Charter flight to nowhere

Now that the unpleasantness of the general election is behind us and the long, lazy days of summer beckon, we can get back to business as usual, confident of knowing our places in a prosperous and well-ordered society. We are, as John Major has told us, ‘a nation at ease with itself’. Saint Margaret is in her heaven and all’s well with the world.

Yet the image of the world the Prime Minister presents to us is complacent in the extreme. Life, for many people in Britain, is not a game of cricket. Something is very rotten in the state of Britain -- and the evidence comes from a unlikely source.

The Samaritans have recently published figures showing a horrifying 74 per cent rise in the suicide rate in young men over the past decade. Indeed, the government’s own health strategy The Health of the Nation cites a similar figure -- albeit hidden away in one of the appendices to the document.

This appalling figure -- behind which we can only guess at the bleakness and despair which have blighted hundreds of young lives -- raises a clamour of urgent questions as to its cause. Or it should do. In fact, given the degree of complacency in the response of government, it provides stark evidence -- if any were needed -- of the widening gulf between political imagery and daily reality.

For the simple truth is that for over a decade, the government has pursued policies which have systematically robbed young people of any sense of hope, of idealism, or of the opportunity to contribute to a better future. Instead, we have been offered a vision of rising homelessness, long-term unemployment and debt, coupled with the cruel accusation that, somehow, young people -- or their feckless parents -- are to blame for all this and more.

But it was not young people, or their parents, whose policies cut state benefits for teenagers, who presided over the growth of homelessness, or who pushed forward the inequitable poll tax. It was not the young who set about widening income inequality to its greatest degree for over a century, with a resultant widening in health inequality. Young people, however, are paying the price for this politics of greed.

The mounting toll of suicides in young men stands as a grim indictment of the vision of the future our leaders have created for us. And what has been the government’s response to this crisis of confidence in life itself? How has it set about restoring the faith of Britain’s youth?

Sadly, John Major’s big idea is facile and irrelevant to the need of the hour. The issues of greatest immediate concern to young people -- and those linked most closely to the maintenance of mental health -- are the basic questions of shelter, of income, and of worthwhile employment. A strong commitment to the provision of such basic needs, backed by real resources, is long overdue -- yet all we see is one charter after another waved in our general direction.

And do these charters guarantee limits on waiting times for a home, or a job? Do they guarantee a minimum wage? They do not. Instead of publishing empty promises, the government must realise that it has created a society in which many are on the brink of despair. It must act now to create a land fit, not for heroes, but for ordinary people with ordinary needs.