David Willetts is Chair of the Resolution Foundation.
Young people are rioting in countries across the world. France and India are are the two most dramatic cases at the moment. They are worth investigating as there are some common threads which might be relevant, even to us here in the UK.
As always, university students are active in the French protests. But it seems as though the core protests concern schools which are set to get significant spending cuts and are already in poor physical condition. Teachers are protesting too. The French Government has got an even worse fiscal mess than we have and is trying to save money. After failing to get a grip on its expensive state pension, it is trying to save money on young people instead.
Some of the protesters used the One Piece flag, a symbol of personal liberation. It has also been used in other youth protests from Indonesia to Nepal – where protests against corruption and the nepo-babies of the elite who were getting the best jobs led to riots with 70 killed and the PM resigning.
The Indian protests also involve education, though the specifics are rather different. This time it is unhappiness about the conduct of exams, particularly the leaking of tests crucial for getting in to medical school, which has led to such significant stress, delays and resits that 20 students committed suicide.
India also has shocking levels of youth unemployment, estimated at being in the region of 40 per cent. India is going through a surge in the number of young people too, with between 27-29 million babies born every year between 2001 and 2008. That is a historic peak, and it is now down to 23 million.
Developing countries often have these surges of young people. They are an opportunity to transform an economy if an open labour market enables them to move into productive new jobs. But, if the jobs market is closed and jobs are determined by patronage and not merit , then there is anger and frustration. That is what led to the Arab Spring all those years ago.
There are similar demographics in France, though in a more muted form. France had a mini baby boom in the first decade of the century, with record numbers of over 800,000 babies born in the years 2005-2010. Since those years, it has gone down to about 600,000.
There is a common thread here. When there is a surge in the number of babies born there is often an increase in disruption and disorder some 15 to 20 years later. As I observe in my book The Pinch, London’s two biggest riots – the Grosvenor Square riots of 1968 and the Brixton and Broadwater Farm riots of 1965 each came about twenty years after the twin peaks of the post-war baby boom in 1947 and 1964.
This is partly because a surge of young people puts pressure on the education system and then, later down the line, on the jobs market. There is strength in numbers too, because it makes new products and services more viable when there are just so many young people. New technologies emerge to serve them. TikTok is the new vehicle of protest now, though it is better at stirring anger than at constructive organisation or deliberation.
This surge in the number of young people is not all bad news. There is also a demographic dividend if it is handled right. It can lead to a surge of young people into new jobs. After the riots and unemployment of the early 1980s we enjoyed strong growth and structural change in the British economy.
We are so focussed on the increasing numbers of baby boomers and the collapse of the birth rate in many Western countries that we have lost sight of the mini birth surge in between. In Britain we had a boom in births between 2010 and 2012, when they reached a historic high of over 800,000. Yet now, they are heading down to a record low of just over 600,000. Whilst primary schools are closing because of falling numbers, there is intense pressure on secondary schools, colleges and universities. And if these young people emerge to a blocked labour market with few job opportunities, then trouble is brewing.
So the challenge is not just for us individually to pass on an inheritance to our own children – admirable though that is. It is also for young people as a whole to have a chance of a good education and a good job which does not depend on who your parents are. And it should be possible to earn one’s way to wealth, not just to inherit it. Mobility and opportunity are the best way to protect us from the youth protests we see on our screens every day.