Wasted attempts to do for young people what Owen Jones's Chavs did for the working class: rehabilitate the image of a section of the population so demonised that Max Hastings could get away with describing them, after the 2011 riots, as "essentially wild beasts".
A London councillor, and daughter of one of the architects of New Labour, Georgia Gould argues that it's not young people who are apathetic but mainstream politicians, by not making the effort to engage them. But if they're excluded from traditional politics, they're far from uninvolved. Young people across the country are showing tremendous initiative, energy and public-spiritedness in other areas. Why go to a public meeting to be denounced as a "problem" when you could aspire to motivate others by doing a TED talk? Gould challenges the idea of "clicktivism" as a lazy alternative to involvement by showing many examples of the kind of active involvement that signing an online petition can lead to.
The decline of traditional communities and institutions has not left young people anti-social and atomised: they establish alternatives instead. Among the young of today are just as many great community-minded organisers as there ever were. The difference is that they have tools no previous generation had at its disposal, and they use them inventively.
Individualism is one of the core issues here. Young people are derided for not getting involved with traditional mass movements and institutions. But how else would children growing up in a post-Thatcher Britain behave? The majority of Gould's interviewees are motivated, entrepreneurial-minded and scornful of welfare, and have internalised the idea that individual drive will triumph over external factors. The world they perceive is a dog-eat-dog one, in which people compete for limited resources. They're criticised for simply being products of the culture that spawned them, and Gould admits that Labour has to take its share of the blame: "This generation has never heard mainstream politicians advocate redistribution or champion the welfare state."
No one could read Wasted, with its numerous accounts of active and committed young people, and maintain a view of Britain's youth as couch potatoes and feral hedonists. Where Gould falls short is in her suggestions for bridging the gap between youth and mainstream society. She pinpoints the problems, but her solutions - relationships built on trust, greater inclusion and autonomy, working towards common goals - are vague in the extreme, and bring Wasted limping to a conclusion.
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