Radical future: politics for the next generation

We have been dubbed the millennium generation, iPods, the lost generation, Thatcher’s children – and told we are feckless, materialist, disengaged and even dangerous. Yet in the not too distant future the under thirties will inherit responsibility for a world full of problems not of our making. Many of our generation are detached from politics because politics has detached itself from us – we are disregarded in electoral calculations, disenfranchised by the main parties’ relentless focus on middle-aged Middle England. Yet most of us are concerned about the future, and many are active in single-issue campaigns. This book represents an attempt by a group of activists, journalists and academics to come to terms with the issues faced by our generation, and the kinds of politics we want for our future. We are a diverse group, but in our professional lives all of us work actively for a better society. We believe that this book should stand as a statement of intent, and as an offer to our elders to enter into the debate for our future. Introduction by Ben Little sets out the general argument of the book and looks at key examples of inter-generational inequality, for instance tuition fees. Chapter on "Networks and generational exceptionalism" by Ben Little argues that there is a dialectical movement between generations since WW2 in terms of the arena for political struggle. For the generation that fought the second world war, the prevailing question was around society, for their children, the baby-boomers, it was the individual, and for those born after 1979 it will be the network. There are, of course, longer genealogies for these framings of the political sphere, but for each generation the primary debates will be structured around those conceptions of human togetherness.

eBook, free to download from lwbooks. Contributors: Shiraz Ahmad, Joanna Allan, Sarah Baker, Clare Coatman, Kate Crawford, Rowenna Davis, Joss Garman, Jeremy Gilbert, Richard George, James Graham, Noel Hatch, Ben Little, Ben Mann, John Miers, Laurie Penny, Richard Pring, Arjun Singh-Muchélle, Elizabeth Somerville, Ejos Ubiribo.