Why are Indians leaving India?

 

Why are the youth leaving India?

 

Stubborn Unemployability of Indian Youth

 

Rahul Gandhi & Priyanka Gandhi Vadra release 'Youth Manifesto' for UP

 

Reinventing communism can help both the CPI and India

Anand B in The Hindu




The Communist Party of India and its ideology seem to have lost a bit of its sheen in the last three decades, today peeking shyly from the Kerala undergrowth. Time to take to the streets — er, the social media? | Wikipedia

December 26, 1925, was the day the Communist Party of India considers as its foundation day. The party is now 92 years old. There are 84 parties that branched out from this party and follow communism today. This is, however, not about the party leaders or the staunch followers of communist philosophies in the party. This is more about actual communist and socialist workers — people who believe in communism and socialism regardless of their being a member of any affiliated parties.

The communist parties have succeeded in alienating themselves and the communist philosophy as a whole from the youth. Sure, the parties have members under the age of 35. But again, this isn’t about the party or its student-body members.

This is about the man (or woman) who works hard every day to earn a living. The man who no longer cares about philosophies or society as a whole. With the advent of technological advances, communism or Marxism has been left behind. Unfortunately, it is not Marx’s fault. He welcomed technology. He never recommended the destruction of the means of production; he asked the workers to seize it for the greater good. 
The IT and BPO industry sans unions have completely blocked a section of society — a vibrant section — from the philosophies and, subsequently, the parties too. An industry which attracted a whole generation for over two decades now has been kept away from the Left and this has crippled the spread of the ideology as well as its philosophy and politics greatly.

How did communism grow?

To delve a bit deeper, let us take a look at how communism spread. It did not spread merely through charismatic oratory figures or sectarian ideologies like caste or language. It spread from the bottom up. It spread from the workshops. It spread from the factories. It spread from weavers. It spread from the farmers. It spread in the form of trade unions. It spread in the form of student bodies. It spread based on the success it had in the form of USSR, which went toe to toe with the United States.

This meant a person who was to eventually join the party would first have to be attracted by its ideology and the philosophy. This was achieved by a propagandisation of the benefits one would get as a member of the proletariat as much as the power of the workers’ rights against the exploitation they were subjected to. It was done by apprising the worker of their rights. Grassroots propagandists like Jeevanandam or Jyoti Basu or E.M.S. Namboodiripad, who went on to become leaders, greatly helped in taking this message to the common man.

What changed?

The factors that helped in spreading the ideology largely disappeared during the final decade of the last century.

With the globalisation of the Indian Market, the death of the USSR, and the absence of grassroots propagandist leaders in the league of EMS or Jeevanandam, the party and its ideology have come in for hard times. The current party leaders confining their discourse largely to politics is not helping either. Not to mention, the mass influx of American culture along with the growth of the IT/BPO industry further dented its reach — the youth became more interested in seizing the day than seizing the means of production. And then, when the communists of the country started to set themselves against both globalisation and pop culture, they completely alienated the present generation, and they were forced to retreat to the universities in the north and factories in the States they ruled.

But they do exist. The philosophy, like all others, cannot be killed so long as even one person believes in it — indeed, even if no individual believes in it. The communists, however, are no longer as ideologically relevant or politically dominant as they used to be and should be to keep the social balance. Nor are they spreading the word as effectively as they used to.

The fact that they still limit themselves to talking about farmers and factory workers is ensuring that a young section of society finds communism or socialism an alien concept. Without meandering into the partisan part of it, being unrelatable is not doing the philosophy or the ideology any favours.

The need for communism

So, why bother with rejuvenating a dying movement? Because the need for communism and socialism is now higher than ever. When the Right gets stronger, the Left is needed to balance it out just as the Right balances the Left. Like the force from Star Wars, the balance of power needs to be restored.

On the personal front, the youth no longer are interested in hunger unless it is their own. They are not interested in problems until it affects them. By living each day for itself, we, the youth, have forgotten the lessons the past taught us and ignore the impact that forgetting these lessons can have on the future. Likes, Shares and Retweets are the highest form of response you can get for actual issues from other members of the proletariat today. All their intelligence and ability to understand politics and social structures is being squandered as they spend all of it on pop culture. The politics in House of Cards and Game of Thrones is more interesting than the actual politics that affect them on a day-to-day basis.

Seeing the bigger picture, unchallenged power corrupts. Congress — left of Center under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi — is just not enough. With the currently weak leadership in the party, be it at the regional or national level, Congress is not even a challenge for someone like Modi. As much as we need the aggressive development BJP promises, we also need to have checks and balances politically.
The news channels are not helping. They are giving more coverage to moralistic or mundane controversies (Padmavati, Trump tweets) than actual issues of economic and ecological significance (GST implementation, education sector woes). It is easier to distract the news channels than to distract the youth. Thanks to the TRP race, the current hot issue matters more than the ones that are important to the country as a whole in the long run.

Socialistic and Communist thinking could be the perfect cure for these modern-day ills and help create a future generation that is aware of the hows and whys of the policies that affects them. Taking the thinking to the youth and first-time voters will help the country greatly. The parties that follow Marx are the ones who should take ownership with this. They are better equipped to take this responsibility than anybody else.

What can they do?

Marx talks more about factories in his manifesto than agriculture. Lenin is credited with bringing in farmers into the fold of socialism and communism — he brought in the sickle and made the philosophy relevant to a larger audience.

Instead of limiting themselves to Marx’s writing, they need to evolve, much like Lenin, and reach out to the larger audience on the issue that affects them. They lost a wonderful opportunity during the recession-driven IT layoffs, for instance, to emphasise their philosophical importance.

Just like they went to universities to reach students, went to factories to reach workers and to farms to reach farmers, they need to go where the youth are concentrated today — the social media.

The philosophy needs to go into their handheld device, those we spend more time with than our better halves or parents. It is up to the party to take it there, to them, with a renewed set of issues that can be solved or mitigated by the application of socialism. This cannot involve merely creating an app which echoes the leaders’ political critique of Modi’s policies but also about creating awareness about the philosophy as a whole in a simple and reinvented ways. They also need to acknowledge that the present generation seeks out the trappings of global pop culture to decide which ideas to consume. Therefore, communism needs to outgrow the books and literature that helped propagate the philosophy in its heyday and be more proactive in its outreach.

Failure to evolve will result in extinction. And socialism/communism is one philosophy that needs to exist in our country and survive as a counterbalance for the other side. The ball is in the parties’ court for now, as always. It is up to them to decide on what to do with it, for it decides their future and ours.

