So graduates are moving back in with their parents. Quelle surprise. The news cycles wring their hands over this modern tragedy, but let’s be honest: it’s the logical endpoint of a policy regime that has worshipped at the altar of property speculation since Thatcher flogged council houses.
We now have a generation of well-educated serfs who cannot afford a door of their own. The government prattles on about ‘affordability’ as if it were a magical incantation. But affordability, like chastity, is a virtue the powerful commend only in others.
The real scandal is that we pretend this is a new problem, as if Arthurian knights didn’t also live with their mothers until they stole a horse. But no, the Victorians at least built row houses. We build luxury shoeboxes and call it ‘micro-living.
’ The Boomerang Generation is not a failure of character; it is a failure of nerve. We have confused housing with investment, homes with hedges. Until we treat a roof as a human right rather than a yield on capital, our graduates will keep bouncing back to mum and dad.
And the Romans, for all their faults, never made their centurions commute from the suburbs.
