Why a post-Brexit UK must put its young people first

Chris Middleton dissects the biggest political decision to face the UK for a generation, and what impact it will have on the young.

The post-referendum UK rightly wants to face the future with hope and optimism, now that a majority of the population has voted to go it alone.

Skills and inward investment are key challenges for post-Brexit Britain, therefore. But while the UK wants to stand tall and inspire the confidence of the international community, we must acknowledge that real-world risks that have been created as a direct result of Brexit – risks to the very things that will be most important to our future success, including skills and inward investment.

One of these is the long-term risk of the UK breaking apart into separate nations competing for the same contracts and the same money. Another is the cost to social cohesion within a country that must now tell a convincing story to win (and retain) international business.

Before we get onto the skills challenge and how that affects our young people in particular, let's take a quick look at what may happen to the country whose independence Leavers believe they have won.

Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain. If Scotland detaches itself from the UK and somehow rejoins the continent, it will secure a major competitive advantage over England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile Northern Ireland will simmer next to its European neighbour across a heavily policed border, and Wales will struggle to get Westminster’s attention. In the long term, a breakup of the UK may be inevitable.

And in an ever more isolated England, very different visions of our society sit side by side in a nation subdivided by severe economic disparity, a North-South schism, a social rift between young and old (exacerbated by the Brexit), and a clash of metropolitan, inner-city, suburban, and rural cultures.

In each of these cases, Brexit has highlighted the divisions, not strengthened national unity. That's a problem we must now address, even though it was a foreseeable consequence of a reckless campaign that seems to have placed personal self-interest above the national interest, in some cases.

Other repercussions are emerging. Just a week ago, it seemed inconceivable – the stuff of dystopian fantasy – that there would be a genuine campaign to declare London an independent city state, although some would argue that the capital has been that since the 1980s. Meanwhile, pockets of anti-immigrant prejudice have opened in some of the communities that were most severely hit by austerity and by the 2008-09 recession.

Again, these complicate the story we need to tell our neighbours, allies, and partners in order to make Brexit work.

Anecdotal reports suggest Brexit appears to have both triggered and ‘legitimised’ sporadic attacks on ethnic minorities, in some communities and in some people’s minds. There have even been reports of anti-gay incidents, directly linked to Brexit. But that does not mean that our tolerant, welcoming UK no longer exists.

That said, even the most passionate and sincere Leaver who believes in a bright future for an independent Britain, free at last of bureaucratic, cronyistic Brussels, must accept that the notion of a single ‘British way of life’ now seems remote. Certainly, it's harder to sell.

That’s important in terms of the narrative we put before the world. Every country needs a story on the world stage. From this week, we must start telling one that the world believes.

A key challenge will be deciding how to attract international business to a UK that seems to be at war with itself, and with the population’s attitudes to Europe split down the middle.

Another key question is: How to convince overseas partners, customers, and prospects that they should invest in the post-Brexit UK? Or in some future independent England – rather than in, say, a competitive, upbeat, outward-looking Scotland that supports both European membership and integration?

As things stand, the ability of the UK to attract skilled, experienced people from the EU and elsewhere to live and work here must also be in doubt. Around the world, front pages reveal that our allies and partners think we’ve lost our minds. That must be a cause for concern for British businesses. We need those skilled people.

So we have to face facts: by seeking to assert our independence in this way, after months of negative campaigning that we now know was based on half truths and misinformation, and in our quest to win back the sovereignty that Parliament already had as a simple constitutional truth, the UK may have made itself toxic to overseas investors.

That's no overstatement: the only figures on the world stage to give Brexit the thumbs-up are Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and an assortment of terrorist groups.

All of this has particular relevance for the UK’s young people. And it can only be in the nation's youth that the answer to all of the above questions lies.

The government’s own statistics reveal that the UK's young people – our future – were the hardest hit by recession and austerity. UK youth unemployment stands at 13.6 per cent of all 16-24 year olds. That total is falling, but it is still nearly three times higher than the overall unemployment rate of 5.4 per cent. Average wages have also fallen for young people faster than for other workers.

Just a year ago, prominent Outer Ian Duncan Smith warned young people that they would be forced to pick up litter if they wanted to receive benefits. The revelation that the Leave campaign has no post-Brexit plan for Britain suggests that IDS’ strategy for the nation’s youth has progressed little since then. Hardly an inspiring vision.

A tragedy for our young people is that on the day the UK (as it stands) formally leaves the EU, they may lose their right to live and work freely across 27 countries. Brexit may leave them isolated, with none of the advantages of their European peers, separated from a continent that has no reason to help them acquire skills and experience, least of all to invest in them.

(It must be acknowledged that if freedom of movement and labour are not impacted by Brexit, depending on whatever deal the UK strikes with Europe, then Leave campaigners will have failed to achieve their stated goal of quitting.)