On Tory attempts to Activate British youth

Skepta will make a video on a skateboard park with his crew, singing ‘I’d do anything to please her, my Theresa, got a smile like Mona Lisa, as strong as Julius Caesar, as long as DUP get money to appease her’


Mark Steel in The Independent


This is a wonderful development: a youth group has spontaneously erupted to support the Conservatives, and calls itself Activate. It’s surprising this has taken so long, as you often hear young people in nightclub queues saying: “Listen up blud, a man Hammond getting bare fiscal growth yu get me, him one sick chancellor bruv.”

The plan must be for Chris Grayling to appear on Radio 1, interviewed about Brexit by Jameela Jamil, who says: “Wow, your riff with the Danes about butter tariffs was like totally AWESOME.”

At their conference, Conservative members will be told to wander into random locations chanting “Oooo Andrea Leadsom”, as this will result in young people joining in until it’s a Christmas number one featuring Stormzy in a duet with Amber Rudd.

Skepta will make a video on a skateboard park with his crew, singing: “I’d do anything to please her, my Theresa, got a smile like Mona Lisa, as strong as Julius Caesar, as long as DUP get money to appease her.”

Or the Conservatives may concede that the grime scene has committed itself to Labour, so they’ll have to co-opt a different style of youth music – such as thrash metal.

Then at fundraising garden fetes, the local Conservative MP can announce: “Thank you so much to Thomas and Frances Diddlesbury for such generous use of their grounds as ever, and for Lady Spiglington who surpassed herself this year with her delightful vol-au-vents and exquisite cranberry salad, and now I’m sure you’ll all join me in welcoming our special guest band to see us through the evening – let’s hear it for ‘Skull-crushing Death’.”

Then the singer will inform the crowd: “This first song is about the need for a tough stance on Brexit – sing along with the chorus that goes ‘They’re gonna crush your bones, crush your bones nnnnnygggggghaaaa vrrrrrr the European single market will lead us to Satan Satan Satan Luxembourg is run by Satan’.”

It’s typically astute that the spontaneous young Conservatives chose Activate as the name of their group, proving their sharp sense of youth culture, because like Momentum, this has the crucial quality of being three syllables.

They probably had lengthy discussions on which three-syllable word to choose, from a shortlist that included Caliphate, Urinate, Camper van, Rwanda and Wheelie-bin.

The next stage will be for Activate to collect millions of followers on Twitter, posting pithy youthful Tory tweets such as: “OMG! David Davis negotiation Gr8 massive love bro”, and “Bring back da hunt dem fox get merked proper lol.”

Because what the Conservatives have worked out, is that Jeremy Corbyn succeeded in appealing to millions of young people because he put stuff on Twitter.

No one was bothered about what he said on Twitter; it could be abolish tuition fees, or quadruple them – but the main thing is he said it on Twitter.

Then lots of young people said, “Oh look, like wow that old dude is on Twitter and shit”, and started singing his name.

So the Conservatives just have to copy the Corbyn image and they’ll win back the youth vote. Michael Fallon will grow a beard, and when he’s asked about Trident, he’ll say, “Talking of massive weapons, look at this beauty” – and display a prize-winning radish from his allotment.

This is why they’re promoting Jacob Rees-Mogg. Corbyn may be naïve enough to think he won popularity amongst the young by opposing zero-hour contracts, but the real reason was that young people are won over by anyone who seems a bit quirky.

So if Mogg doesn’t work, they’ll pick a leader from the people who go out on the first heats of Britain’s Got Talent, choosing someone who dresses as an ostrich and eats bees.

The Conservatives have a problem in trying to create an organisation that copies Momentum. It’s that Momentum didn’t just enrage the Tories – it also infuriated most Labour MPs, by backing someone who had spent his life on the edge of the Labour Party (usually in opposition to the leadership).

So it’s handy that they claim Activate has sprung up spontaneously, in a vast surge of natural youthful enthusiasm for working without a contract and having nowhere to live.

Amongst this energised adolescence is Activate’s National Chairman, Gary Markwell, who has suddenly decided to pull together these young forces who are crying out to be led.

He’s a reflection of how this is a grassroots movement, because up until now Gary has had no connection whatsoever with the hierarchy of the Conservative Party – except for being a campaign manager for Theresa May and Boris Johnson for ten years.

Now he’s suddenly decided to spontaneously set up Activate, in the same way that Nigel Farage might announce: “It’s never occurred to me before, but I think I might start campaigning to leave the EU.”

They’ve made an excellent start, because the way to win young people over, according to any faint study of the nation’s youth, must be to prove the Conservatives are the party of compassion and spirit and youthful energy.
So a Whatsapp group, described as a “precursor” to Activate, has been revealed to have had a fascinating discussion about the issue of “chavs”. An event in a working-class area is described as: “A fine opportunity to observe homo chav. And gas them all.”

It’s then suggested they could have medical experiments performed on them, to see how “they’re good at producing despite living rough”, and “substituted for animals for testing” and on and on.

That should do it. The Tories are already on 17 per cent of the under-24 vote, and Activate should guarantee it goes a long way down from there.

Extremism is surging. To beat it, we need young hearts and minds

Scott Atran in The Guardian

The last of the shellshocked were being evacuated as I headed back toward Las Ramblas, Barcelona’s famed tourist-filled walkway where another disgruntled “soldier of Islamic State” had ploughed a van into the crowd, killing at least 13 and injuring more than 120 from 34 nations. Minutes before the attack I had dropped my wife’s niece near where the rampage began. It was deja vu and dread again, as with the Paris massacre at the Bataclan theatre in 2015, next door to where my daughter lived.

At a seafront promenade south of Barcelona, a car of five knife-wielding kamikaze mowed down a woman before police killed them all. One teenage attacker had posted on the web two years before that “on my first day as king of the world” he would “kill the unbelievers and leave only Muslims who follow their religion”.

Mariano Rajoy, the president of Spain, declared that “our values and way of life will triumph” – just as Theresa May had proclaimed “our values will prevail” in March when yet another petty criminal “born again” into radical Islam drove his vehicle across Westminster Bridge to kill and wound pedestrians.

In Charlottesville the week before, the white supremacist attacker who killed civil rights activist Heather Heyer mimicked Isis-inspired killings using vehicles. “This was something that was growing in him,” the alleged attacker’s former history teacher told a newspaper. “He had this fascination with nazism [and] white supremacist views … I admit I failed. But this is definitely a teachable moment and something we need to be vigilant about, because this stuff is tearing up our country.”

