear once.

Could you post a link or provide any further information to surmise that young and healthy people will start to be hugely affected by Covid?

He swore at Starmer and accused him of destroying young people’s futures because ‘old people are dying’

Sounds like a nutter.

@Empressofthemundane
I think this is exactly right. It’s not so much the here and now that is a problem for young people though that’s bad enough. It’s that repeated lockdowns have massively damaged the economy and the government has spent everything which would have been for these people’s future on covid. That has an impact on jobs but also on all the sorts of services the state might otherwise have funded and in turn those things affect people’s health and quality of life in future. I think that is the fundamental unfairness here. And completely agree that most young people won’t understand that until far into the future so it is not really relevant that they may have been willing to sacrifice a year of seeing friends / going to the pub. The question should have been whether they are willing to risk a permanently lower quality of life and quite possibly lower quantity of life (as recession and unemployment strongly correlate with reduced life expectancy) to marginally decrease risk of covid to older people.

The government seems to have stopped talking about the economy and future now and even said at one point it wasn’t possible to model the long term cost of lockdown so they wouldn’t try. To me that just says they have put young peoples’ future at unquantified risk.

@Chessie678 That is very true, about young people being saddled with a future of debt, austerity, compromised health care, and likely reduced life expectancy.

It is not just about the harm to social life or even to their education. We are mortgaging their futures.

True

@Flyonawalk

So just to put some perspective on the cost of Covid, in December 2019 Jeremy Corbyn's spending plans including various nationalisation of rail and power industries were costed by the Conservatives at £60 billion, an additional debt they claimed would bankrupt the country.

To date the Conservatives have spent since March 2020 £400 billion.

Now the easiest way to get rid of this debt is to inflate it away but inflation is a bit of a loose cannon and it's not easy to put it back under control again. Plus with inflation there will be winners (rich with assets) and losers (poor in insecure jobs where the pay does not keep up with inflation).

Alternatively you could raise taxes but the top 1% of earners already pay 30% of all income tax and half the workforce don't pay any income tax at all because they are below the tax threshold.

That leaves spending cuts the attached is where the Government spends its money:

Now no Government is going to cut health spending post Covid, you can't cut pensions if you want to get elected because old people vote, you can't really cut welfare much more especially with rising unemployment or people will starve or turn to crime. So that just leaves education cuts which has the advantage of young people not voting as well as the current trend for teacher bashing.

Everything else (defence, transport etc) is relatively minor spending.

@1dayatatime It’s not just the £400bn spent either but also that tax revenues have dramatically fallen and likely to stay low for a while due to businesses having shut and unemployment. So less money coming in. Plus economies thrive on certainty and have had none of that - who would start a cafe if it could be shut down every time hospitals are busy. There is a lot of pent up money in the economy because some people have saved through lockdown but they’re unlikely to now spend as much as they would have done which just exacerbates the gap between rich and poor. Very hard to know what will happen though because we haven’t tried doing this to our economy before. If you raise taxes when businesses are vulnerable you risk them just giving up or people not starting a business in the first place (hence the delay to the increase in corporation tax) but at some point the government will need some money coming in. I do rate the chancellor but he has an impossible task. Hope they don’t cut education as that would really be another kick in the teeth for young people.

I'm bloody proud of them all though. They are still kicking back. Since DS2 returned to uni last week, he has been on a picnic in a London Park, been out helping feed the homeless with a uni charity then into Chinatown for dinner afterwards, been for dinner at the private flat of someone on his course and yesterday called to say he didn't finish his essay because he ended up on some pub roof terrace, drinking cocktails with a bunch of people on his course. And I thought: good for you. I'm actually glad you are skiving to go drinking. You are finally getting some of that social experience you longed for last September.

And his brother has finally been allowed back just this weekend and called to say there'd been a staircase party that night and he has plans to go out on the river with some friends and for dinner with some others. He's more sociable naturally and doesn't suffer social anxiety but even he told me it was a massive struggle ot make new friends last term and to find anyone he felt he knew well enough to rent a house with the following year.

It's all very well focusing on grades because there's sod all else to do, but actually, what matters most in life, and in work, is that you can get on with others. That's as much what uni is about as gaining a degree, which is why I despair of unis trying to palm students off with 'surveys show many students would prefer to stay online.' Well of course they would, They have social anxiety and depression and inertia and agoraphobia. It's the uni's job to tug them back into belonging in a society and to create one for them with F2F tutorials, seminars, lectures and societies.

