Sex has fallen off the menu, the pints cost £9: this lost generation needs regeneration

A few years ago I finished writing a truly strange book called Do You Sincerely Want to Smash Capitalism and Have a Full Sex Life? It started with my experiences of falling among anti-capitalists who were as committed to the free availability of casual sex as they were to tear down the fabric of the capitalist state. The time, 1967, the place, Paris: with me suddenly catapulted there at the age of 21 while running away from the police in Swinging London. 

When I arrived, students were preparing for the great French social confrontation of 1968 when revolution, disruption, tanks surrounding Paris and the fall of General de Gaulle took France to the edge. That was where the title of the book came from, but the book’s content and title soon got separated from each other and the content ended up as a completely barmy, almost Midsummer Night’s Dream, with fairies and history and my own personal history mixed up like an eclectic stew. 

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Some people are devoted to the book, but as of yet no publisher. One of the devotees is a noted film company who are putting script and money together as we speak. As for me, I have tried reading it a dozen times since I finished it and can’t make ‘arse nor elbow’ of it. ‘Cacophony’ is the word that springs to mind. Loud unrelated things were yoked together by me, almost in a mad passion to include everything, including the kitchen sink, in a drive to finish the fecking book.

At last, I cried to my detractors, after years of trying I’ve got this potpourri of events and people and happenings; my mad life, written down between pages. 

I was reminded of my mad book and mad contents the other day when I heard something disturbing: that young people – battling with the burden of student debt, with unemployment, with doing worse than their parents (a first since the Second World War) and facing homelessness or a life of rented accommodation – were giving up on social mobility.

That the idea of building a career and a life of improving opportunities was a thing of the past. That collectively young people, loaded down with wellbeing issues and debt or the crap jobs on offer, were losing belief in a future. That wars and AI were compounding this feeling of the death of social mobility and the advent of simply trying to get by.

As if capitalism and its governments were making young people feel like refugees in their own country and their own economy, in which they played a desultory and increasingly negative part. It’s all well and good to be part of a country and its society; but not to be or feel a part of its economy is a death knell to ambition, hope and life. 

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The other reason I thought of my weird and hopefully wonderful book, was the ‘sex’ bit in the title. Apparently young people are going into pubs for £9 pints of beer and only having one. No wonder wild sex has fallen off the menu, along with its enjoyment. Hence the inappropriateness of my title, expressing a more jocund but lost time and period.

Where fraternisation leaped the sexual constraints of the parental generation. And to add insult to injury, the young of that time ended up with a house for under £20,000.

Today, the tearing down of capitalism, or its reinvention, is absent from the agenda it would seem. Rather, there is a depressing acceptance of what you can get by with; whether that’s a crap job or a paltry amount of state benefit. And social mobility, the driving force of generations since the Second World War, is a thing now dead in the water. 

If this story is true – bear in mind that all generalisations (including this one) are suspect – then political and social depression is on the rise. And with it, the tenacity to change is in short supply. Politics has become a depressing series of grumbles and disappointments.

But of course those who have no student debt because they have not progressed far in their education, the children of the working poor or those on benefit, have never had much hope of social mobility. Social mobility largely passed them by as they inherited the poverty of their parents and are set to pass it on to their children – the inheritance of poverty being their only legacy. 

Yet somewhere among all this it would seem there is some prosperity, as I witness on my way to Liverpool Street station, trying to get through the crowds of drinkers spilling out onto the night streets of the City of London.

The grey vans of Amazon and numerous delivery businesses pass by, dropping off at home what was once purchased on the high street or shopping mall. An aversion to looking about the world is rife, as all concentration is given over to the expensive-to-buy and expensive-to-run mobile phone. 

The whiff of a generation as it’s becoming lost made me think of the times we live in. And how archaic the title of my recent book may be. How a global regeneration is more pressing. A building of new forms of government that do not do more of the same. That embrace this crisis of the young and make it their own. That do not give up on generations that are facing a costly, chaotic and depressing world, often weighed down by debt, if you face a poor job future. And if poverty is your inheritance, a decreasing chance of catching the bus of opportunity. 

And then of course you’ve got the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor/Epstein hurdles to clear, and the meltdown of big party politics, Gaza and the need for Trump to wipe out his enemies wholesale. What
a palaver to have to climb over. 

Regeneration cannot be left to chance, for it may well fall into the wrong hands; and the ‘re’ is replaced with a ‘de’.

John Bird is the founder and Editor in Chief of Big Issue

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