ABSTRACT
The economic crisis of 2007/8 had a severe impact on many young people. Patterns of inequality that had already emerged in a polarised service sector, as well as greater economic uncertainty, deepened social and economic divisions in the UK and elsewhere. Categorical distinctions of class, gender and age took on new salience as the crisis and the years of austerity strengthened differences between the young and the elderly, men and women, the middle and working class. Markers of youth identity and differentiation, created in the main through consumption, became increasingly hard to maintain as incomes fell and youth unemployment rates remained stubbornly high, even as the UK economy began to emerge from recession. For young people without work, a punitive benefit system left them poorer (in relative terms) than in previous decades. In the post-crisis precarious labour market, with the expansion of part-time work and various forms of self-employment, young men, especially minority men, seemed to fare worse than young women, although cuts in public services have an adverse effect on young women’s employment opportunities (Karamessini and Rubery 2013). Middle class youth, with family support behind them, were less badly affected than young people with little financial capital or other familial advantages. Even so, their prospects also worsened as the new millennium progressed. Insecure employment, zero hours contracts and the prospect of non-graduate level employment on graduation became more common. While the expansion of university education for growing numbers of young people is a mark of greater social equality in one sense, it now produces a generation of young people in debt. As debates about job insecurity and declining rates of social mobility became more urgent after the crisis, many young people demonstrated against education cuts, rising indebtedness, British involvement in wars, against violence, especially against women, gay men and women, and young people of colour, and for and against immigration. For the state, behind all these political movements lay fears of radicalisation of disadvantaged youth, especially young men from minority communities, including adherents of particular versions of Islam. New strategies of state surveillance were introduced and the world began to feel a more insecure place in which to move into adulthood. Collective political actions by young people quickly declined in significance from around 2012, after a moment of hope linked to, among other things, the socalled Arab Spring, that itself proved short-lived.
