Читать книгу It’s All Their Fault - Neil Boorman - Страница 6

– his or her share of the £1.4 trillion Credit Crunch bailout. Added to which the average student graduates owing more than £20,000. Add all this together, and you’re left with a generation owing more than £40,000 before they’ve earned their first pay packet. That’s if you can get a job; there are 2.5 million people unemployed in the UK. One million of them are under 25 http://bit.ly/under25.

Pay packets, when you do finally find work, don’t stretch beyond the absolute basics. First-time buyers need to earn an above-average salary to afford an ex-council flat, and you need a partner earning a full-time wage just to cover the food and heating. It’s getting to the point where having children is a luxury.

Student debt is sold to us as an investment for our future, but that BA (Hons) certificate isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. The more companies streamline and outsource their manpower, the less chance we have of winning well-paid, long-term contracts. Forget about jobs for life, university graduates are settling for part-time shop work or volunteering abroad.

These days, it’s not unusual for 30-year-old professionals to go begging cap in hand to the Bank of Mum and Dad for bailouts, http://bit.ly/bankofmumanddad. And branches of the Hotel of Mum and Dad are springing up all the time – providing beds for a generation that studies hard for grades and toils diligently at work but still can’t afford to make their own way.

And where are the proprietors of Mum and Dad Plc, now that the Credit Crunch has killed the party? They’re safely tucked away in gated communities, or on permanent vacation in their places in the sun www.aplaceinthesun.com, leaving us to fight over the expensive dregs. If we have one certainty in the future, it’s that we’ll be working long past retirement age – which incidentally is being raised – to pay off the debts.