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January 30, 2008 - Future Leaders Survey 07/08

I was trying to think the other day what it felt like to be 18 – back in 1968. A spate of 40-year on retrospectives covering the Paris riots and other events at that time have stimulated all sorts of dubious attempts on my part to re-capture the mood and the moments of that time. It was certainly bracing, and, for me at least, my first serious brush with radical politics – though a couple of rather well-behaved protests was about as far as it got in my case.

There would appear to be no such ‘new dawn’ mirages shimmering in front of today’s 18-year olds. The idea that students might take to the streets in their thousands, let alone engage in running battles with riot police for days on end, must be a completely alien notion.

But it was still very reassuring to see some serious anger bubbling through in the responses of the 25,000 university applicants to the second Future Leaders Survey – coordinated jointly by Forum for the Future and UCAS, and sponsored by Friends Provident. Bombarded as they now are on all sides, by uncompromising rhetoric about the likelihood of climate-induced meltdown, the inadequacy of the political response must appear breath-taking as far as they’re concerned. Whilst the majority of them would appeared to have resisted a collapse into apocalyptic despair (84% think it likely or very likely that human civilisation will last another century), their residual optimism is based on the prospect of radical change commensurate with the scale of today’s converging crises. And of that there is little sign, and that’s the source of their anger against politicians.

Surprisingly, there is also growing awareness that the cornucopian bonanza enjoyed by their parents’ generation may in fact be coming to an end – with 86% supporting the idea that material consumption must be reduced, and more than 50% subscribing to the heretical premise that economic growth should no longer be the government’s top priority.

Mind you, that kind of high-level response needs to be tempered by some of the specific responses. Perhaps not surprisingly, only 16% expect to avoid taking a flight that they would have taken otherwise for environmental reasons (happily, that is at least up on a 10% response last year!), whilst 82% are mustard-keen to get out there and visit as many exotic places as possible “before they disappear”!

Mind you, such ambivalence seems perfectly reasonable – especially given the fact that my generation probably wouldn’t muster anywhere near a 16% response to the same question!

But will the anger grow? What needs to happen to convert these reasonable plugged-in, compassionate people into cobble-stone heaving insurgents? Forty years ago, in 1968, the end of the world (for human civilisation at least) wasn’t even on the agenda – the greed, injustice and war-mongering oppressiveness of capitalism was quite sufficient.

Add eco-meltdown to that list (the rest of which has hardly gone away after all!), and who knows when that will create some kind of tipping point in gathering anger amongst the young.

For more information visit www.futureleaderssurvey0708.org.uk

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Posted on January 30, 2008 10:45 AM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

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