The values of liberal and open democracy increasingly appear to be losing ground around the world to those of narrow, xenophobic ethno-nationalisms and radical Islam. This is not a “clash of civilisations”, but a collapse of communities, for ethno-nationalist violent extremism and transnational jihadi terrorism represent not the resurgence of traditional cultures, but their unravelling.
This is the dark side of globalisation. The western nation-state and relatively open markets that dominate the global political and economic order have largely supplanted age-old forms of governance and social life. People across the planet have been transformed into competitive players seeking fulfilment through material accumulation and its symbols. But the forced participation and gamble in the rush of market-driven change often fails, especially among communities that have had little time to adapt. When it does, redemptive violence is prone to erupt.

The quest for elimination of uncertainty, coupled with what social psychologist Arie Kruglanski deems “the search for significance”, are the personal sentiments most readily elicited in my research team’s interviews with violent jihadists and militant supporters of populist ethno-nationalist movements. In Hungary, we find strong support for the government’s call for restoring the “national cohesion” lost with the fall of Miklós Hothy’s fascist regime in the second world war. In Iraq, we find nearly all young people coming out from under Isis rule in Mosul initially welcomed the stability and security it offered, despite its brutality, amid the chaos following the US invasion.
In the world of liberal democracy and human rights, violence – especially extreme forms of mass bloodshed – is generally considered pathological or an evil expression of human nature. But across most history and cultures, violence against other groups is claimed by the perpetrators to be a sublime matter of moral virtue. For without a claim to virtue it is difficult, if not inconceivable, to kill large numbers of people innocent of direct harm to others.
Ever since the second world war, revolutionaries and insurgents willing to sacrifice themselves for causes and groups have prevailed with considerably less firepower and manpower than the state armies and police forces they oppose. Meanwhile, according to the World Values Survey, the majority of Europeans don’t believe democracy is “absolutely important” for them; and in France and Spain we find little evidence of willingness to sacrifice much of anything for democracy – in contrast to the willingness to fight and die among supporters of militant jihad.

How can we resist, compete with, and overcome these strengthening countercultural pressures in the present age? Perhaps, for some, a re-enchantment and communitarian rerooting of our own values of representative government and cultural tolerance provides an answer. Preserving what is left of the planet’s fauna and flora and avoiding environmental catastrophes may offer a new course for others. Or the coming generation, if allowed, may offer whole new ways of understanding.


Young people are viewed mostly as a youth bulge and a problem to be pummelled rather than as a youth boom

Yet no countervailing message will spread in a social vacuum, in the abstract space of ideology or counter-narrative alone. The means of engagement are critical, requiring close knowledge of communities at risk. Most often, people join radical groups through pre-existing social networks. This clustering suggests that much recruitment does not take place primarily via direct appeals or following individual exposure to social media (which would entail a more dispersed recruitment pattern). Rather, recruiting often involves enlisting clusters of family, friends and fellow travellers from specific locales (neighbourhoods, universities, prisons).

Our research into the history of Isis-inspired attacks in western Europe clearly indicates that initial attempts by those directly commissioned by Islamic State, and without involvement from locally pre-existing social networks, mostly failed; however, as that involvement broadened and deepened, attacks became progressively more lethal. In our research, we find loose but wide-ranging connections between jihadist circles in Barcelona and much of western Europe, the Maghreb, the Levant and beyond that stretch back even before the attacks of 9/11.

The necessary focus of engagement must be youth, who form the bulk of today’s radical recruits and tomorrow’s most vulnerable populations. Volunteers for al-Qaida, Isis and many extreme nationalist groups are often young people in transitional stages in their lives – immigrants, students, people between jobs and before finding their life partners. Having left their homes and parents, they seek new families of friends and fellow travellers to find purpose and significance.

We need a strategy to redirect radicalised youth by engaging with their passions, rather than ignoring or fearing them, or satisfying ourselves by calling on others to moderate or simply denounce them. Of course there are limits to tolerance, and dangers of worse violence in appeasement of the intolerable. Our partisan divisions include real differences in values that politicians and pundits hype and ply into existential threats. But there are still vast common grounds in a world where all but the too-far-gone can live life with more than a minimum of liberty and happiness, if given half a chance. It is for this chance that some of our forebears fought revolutions, civil wars and world wars.

Why Corbyn could come up Trumps

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

The season of looking back with big ideas has come early this year, thanks to Brexit, Donald Trump and now the referendum rout in Italy. And two of these big ideas tend to converge. The first is that populism is on the march, thanks to those “left behind” by free-market orthodoxies. The second is a despairing cry of: “Where, oh where, is the political left when we need it?”

In the UK, those “left behind” are now in the sights of all political persuasions, but most conspicuously from the right and from those experts so derided by the Brexiteers. Theresa May has made social justice a theme of her early months as Prime Minister, while the minuses of globalisation have featured even in a speech by the head of the Bank of England, along with arguments that something – though it is unclear precisely what – should be done.

The difficulty is that the mooted solutions are unpalatable, especially to those who have thrived amid free movement and the free market. More redistributive taxes in the Scandinavian mode; swingeing tariffs on imports of cheap foreign goods; walls, literal and metaphorical, to keep cheaper labour out; incentives for employers to keep jobs at home; subsidies for workers who would otherwise be priced out of their jobs by foreign competition – none of these are seen as desirable or realistic. They fly so much in the face of all the prevailing assumptions of a generation.

If the ideas about populism in the UK and its causes differ little from those swirling around elsewhere, we have our own local personification of the political left’s failure in the figure of the Labour leader. Jeremy Corbyn is seen as inept and divisive; a man who became party leader by a fluke and has no prospect whatsoever of becoming prime minister.

Why not? To his detractors, the reasons are so obvious that they hardly need to be stated. He is in every way a throwback to an age that is long gone. He may have taken the advice about suit-wearing offered vicariously by David Cameron’s mother, he may have learned from Michael Foot about how not to turn up on Remembrance Sunday at the Cenotaph. But he lauded Fidel Castro after his death, and he still harps on about exploitative employers and profiteering bankers.

He has absorbed nothing from the victories of Tony Blair and what makes a modern Labour party electable; nothing about aspiration from erstwhile Mondeo Man, and nothing about remaining “intensely relaxed” with people getting “filthy rich”. No wonder, Corbyn’s opponents would say Blair is contemplating a comeback.

