‘Rishi Sunak’s barmy military concept is final straw for the no-hope youth of right this moment’

BY far the best question I’ve heard asked during this limp election campaign came from the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire.

Here is most of what she put to Transport Secretary Mark Harper on Newsnight this week: “Have the Tories got a problem with young people? You’ve tripled their tuition fees, you froze the threshold at which they have to start paying back their student loans, you extended the repayment term from 30 to 40 years, you invested only a third of what was recommended by the catch-up tsar to help kids catch up after the pandemic, rents rose nearly 9% in the last year and houses are their most expensive since 1876.”

Harper looked like he’d been slapped across his face with a wet mackerel before replying, totally unconvincingly: “No. Not at all.”

Which is where Victoria sadly had to miss a trick. Because had she had the time she could have added the following to make it the longest, and most damning, question ever asked of a politician.

Local libraries have closed, playing fields sold off and grants to teenage arts groups slashed as English councils now spend 73% less on youth services than they did in 2010/11.

There are 270,000 children waiting for mental health treatment partly due to bearing the brunt of Covid lockdown by being cut off from their schools, effectively to protect older people
from dying.

Those schools are in such a perilous state of structural degradation after years of cutbacks and lack of maintenance that many could collapse onto pupils.

The number of new apprenticeships has fallen by more than 40% since your government brought in a training levy in 2017 and Brexit
has screwed their chances of studying or working abroad.

Tory peer Lord Willetts has warned your government that retaining the triple lock will mean pension age may soon have to rise to 68, with experts reckoning those now at school will have to work into their 70s to claim it.

Today’s kids are projected to experience a four-fold increase in extreme weather events during their lifetime if global temperatures increase by 1.5C.

The over-50s now own 78% of the UK’s private housing wealth and the Institute for Fiscal Studies says young adults today are largely locked out of home ownership unless they have wealthy parents.

Artificial Intelligence will decimate their job opportunities. A study by the Institute for Public Policy Research claims 60% of current human tasks could be handed to AI with eight million UK workers at risk of being replaced by technology.

We have a national debt of £2.6 trillion, or 98% of GDP, equivalent to £37,900 per person which they will have to pay off.

The average graduate now enters the workforce with £44,940 worth of student debt, plus interest, some of whom are now being told by Rishi Sunak that their money has been wasted on Mickey Mouse degrees.

So has a flagship policy ever looked more likely to backfire than the one to force teenagers into National Service where they will be taught how to use a gun?

Because due to being treated so appallingly by older generations there’s a good chance they’ll turn their guns on us and fire away.

And we’ll have no grounds for complaint.