Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older?

Well frankly, it was about time. This week, the Coalition government threw an apparent bone to young people. Speaking as a young person (and I’ll have none of that sniggering), I am well aware that I don’t tend to be at the political centre of gravity.

There is a great scene in a new film, The Ides of March, that captures the zeitgeist: the idea of National Service is floated by Ryan Gosling’s character as a perfect piece of policy: the only people who disagree are under-18s, and they can’t vote.

This happens all the time, of course, away from the big screen. Even those of us who can vote are a bit concern: we turn out in lower numbers, and we are dwarfed by simple demographics. Recently, young people have seen a steady tide of news go against them. Many will pay more fees and receive less educational support. Young people are already suffering the brunt of unemployment. This belt-tightening will happen against the backdrop of handsome rewards for those who happen to be older.

Universal benefits for the elderly are preserved, despite a clamour for reform of that unjust system. Inheritance tax thresholds have been raised yet again, despite the tiny number of estates that attract the tax. (As an aside, the argument against inheritance tax has always struck me as a curious one: you had to be neither a shrewd investor nor particularly hardworking to ‘earn’ a huge amount of money off an unprecedented housing boom.)

But wait! What’s this? In swoops the Coalition to save the day. Yesterday they announced a raft of measures which will ‘unstick’ the housing market and catapult young people onto the property ladder, which sure sounds like a gee-whiz place to be to me, mister.

Thanks, but no thanks. Young people leaving university with £40,000-worth of debt, as they soon will be, cannot afford even 95% mortgages – and since most of our incomes would be spent servicing debt on such a mortgage, the situation would be little better than renting. Even if home ownership is desirable from an individual perspective – property does, after all, print money – from a societal point of view it is problematic.

There is a great irony in Mr. Cameron’s wording: ‘unsticking’ the housing market by encouraging ownership will make the economy very ‘sticky’ indeed. Young people now, more than ever, need to move to wherever there are jobs. If we lose ours, it is better that we are nimble, able to pick ourselves up and move to find work. Tying down the young people who could be contributing so much to our economy is the last thing we need to do. And that’s without factoring in the questionable logic of driving house prices still higher.

More than anything else, piling mortgages on top of eye-watering personal balance sheets enshrines a wider culture of debt. What is another £10,000 on a credit card, when you already owe the Student Loans Company £40,000, and your mortgage provider £250,000? Where do you suppose this ends, Mr. Cameron? This policy would further normalise debt. Spending hopelessly beyond our means is a poor basis for growth – a tough lesson which I thought we’d just learnt.

Our generation will live in the shadow of the previous one. We will struggle with the very real impact of climate change. We will pay for handsome pensions, the like of which we are unlikely ever to see. The poorest amongst us will struggle to find council housing, because of -  wait for it – the cult of home ownership.

I, for one, am angry. I see wealthy, middle class and middle-aged Britons, Britons who grew fat on a property boom that they will scarcely see the dark underbelly of, nodding along to the Occupy protests, grumbling about ‘greedy bankers’. It takes two to tango, folks.