The fact that Labour’s poll ratings are disastrous, that a party candidate lost their deposit at the last (Richmond Park) by-election, and that one-time safe northern constituencies are haemorrhaging votes via Brexit to Ukip are all reasons why Labour under Corbyn is supposed to be a lost cause. And, of course, to return to appearances, Comrade Jeremy just does not look or sound prime-ministerial, and everyone knows he is a hopeless administrator: not leadership material at all.

This is not, however, anything like the whole truth. Labour’s poll ratings are dismal at least in part because it is presenting itself as a divided party. And whose fault is that? There is an ideological rift between the mainly Blairite MPs and the grassroots who – post-Ed Miliband – were given a vote for leader. Under that system, Jeremy Corbyn has won the leadership convincingly, not once, but twice. So who is perpetuating the division – the majority or the minority? In other contexts, those who don’t accept the rules of the democratic game have been called variously “sore losers”, “Remoaners”. Who, I repeat, are the non-democrats here?

Under Corbyn, Labour’s record in by-elections has been creditable – it has not lost a single seat it previously held – despite the fervent hopes of some that a loss would offer a pretext to oust him. And after the Brexit vote, has Labour’s record been any worse than that of the divided Conservatives? On the contrary, in the former Attorney General, Keir Starmer, the non-managerial Corbyn has somehow found a persuasive spokesman. Emily Thornberry is making a decent job of shadow Foreign Secretary. Labour has been scoring points on benefits and the NHS.

If it were united, it could do much, much better. But it would have to be united on Corbynite, old-Labour terms – the very terms, in fact, which explain Labour’s appeal to a whole new constituency: all those young people allegedly turned off by politics, who thronged the rallies of a bearded 67-year-old. At a time when the great and the good lament the political disengagement of the young, Corbyn has struck a chord with a programme of back-to-basics leftism from which he has barely deviated over decades.

After Iraq, the financial crisis, the spinning away of the super-rich, and the legions “left behind” by late 20th-century capitalism, those basics have a new resonance. This is why one of the big questions of the year has been: where is the left when we need it? But it is also why those who embraced Blairite centrism don’t want to know. It is their model of ideological flexibility and economic compromise that has aged badly, not Corbyn’s attachment to the old verities. It is the old left – of workers’ rights, the social-safety net, redistribution, and equality, of opportunity if not outcome – that has to be the source of Labour’s revival.

These are not my politics, and – according to some – Labour is already up to its old “splittist” tricks, with Trotskyite entryism again a threat. But there is a place for an old British left perspective on the world and its coherent critique of capitalism could yet enjoy electoral appeal. Corbyn is building a passable team; he has scored points at Prime Minister’s Questions, and in tapping into the youth vote, he has done what no other party leader has managed to do.

He may not look, sound or behave as a prime minister-in-waiting and the polls have him doomed – but these are not necessarily counter-indicators in this perverse age.

The housing crisis is creating sharp-elbowed husband hunters

Grace Dent in The Independent

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” wrote Jane Austen, foretelling the British housing situation in 2016, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in need of a wife.” Oh how I struggled, as a sixth-former in the Nineties, with the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice.

How hideous, I thought, that a time existed when a woman would marry a man for a house. Cut forward some two decades to the era of the £80,000 mortgage deposit. How odd that marrying bricks and mortar – with an added spouse as a bonus – seems pragmatic, rather than mercenary, today.

I very much enjoyed a recent column by the writer Esther Walker, in which she admits spying her then-boyfriend Giles Coren’s slightly neglected five-bedroom London townhouse, seven years ago, and being instantly smitten. With the house, that is. Coren, as alluring as he is, came second in the equation. First, Walker says, she saw the chipped front door, the replaceable carpets and all that lovely space. Here was a home in which she could live, nest, and raise children.

It is fascinating to me that, five short years ago, a confession as gloriously candid as Walker’s would have provoked feminists into bringing down the internet. I would have been among them, perhaps. Today, I greet the same news with a relaxed shrug of acceptance.

Just five short years ago, I remained convinced that if a young woman – or a young man, for that matter – dreamed audaciously and worked very, very hard, they need not be dependent on anyone for a home. I bought my own house through sheer slog and bloody-mindedness; why couldn’t Generation Buzzfeed do the same? 

But little by little, I’ve watched the rise of single men and women trapped in later-life house-shares. I’ve seen how grown-up children are reduced to squatting like cuckoos in their parents’ back bedrooms until well after it is polite. Eventually, I was writing about the rise of strangers in London sharing bunkbeds (out of grim necessity, I should point out, not as a niche hobby).

The future seemed rather infantalising. And for women, feminism may well have flourished, but owning the house you live in, like Beyoncé sang about in “Independent Women” has fallen on its arse somewhat.

The facts are sobering: recent research by the Resolution Foundation on inter-generational fairness shows that in 1998, more than half of those earning 10 to 50 per cent of the average national income had a mortgage. This figure dropped to one in four by 2015. Within a decade, if things continue as they are, one in 10 will have a mortgage. In the late 1990s, when I was a strident youthful thing, it took determined people like me three years to save up for a deposit. Today it would take 22 years. That’s a long time to share a bunk bed, even if it’s in HMP Holloway.

This is particularly bleak in the light of new research on the rise of the “crowd worker” – people paid through online platforms such as Uber, Upwork and TaskRabbit. Here, instead of fairly paid, pensionable work which impresses mortgage vendors, there is a generation tied to their phones waiting to accept or decline piecemeal “tasks”.

Crowdworkers tend to work without benefits such as sick pay, holiday pay, pension contributions or minimum wage guarantees. There must – I suspect, as I’ve never worked like this myself – be a feeling for crowdworkers of being tremendously busy and usefully employed. But meanwhile, financially at least, they are treading water. I’m not sure how you conduct a family life or a relationship around crowdwork, although I’m pretty sure the people who profit from it will say that it’s this versatility that is the unique selling point.

One thing I do know is that Walker’s confession unveils an unpalatable truth about the modern British relationship. We are, increasingly, a nation of clandestine Austen heroines in search of those “in possession of a good fortune”. Be you feminist or fervent bachelor, gay, straight, male, cis or genderfluid; for the average person, marrying into property will be your best shot at “owning it” these days. And if you can charm your name on to the mortgage deeds, well, even better. The housing crisis will make sharp-elbowed, radar-eyed Chelsea husband-hunters of all of us.

