The Dream of Elsewhere
Even the smallest dreams don't come true in Britain anymore. Want a house? Decent pay? Kids? Don't regret not getting out while you had the chance.
It dawned on me recently that I’m never going to score the winning goal at Wembley. If you know me this won’t come as much of a surprise. I’m 22 and whilst I love watching sport, I’m terrible at it. I spent much of my childhood running away from the ball whilst receiving pitying looks from spectating parents. But there was always time. Maybe one day I’d wake up and have grown a right foot instead of two left feet, I’d be walking through the park on the way to work, the ball would drift from some nearby kids toward my feet. I dazzle them with my skills, people stop to watch, word gets around. I get a call from an unknown number; it’s Gareth Southgate. My country needs me.
I think most people have moments where an imaginary line is drawn between their sixth form band and the pyramid stage at Glastonbury. If only that summer job at Morrisons hadn’t got in the way. Then you catch yourself. The closest you came to playing a gig was at your aunt’s wedding and whilst your family seemed to enjoy your poorly constructed rendition of “Come on Eileen” it’s hardly festival headline material. But Pink Floyd didn’t make it big until their seventh album. There’s always time.
“Dreams crumble to dust” as Mark Corrigan from Peep Show says. I’m exaggerating because I’m depressed but the sad truth is that most big dreams - I’m talking the stratospheric ones - don’t come true. That’s not to say that they’re not worthy of being dreamt up. After all, those who don’t ask don’t get. But in the end most people have to fall back on the smaller dreams, the realistic pleasures of the life our ancestors fought for. Buying a house, getting a good job working alongside people you like, having kids and doing everything to make sure they grow up into better people than yourself, holidays, a decent car, a nice TV. It’s all getting a bit Trainspotting now but you take my point. You don’t have to be a rock star to live a great life.
Except, in Britain today, the painfully average scaled down dream of suburban utopia is increasingly unobtainable. Houses are 9x the average income, adjusted for inflation incomes haven’t risen since 2007. Work hard, go to university, scrimp and save, and life is still bleak and grey in a pool of opportunity that narrows by the year. In Britain today, the highly skilled and the hard working get paid half what they would in other developed nations and have a fraction of the purchasing power. For my generation even being able to afford to have kids seems like a pipe dream. Perhaps not quite as unlikely as a sweaty embrace from Harry Kane as we celebrate my last minute winner in the World Cup Final but the odds feel stacked against us. And we as a nation have just let that happen.
You might be thinking, given my attitude towards dreams that it’s good I’m unlikely to have kids on the current trajectory. “You’re not going to be an astronaut now eat your dinner”. But what sort of developed nation extinguishes a dream that basic? What sort of developed nation doubles down on it’s own self-destructive policies? The government has made it harder to build housing despite our chronic shortage. Over-taxed and under-paid workers are squeezed ever more to hand out triple locked pensions to the richest generation of retirees in history. The student loan threshold will fall and benefits look set to rise by wages rather than prices as the third of boomers who are millionaires get an inflation busting pay-out from the government.
I’m terrified that this is the best it gets. The student loan is at breaking point and I’ve left my arranged overdraft behind in the dust. My wilful ignorance shattered by the word “DECLINED” spelled out in block capitals on the card machine at Costa. Turns out even the generosity of HSBC has a limit. The lull in between my undergrad and my masters. A summer of endless hope and possibility. Except it isn’t. I’m working most days but I can’t really afford to go out. These are supposed to be the best days of my life. Before it goes downhill.
I share my misery with people when they’ll listen. Dark jokes with my girlfriend, my flatmate, and all my brothers and sisters in the arms of our generational struggle. The fight to be able to afford the occasional flat white and have a plausible chance of affording a house one day. But there’s always time for things to change right? Labour have the right ideas on planning, they get it. It’s a crisis of supply and they’re going to increase it. They’re going to build on the greenbelt. The concrete Surrey of a Starmer premiership beckons.
The next election feels like ages away though and too much damage has been done for the next Prime Minister to be able to unpick it quickly. The tax burden is the highest it has been since the Second World War, we are short of 4 million homes, there are 7.4 million people on NHS waiting lists. All of those could fall and yet still be unbearably high for some time. I’m fed up of waiting. I’m fed up of being told that things might get better at some point in the future by people who have already had it so good they cannot imagine the grey most young people are living in.
Which is why, in the end, most people who don’t want to waste their lives will have to leave this country. Go to America or Australia, somewhere where the possibility that hard work might pay off is still alive. I hate that that is the case. I love this country. I love our music, our TV, our films, our beer gardens, our football and cricket and ability to queue. But I’m fed up of dark humour and my reserves of hope are low. I still believe that there are deliverable policies to massively improve the plight of this country. But my plan can no longer be waiting around to find out if they come to pass.
I want to grow old with my girlfriend and without regret. I want security and you can’t have that in a country where the basics are things you have to hope for. I don’t want to look back and realise that the dream of a house, a family, decent pay, and nice holidays was as obtainable as footballing superstardom. There’s always time for your dreams to come true. Until there isn’t.
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