[quote Flyonawalk]@Chessie678 That is very true, about young people being saddled with a future of debt, austerity, compromised health care, and likely reduced life expectancy.

It is not just about the harm to social life or even to their education. We are mortgaging their futures.[/quote]
We didn't finish paying for WW2 until 2006. This is nothing new. Not great, but nothing new.

I agree with the point about the services that might have been funded (though given we have a Tory government, I doubt we'd have got any new services anyway, other than something to bribe the Red Wall seats).

Between covid and Brexit, our young people have been thrown under a bus.

Still there will be plenty of fruit picking jobs (except that farmers don't want British employees because they are too slow and leave after 3 weeks hours ).

What an unfair and prejudiced comment poppycat10

That's great news Cowbells. My ds is holed up in his bedroom with the windows closed but I thought his expression looked a little brighter earlier on....all crossed he goes back at the weekend. I agree with you uni is also about learning to interact with different people and personal development.

I feel very sorry for CEV children.

I also feel so sorry for young people suffering from long covid.

This poor guy is only 23. He was working as a personal trainer. Now he's had to employ a carer and his mental health has been badly affected by his debilitating condition.

uk.news.yahoo.com/news/personal-trainer-health-anxiety-long-covid-105058416.html

@mustlovegin

What an unfair and prejudiced comment poppycat10

I'm assuming CEV and CV young people don't exist or don't matter to poppycat10. Seeing as they're the vulnerable - the group she thinks other young people have been 'thrown under a bus' for.

It's the disabled of all ages including the young who have been thrown under a bus. By this government, and by all those before it going back 30 to 40 years.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56812163

@ConcernedAuntie Pandemics are also nothing new. It is the response to this one which is unusual, harming as it does the youngest and weakest.

Another thing which is not new is the reality of post viral syndrome. Long covid is obviously recent and gets a lot of press. Chronic fatigue does not, although NICE estimate that 260,000 people in the U.K. have been living with it for years.

www.hriuk.org/health/your-health/lifestyle/people-with-coronavirus-are-at-risk-of-blood-clots-and-strokes

However, higher rates of strokes in patients with COVID-19 is somewhat unusual because it also seems to be happening in people under 50 years of age, with no other risk factors for stroke.

www.independent.co.uk/news/health/long-covid-symptoms-uk-ons-b1825434.html%3famp

More than a million people in Britain are suffering from signs of long Covid, the Office for National Statistics has said.

This is a significant increase in previous estimates of persistent and debilitating symptoms and follows the January surge in coronavirus.

Long Covid can include chronic fatigue, shortness of breath, so called “brain fog” as well as serious damage to the kidneys, heart and lungs.

Bear in mind that lots of people won't have yet been seen, diagnosed, or scanned. Especially with the NHS backlog. Many more than officially known are likely to have it.

@DoNotBringLulu

That's great news Cowbells. My ds is holed up in his bedroom with the windows closed but I thought his expression looked a little brighter earlier on....all crossed he goes back at the weekend. I agree with you uni is also about learning to interact with different people and personal development.

Thank you Lulu. I hope my post didn't come across as gloating. DS2 had a horrific first term at uni, alone in a flat no one else turned up to, completely isolated, no one allowed in. He was so lonely he stopped eating or sleeping and I was extremely worried for his MH at the time. DH and I had to visit him in his uni town and intervene several times to keep him afloat so I am overly happy that he has met some people and is interacting at last.

I really hope your DS can return to uni soon and get some form of a social life kick started before the summer. Fingers crossed for him.

NICE define long covid as symptoms lasting more than 12 weeks. Not suggesting that that isn’t a problem, but it isn’t necessarily permanent or life-changing.

@Cowbells I am so happy to read your life-affirming post, and hope your son has happy uni times ahead of this. That is what I am for for my student DC. This has been a very tough year for students.

I feel so sorry for all the poor children who've lost a parent to Covid.

I saw the article below and it made me think of how many our young have suffered this bereavement over the past year.

www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/dad-three-46-dies-after-20416513

He leaves behind 3 young children. So sad.