In another five years, I predict that Tinder will be outmoded by a simple database of single millennials who were lucky enough to inherit – or afford – a three-bedroom house with space for a homeworking office and a nursery. Or an app which lists unwedded people with sickly parents about to cark it who, in the meantime, happen to be sitting selfishly on a five-bedroom pile in Surrey. In the future, these property owners – not the slinky, the booby or the muscular – will be the sex gods of society.
These gods will woo you with their seductive talk of land registry documents, convertable attic space and the downsides of a 20-metre back garden. You will be powerless in the face of their Farrow & Ball catalogue and hopelessly impressed that their bed is on one level and not accessed via a ladder. You will swipe right for a place to call home. Sure, deep, real love will keep you warm in bed at night. But when the place is yours, you can stick in underfloor heating and a reliable combi-boiler.

First Corbyn, now Sanders: how young voters' despair is fuelling movements on the left

Owen Jones in The Guardian

On both sides of the Atlantic, economic insecurity is fuelling the rise of new movements on the left.

 

Bernie Sanders was neck and neck with Hillary Clinton in this week’s Iowa caucus. Photograph: Yin Bogu/Xinhua Press/Corbis

He’s the septuagenarian powered by youth. The figures behind Bernie Sanders’ triumph in Iowa – in which his grassroots insurgency scored a virtual tie against what he rightly described as “the most powerful political organisation” in the US – are astonishing. Among Iowa Democrats aged between 17 and 29, 84% opted for this unlikely youth icon; among those aged 30-44, Sanders still had a 21-point lead over Hillary Clinton. It was older Americans who flocked to Clinton’s camp: nearly seven out of 10 of those aged over 65. The generations appeared separated by a political chasm.
Here is a phenomenon far from specific to the United States. It is a story of young people facing a present and future defined by economic security, often apparently doomed to a worse lot in life than their parents. They often feel unrepresented, ignored, betrayed or outright attacked by the political elite. They are far more progressive on social issues than their grandparents’ generation. And they are helping to drive movements from Sanders’ to Podemos in Spain, from Syriza to Jeremy Corbyn.

That’s not to exaggerate or oversimplify. A “generation” is itself a sweeping generalisation: it may include the retired white billionaire and the black pensioner shivering in a cold home, or the daughter of a miner and the privately educated young man whose rich parents pay his mortgage deposit. Only a minority of young people are meaningfully politically engaged, let alone politically active, and that includes those who opt for conservative or even far-right parties.

But there’s no question that a swath of disenfranchised youth is powering the new movements of the left. Political attitudes have changed. Labour’s rout last May is often compared to the party’s 1983 disaster; but when Labour was defeated under Michael Foot, the Tories had a nine-point lead among 18- to 24-year-olds, while in 2015, Labour achieved a 16-point lead among 18- to 24-year-olds. What’s more, younger Britons were twice as likely to opt for the leftwing Greens as the rest of the population. While a poll last month found that a derisory 16% of those over the age of 60 think Jeremy Corbyn is doing well, the figure rises to 41% among 18- to 24-year-olds. During the leadership contest that swept Corbyn to power, it’s reported that an influx of relatively young members drove the party’s average age down from 53 to 42.

Is it all just youthful naivete? “In 1984 and 1988,” notes the US journalist Peter Beinart, “young voters backed Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush by large margins,” just as Margaret Thatcher attracted a level of youth support that has eluded David Cameron. The evidence that people become naturally more conservative as they age is not conclusive; indeed, on social issues, older people are often simply keeping the conservative attitudes of their youth. “Change is most often toward increased tolerance rather than increased conservatism,” notes one US study. For older Britons, the left may be associated with the disastrous failure of Soviet totalitarianism and the breakdown of the postwar consensus. For younger Britons, the aftermath of financial collapse and a self-evidently profoundly unequal society may loom larger. It’s the fall of Lehman Brothers, not the Berlin Wall, that may be more significant.

The generations seem to live on different political planets. American youth are far more likely to support immigration than their elders, and to have a positive view of Muslims; and while the over-35s are slightly more likely to believe government does too much, the under-35s are decisively more likely to believe it does too little. Here is a generation that has grown up in a world defined by market failure rather than one shaped by cold war rivalries. As a self-described socialist, Sanders is an exceptionally rare breed of American politician. But it is notable that, while just 15% of Americans over 65 have a positive view of socialism, that rises to 36% among the 18- to 29-year-olds, just three points fewer than those who opt for capitalism.
Yet it is surely economic insecurity that drives today’s young radicalism. A poll last year found that nearly half of so-called “millennial” Americans – those aged 18 to 35 – believed that they faced a “dimmer future than their parents”. Forty million Americans are now saddled with student debt, helping to suppress their living standards and leaving them with less disposable income for, say, a mortgage or a car. Home ownership across the Atlantic – the linchpin of the “American dream” – is now at its lowest level for nearly half a century. The economic recovery is an abstraction for many young Americans, all too often driven into insecure and low-paid occupations with little prospect of rising wages or a standard of living they believe they deserve.

A similar picture could be painted in Britain, of course. Government policies have disproportionately targeted younger people: whether it be the punishing of educational aspiration with the trebling of student fees, the cutting of youth services, the scrapping of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, a minimum wage that discriminates against the young, cuts to youth services or a fall in living standards that older Britons have not had to endure. A young person may find that attending university – which now means accruing a huge pile of debt – does not open doors it once did. Home ownership is at its lowest level for a quarter of a century, and it has particularly plummeted among the young, with evidence that many have given up saving up for a deposit altogether. There are now more private tenants than social tenants, and half of those in an often unregulated private rented sector with what can be income-devouring rents are under 34.

But here is the danger. Like other western nations, Britain is an ageing society, and older voters are both decisively opting for the Conservatives, and turning out to vote in great number. The new movements face a formidable task: to both inspire younger voters to turn out in greater number, and persuade a substantial number of older Britons of their cause. A failure to do so will doom these movements. But the mainstream political elite should not feel complacent. They seem to believe they can abandon the young and face no political consequences. They may find that, one day, they run out of luck.

Never mind eternal youth - adulthood is a subversive ideal

Empirical evidence confirms what honest introspection suggests: most people are happier after reaching middle age

• 
• • Susan Neiman
  • The Guardian, Sunday 5 October 2014 16.45 BST

‘There is reason to suspect those who tell the young to savour the best years of their lives.’ Photograph: Liv Friis-Larsen /Alamy

Where did we get the idea that youth is the best time of your life? Having failed to create societies that our young want to grow into, we idealise the stages of youth. Growing up has come to be viewed as a matter of renouncing your hopes and dreams, accepting the limits of the reality you’ve been given, and resigning yourself to a life that will be more boring and less significant than you supposed when you began it. Increasingly, grownups appear not merely sad but pathetic.