Polls show that those young people didn’t vote for Brexit; their grandparents did. But in many cases, those young people didn’t vote at all; they’re disengaged from local politics, while still connected to the wider world via smartphones and social platforms. Their social perspective knows no bounds, but the country they live in is putting up walls. This is why there’s a growing youth revolt on social media.

This means the UK no longer has a choice: it must invest in, and re-engage with, its own young people; invest in their training, education, and professional development; invest in giving them the international perspective that leaving Europe has stripped from them.

After all, their counterparts in Europe can travel and work freely across the continent, just as their American, Chinese, and Indian peers have vast, diverse countries in which to gain experience and skills.

And the UK must stop burdening its students with debt – a practice that’s made them into little more than grist for the financial services mill.

From the day parliament invokes Article 50 and we leave the EU, the nation must start paying its undergraduates’ tuition fees again. It’s the least we can do to show faith in them.

But rumours of international banks exiting the City are rife, our credit rating has been cut – which means businesses' credit ratings have also been cut, making borrowing more expensive for everyone – and so a financial services sector damaged by the Brexit may say that it can’t afford to write off a generation’s student loans. The government may find that is true.

Whatever the pros and cons of Brexit, we stand on the threshold of it being a reality. It’s clear that whatever plan does emerge for a post-Europe Britain, our young people must be at the heart of it. If they are not, then we have abandoned the generation that will left to make this work.

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Chris Middleton is a Senior Company Associate at always possible

Curating The Noise

I've been thinking a lot this week about curation, and the art of filtering/editing in a world full of noise. 

If you're anything like me, then you'll struggle to be satisfied that you're ever reading or doing or involving yourself in enough, conscious that you're missing out on something somewhere, not part of an essential conversation happening around the corner. For people like me, social media is both the best and worst possible thing to get hooked onto.

We now lead personal and professional lives anchored in an overwhelming everness of information - there is no stimulus that isn't available immediately in some form, but we are left to rely on piecemeal or amateur curation (or worse still, we have to rely on ourselves as editors). Who, on earth, can we rely on to vet the noise, to steer us to the genuinely good stuff and to stop us wasting time?

Yesterday morning I had a long catch-up with always possible associate, Chris Middleton, an entrepreneurial journalist and magazine editor with whom I have worked for a few years. He insists that print media is far from dying, and - like vinyl records - is enjoying a role as a product that fights the endless noise; beautiful magazines are being produced about incredibly niche areas of thought, standing up as something carefully curated, assembled and informed. 

For me, the element of trust is vital and the most successful platforms on and offline are those that you know will filter the content that is useful to you. There is a great, rebellious power in being a good curator in a time when the accepted norm for media consumption is that we want everything, everywhere, from everyone, all the time. But who decides who should curate, filter and edit - if we follow a particular blog, hashtag, LinkedIn group or individual how do we know that they are not missing out on some of the vital conversations too? Does it matter? How informed do we need to be to still lead and create in our respective fields?

It might be a cliche to cling onto, but it's hard to deny that the last 5 years has overthrown traditional ideas of communication spaces and has democratised the voice of the individual - anyone can be a creator and commentator of content, and magnificent online collaborations can lead to more innovative inquiry amongst communities of people who want to make a difference. In the noise there are definitely wonderful ideas, but how do we ensure they get to supersede the awful ones? For those working in education, the possibilities are limitless, and the advent of online learning will become the single biggest tool for affecting global change - but limitless is a very daunting place to start. I want to say to my 6 year old, here is the whole universe, for you, and there is nothing you can't do within it - but by doing that, I've disabled her before she's even started. Everyone needs a curator to help guide them through it.

After my meeting pondering this, I was privileged enough to spend the sunny afternoon hanging out at Charleston, the East Sussex farmstead once inhabited by the Bloomsbury group. I shall hopefully be working as a consultant with the trust that now diligently owns and runs the site, so after my meeting with directors I snuck onto a guided tour of the house as - despite spending 4 years of dissertation writing on British modernism, Woolf and 1920s art, I had never been before. 

The place is astonishing, deceptively big although the individual rooms are small - almost every surface, wall, furniture piece, fireplace painted or stencilled with striking patterns and once bold colours. A whole building curated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant for themselves and their friends and unorthodox families; a different kind of libertarian noise to that of the Internet age, perhaps antithetical to it as it was really by invite only. There is a mixture of the slapdash (paintstrokes on plaster on the wrong type of paint etc) and of the utterly precise, with contributions to the interior design evolving from 1916 through to the late 70s. The challenge for the trust is to capture the history, spirit and energy of style - a bit like a living, well-designed art magazine - whilst protecting a fragile infrastructure and making it accessible and relevant within a digital universe. 

There is a question for all of us about what role we want in the noise. And as I build my consultancy business, my own curation of advice and guidance for clients will naturally become increasingly acute, as a trusted adviser of mainstream policy and thinking, but also sniffing out the more curious and less visible conversations that may be ultimately more exciting. A goal for the next year is to come to terms with the noise, own it, distill it, filter it, make it palatable for others without over diluting it. Wish me luck.