Consider the difference between JM Barrie’s Peter Pan and Steven Spielberg’s reworking for the movie Hook. Barrie’s grownups are dull but menacing, occasionally wistful; Spielberg’s grownups are ridiculous, not only ill-equipped for the adventures of Neverland but barely fit to live at all. Given the lack of compelling role models of adults in western media, it’s no wonder that Peter Pan is seen as a figure of rebellion, or that a great writer’s fondest wish for his newborn is that the child may stay for ever young.

Outside of fairy tales, no one remains a child for ever. For this reason the time of life most often idealised is the decade between 18 and 28, when young men’s muscles and young women’s skin are at their most blooming. Yet few people who are in or past that decade would choose to repeat it. For most of us, it’s a time of doubt and fear – that every decision is irrevocably fateful, that everyone else is more confident and capable, and above all that we aren’t sufficiently enjoying what we’re told is the best time of our lives.

Empirical evidence confirms what honest introspection knows: most people are happier after reaching middle age. Though there are variations in the global low point – the Swiss reach it at 35, while Ukrainians don’t hit rock bottom until 62 – all report becoming steadily happier after that. Researchers controlled all of the obvious factors, such as income, employment and family status, and found they didn’t matter: from the US to Zimbabwe, the evidence that life is not a downhill path is constant.

What explains the consensus on something so clearly false? An answer can be found where we might least expect it, in the work of Immanuel Kant. His famous essay What is Enlightenment? describes humankind’s exit from its self-imposed immaturity. Growing up isn’t bad, but isn’t easy. Laziness and fear lead us to acquiesce: it’s much easier to let others think for us.

Growing up, like enlightenment, is as much a matter of courage as of knowledge. Kant’s call to have the courage to use your own reason is well known, but few have heeded the warning that comes after it: no government has an interest in cultivating adults. It is far simpler to care for distracted consumers than to satisfy the demands of self-confident citizens.

So most of us spend our working lives making or marketing products developed to divert us. The things that capture our attention are never depicted as toys but as tools that are crucial for being adult. Bewildered by the choice when purchasing a smartphone, we easily forget how many decisions are out of our hands. Or did you choose to live in a world where oil companies can wreck the planet, governments spend more on weapons than on education, and children starve every minute for want of food others throw away?

Grownups take on questions that determine real lives, knowing they will never succeed entirely but refusing to succumb to dogma or despair. Both are surely tempting, and successfully resisting them is key to growing up. Not permanent youth but genuine adulthood is a subversive ideal.

There is reason to suspect those who tell the young to savour the best years of their lives. The tone is cheery, but the message is ominous: everything else will get worse. Thus young people are prepared to expect – and to demand – very little.

No conspiracy theories are necessary: we often collude in our own infantilisation, as we often join in with the curious derision that greets the news that an ageing rock star has reached a round-numbered birthday or opened a concert or gone on tour. Isn’t it time these people accepted their obsolescence and left the stage to others?

This sort of disdain and mockery is all the more puzzling since the recent concerts of Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Leonard Cohen were anything but laughable. Among others, these artists have shown how far and for how long human and creative development can continue, surviving flops and falls and excess and error – thus providing some models of growing up for which we can be grateful.

Students need to make time for love, as well as for sex

By Cristina Odone Health and lifestyle Last updated: July 21st, 2013

The University of Pennsylvania, scene of much 'hooking up'. (Photo: Alamy)

From Monday's Daily Telegraph:

We are nervously awaiting the 18-year-old’s A-level results. Not as nervously, however, as if he had chosen, as many of his friends have done, to try for an American university. The latest news from elite campuses across the Atlantic struck fear in our hearts: everyone is “hooking up” over there, and that’s bad.

Hook-up culture is about sexual encounters that are rushed, unemotional and brief. It sounds depressingly familiar – “wham, bam, thank you ma’am”, we called it when I was an undergraduate – but what makes hook-up culture different is its raison d’être: students today are too busy for relationships. And, unlike the no-strings sex of yesteryear, women as well as men are choosing a hook-up over proper dating.

The bleak new thinking was exposed in a New York Times investigation last week. A journalist interviewed 60 girls at the top-drawer University of Pennsylvania – and their revelations shocked middle-class moms and dads across the country. Their children feel immense pressure to get A grades and fill their CVs with extra-curricular activities, such as running the university magazine, starring in the debating society, spending the summer volunteering as an intern on Capitol Hill. There is a shortage of good jobs out there, so competition is huge on campus. No one’s got time for romance.

Instead, they text (probably after a drink or two) hook-up buddies with whom they can engage in a decompression session of sexual activity. I won’t say “sexual pleasure” as the couple spends very little time on anything but the most perfunctory of chats: think commuters on the Tube rather than Romeo and Juliet. They invest so little in one another, one interviewee confessed she always went to her hook-up’s rooms, so she wouldn’t have to bother changing the sheets.

What a difference a recession makes. In my salad days, during the boom years of the 1980s, we could afford to be far more casual about job-seeking. University, I was taught, was not a means to an end but an end in itself: a place where I could finally learn everything I wanted to know about Bismarck, the Risorgimento and the Dreyfus Affair. Grants, scholarships and no-fee tuition meant that undergraduates, even from modest backgrounds, felt that for three years, money really was immaterial. I remember being shocked that friends were going to London for job interviews in the run-up to finals: surely the BBC and the Rothschild bank could wait?

The time of plenty meant that splurging felt acceptable – emotionally as well as with government grants. University was about romance as well as books; among the more precious undergraduates, in fact, the latter served to fuel the former. We bought scented candles, agonised over which LP to set the mood (Dire Straits’ Sultans of Swing was reckoned to be the most aphrodisiac song in my first year), and even considered sprinkling rose petals on pillows… we may have been naive, and naff, but at least we thought coupling meant exchanging ideas, memories and compliments, not merely bodily fluids.

Studies show that the average number of hook-ups in the US last year worked out to two per student. That’s cheered up a lot of my male friends, on both sides of the Atlantic: apart from their children having heartless sex, the biggest fear fathers have is that their children are having much more sex than they did.

My worry, though, is for the young men and women who graduate from hooking up only to discover that they lack the necessary skills for a proper relationship. Hook-ups teach that love is a distraction; for most of us, though, it’s the main event. Even in a recession, kids.

Generation Y: why young voters are backing the Conservatives

 Young people are supposed to be left-leaning idealists, but polls tell us that today's under-34s don't believe in handouts and high taxes – and they're voting for David Cameron

• 
• • John Harris
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 26 June 2013

David Cameron at a secondary school in Bury in 2010. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

If you want a good idea of where Britain might be headed, go to Peterborough. The city centre is smattered with the usual high-street names, and scores of empty shops (51, at the last count). Plenty of people complain about youth unemployment. The area of the city around a thoroughfare called Lincoln Road is a little Poland, smattered with businesses that also see to the needs of people from Portugal, the Baltic states, and more. Mention immigration, and you tend to get two kinds of response: tributes from recently arrived people to the kind of life that's possible in the UK, and angry, sullen opinions from locals who think advantages and opportunity are flowing in the wrong direction.

I spent a few days in and around the city a couple of months ago, and as well as all those issues, I was reminded of another very modern syndrome: the fact that as you progress down the age range, opinions about the job market and welfare state tend to harden, to the point that droves of twentysomethings sound like devout Thatcherites. In my regular trips around Britain for the Guardian's Anywhere But Westminster series, this has become almost a given. Quiz people under 30, in short, and you're more than likely to hear echoes of the kind of on-yer-bike, sink-or-swim values that decisively embedded themselves in British life when they were mere toddlers.

So it was in Peterborough, where I stopped for a chat with a young woman – born and raised in Cambridgeshire, it seemed – who was selling subscriptions to LoveFilm, next to a row of empty retail outlets and a branch of Caffe Nero. "British people are rubbish," she said. "Lads especially need to be pushed into jobs more."

"I think they need to stop letting people into the country, to start with," she went on, and then paused. "And stop jobseeker's, as well. I don't think it's right."

This was a reference to jobseeker's allowance, the benefit that pays unemployed people under 25 the princely sum of £56.80 a week. "There are hardly any people that are willing to go and get any job that's out there, just to say: 'I've earned that money'," she continued. "They want the best, don't they?"

At this point, my lefty, bleeding-heart soul could take no more, and I blurted out a riposte. Don't they just want to be paid seven or eight quid an hour and be treated with some respect?

"I was on £6.55 in my last job," she said. "If you don't want to go to college, start at the bottom and work your way up."

Such are the prevailing opinions of what pollsters call Generation Y, the millions of people born between 1980 and 2000, who have grown up in a country in which postwar collectivism is increasingly but a distant memory, and the free-market worldview handed on from Thatcher, to Major to Blair and Brown and now Cameron, is seemingly as ordinary and immovable as the weather. I have heard much the same stuff in Manchester, Birmingham, Swansea, Brighton and beyond. This is not a view of things, moreover, solely borne out by random vox pops: careful, long-term research highlights exactly the same things, in spades.

Earlier this year, the polling company Ipsos MORI began to publish the fruits of its work on 17 years' worth of polling results, spread across four generations, starting with those born in 1945 or before, and ending with Generation Y. Among the most striking examples of a yawning gap between the generations was their respective responses to the claim that "the government should spend more money on welfare benefits for the poor, even if it leads to higher taxes" – a signifier for the principle of redistribution, support for which has fallen among all generations over the past 20 or so years. Here, though, is the remarkable thing: whereas around 40% of those born in 1945 or before still agree, the numbers tumble as you move down the age range, reaching around half that figure among those aged 33 and under. Similarly, among Gen Y, the claim that "the creation of the welfare state is one of Britain's proudest achievements" is now supported by around 20% of people; when it comes to the prewar cohort, the figure always hovered at around 70%.

 Adele said her tax bill made her: 'ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire'. Photograph: Jason Merritt/Getty Images

This, says Ipsos MORI's accompanying blurb, "clearly raises important questions about the future of the welfare state". It certainly does, and the point is fleshed out by poll after poll. In research done by ICM in March, for example, the idea that most unemployed people receiving benefits were "for the most part unlucky rather than lazy" was rejected by 48% of 18- to 24-year-olds, and 46% of 25- to 34-year-olds, who apparently agreed with what we now know as the striver/skiver divide.

Look at the polling data relating to other issues and one thing becomes clear. In many ways, Gen Y is admirably socially enlightened: its support for gender equality and gay rights is overwhelming, and on such ideas as the wearing of traditional dress in state schools, its live-and-let-live mores tower over those of older generations. Moreover, among its younger members, the fusty, nostalgic politics of Ukip seems to have very limited appeal: when the party scored its highest ever ICM poll rating back in May, though its support among the 25-34s stood at 21%, the figure for the 18-24s was a comparatively paltry 8%.

A large share of Generation Y seems to build its opinions around a liberalism that is both social and, crucially, economic. This, conveniently, also forms the core of the modern Toryism espoused by David Cameron and George Osborne.

Which brings us to the next revelation, which reached the media last week. Though the under-34s are less keen on the idea of political loyalty than older cohorts, latter-day Tories have apparently managed to speak to a creditable swath of Gen Y, and pull off an amazing political feat. When Cameron took over the Tory leadership in 2005, the party's support among Generation Y stood at 10%. It has since more than doubled, to 20.5%: when Osborne gets up to deliver his latest spending review and serve further notice that the state must be hacked back, and the economy must somehow be rebalanced between private and public, large numbers of young people will apparently be in full agreement.

One recent YouGov poll put support for the Tories among the 18-24s at 31%, with Labour trailing at 27%. By way of a contrast, Tory support among those aged 40-59 was at 29%, with Labour on 40%. In other words, the time-worn wisdom about politics and the young may be in the process of being turned on its head. Welcome, then, to yet another element of the New Normal, and a sobering fact: when it comes to questions about the welfare state, work and the like, the younger you are, the more rightwing you're likely to be.

At which point, some caveats. I'm a comparatively ancient 43, and it has always seemed to me that my own generation – X, the pollsters call it – has been something of a washout. We seemed to be rendered punch-drunk by Thatcherism, holding on to a vague affection for the postwar welfare state – we could get the dole with no questions asked, after all – and being stunned into silence by the social and political revolution that began in our childhood, and was firmly embedded by the time we reached our 20s. For a time, many of us switched off from politics altogether. On that score, I have always liked a sentence written by that eminent Gen X-er Zadie Smith: "I saw the best minds of my generation accept jobs on the fringes of the entertainment industry."

At least part of Generation Y, by contrast, seems to be not just angry with the ever-rightward drift of politics, but more than prepared to take the kind of action at which most of my lot would have balked. It seems outraged by such issues as the marketisation of higher education, the position of the super-rich, and the all-pervasive effects of austerity. If you doubt this, consider the events of November 2010, when all those students laid siege to the Conservative party's HQ at Millbank, and trashed it, along the way spurning the kind of tepid politics espoused by the leadership of the NUS. Note also the fired-up voices who have given Generation Y a huge political visibility: the columnist and author Owen Jones, the left-feminist Laurie Penny, the people who have clustered around such brilliantly trailblazing groups as UK Feminista, People and Planet and UK Uncut.

And yet, and yet. Might the true views of Gen Y have been better summed up by 23-year-old Adele Adkins, whose response to the brief era of a 50% top rate of tax oozed the stuff of post-Thatcher individualism? Just to recap: "I'm mortified to have to pay 50%. I use the NHS, I can't use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit, and I've got to give you, like, four million quid – are you having a laugh? When I got my tax bill in from [the album] 19, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire." Lovely. 

Not that one should set huge store by the often frazzled views of mere pop stars and celebs, but it may also be worth noting that Harry Styles (19) issued a mournful tweet about the death of Margaret Thatcher, and that the Marx-like oracle Rylan Clark (24) described her as a "legend" before affecting to think better of it. At the upper end of the Gen Y age range, consider also the infamous views of Frank Turner, the 31-year-old old-Etonian singer who apparently thinks that when it comes to the relationship between government and the individual, there should be an emphasis on "minimising the impact on ordinary people's lives … allow[ing] them to get on with their lives and not be bothered by the state. Then you've suddenly got a range of things to talk about that are achievable. Like everything from not having ID cards and trying to dismantle the surveillance system we've put together in this country on the one hand, trying to remove government from people's lives, social services. Letting people be freer, health and safety, whatever it might be." On the face of it, that all chimes brilliantly with the aforementioned polling.

But never mind pop stars and singer-songwriters. In the real world, what's often most remarkable about the Gen Y worldview is the way it extends even to people who, on the face of it, might have very good reason to think that economic liberalism and hostility to the welfare state have done them very few favours at all.

Last year, I went to Warrington, the sprawling Cheshire town that shares with Peterborough the sense of somehow being modern Britain incarnate. I was there to have a look at the local version of the Work Programme, the government initiative that aims to get people suffering long-term unemployment back into work, apparently by convincing them that joblessness is usually the result of character failings rather than the state of the economy.

There, I met a 27-year-old man who had just managed to re-enter the world of work, though the only thing he could find was a temporary contract delivering sofas. Around us were shelves peppered with self-help books; the people in charge assured me that even if work seemed thin on the ground, the people they supervised could always look for "hidden jobs". So I wondered: did he think that the fact he was unemployed was his fault?

His reply was just this side of heartbreaking. "Yeah," he said. "I do. I think I should have applied for more. I should have picked myself up in the morning, got out, come to a place like this – tried more. When you're feeling down, you start blaming the world for your mistakes – you feel the world owes you. And it doesn't. You owe the world: you have to motivate yourself, and get out there, and try."

There it was again: the up-by-the-bootstraps Conservatism of Norman Tebbit and Margaret Thatcher, largely unchallenged during the New Labour years, and now built into millions of young lives as a simple matter of fact. Oh, Generation Y. Why? 

Pick 'em early? The fate of young English talent.

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo 

Brian Close: the youngest male cricketer to play Tests for England  © PA Photos

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It was a day for history at North Marine Road. Yorkshire, like the venerable Almanack, are celebrating their 150th anniversary this year. Sunday was also 50 years removed from the first of Geoffrey Boycott's 151 centuries in a Roses game at Bramall Lane, an occasion marked with the presentation of a framed scorecard. And then there was Matthew Fisher, all of 15 years and 212 days old, the youngest player to appear in a competitive county game since Charles Young, who turned out for Hampshire against Kent in 1867, aged 15 years and 131 days.

There is an inevitable melancholy about this great wash of time, refracted through the boys at either end of it. Young, a left-hand allrounder who was born in India, played 38 games across the next 18 years before slipping away into history. No one knows when or where he died, or the circumstances surrounding his end. He was here and then he was gone. We're left with his wickets and his runs and his odd little record, which may stand forever. Fisher is from an entirely different world and a more focused and intense game, yet prodigies always carry with them a chance of unfulfilment that can be unsettling. 

Fifteen, you think, that's just too early, isn't it, however good you may be. For a start, it is such a brief span. Boycott had been retired for 11 years by the time Fisher was born, and no doubt Geoffrey could (and perhaps has) told the young man how fleeting those years can feel.

Yorkshire know a prodigy when they see one. Their 2nd XI keeper Barney Gibson was 15 years and 27 days old when he played against Durham University. Tim Bresnan got a Sunday League game as a 16-year-old. They had the young Sachin, of course, and before him Kevin Sharp, who seemed set for greatness after making a double-hundred for Young England and appearing in the first team at 18.

Then there was Brian Close, a man whose legend exists on different terms to those that his precocity seemed sure to dictate. Born in the same town, Rawdon, as Hedley Verity, he played Under-18 cricket at the age of 11, appeared for Leeds United and England youth as an amateur footballer and was considered bright enough to have attended Oxford or Cambridge had he chosen that path. Instead he became the youngest man ever to play for England in a Test match, in July 1949 at the age of 18, whilst in the process of completing the "double" of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in his first season (another record). Had the world known then that Close would make his final Test appearance almost 27 years later it might have imagined a new Leviathan had come, yet he played just 22 times for England.

In its place, Close's fame is based around his unyielding toughness, the brilliance of his captaincy (six wins and a draw in his seven Tests as England skipper; sacked after being accused of time-wasting in a game for Yorkshire) and his ability to nurture young players both in cricket and in life. Perhaps some of that understanding came from his earliest years, and the burden that they bestowed. He was by almost any measure a wonderful player, almost 35,000 runs, 1171 wickets and 800 catches batting left-handed and bowling right, and yet his first season casts its long shadow.

We are programmed to think that the earlier a talent emerges, the bigger it must be. That is not always the case. It will certainly not be rounded enough to offer anything other than promise, and promise is ephemeral stuff, available only for the briefest of moments. Matthew Fisher has promise, and our good wishes. What he needs most now is simply time.