THE BIG READ: Britain's bad bout of the big baby blues

We have made it all but impossible for our 20-somethings to make a proper start in adult life

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

THERE is a photograph in many morning papers – the Telegraph has a particularly good version of it – of a shaven-headed man sitting on a snooker table surrounded by an orange mist.

He was, of course, one of the new breed of environmental protesters and had doused a table at the world snooker championships with orange paint powder. He may not have succeeded in stopping oil, but he certainly stopped the snooker.

In the Telegraph version of the photo – and this Substack is not yet in the happy position of having a budget for news pictures so you will have to look it up online – the man is shown kneeling and with his mouth wide open. The impression given carries an unmistakable air of a toddler throwing a tantrum in a sand pit.

There appears to be some confusion about whether the individual involved is 25 years old or 30 years old. In any event he is not a child, nor even an adolescent, but a fully-fledged adult male. Yet the babyish overtones hit home for a reason. This is, at best, the kind of attention-seeking behaviour one would expect from a university fresher engaged in his debut student demo. What on earth is someone closer to 30 than 20 doing getting involved in something like this. On a week day too. Why wasn’t he at work?

You may scoff at that old-fashioned attitude. But when I was a young man, in the late 1980s and the 1990s, to be seen out and about on a working day and during working hours carried with it a degree of social stigma. Middle-aged ladies going to the shops would give you a sideways look. One was thought to be a possible layabout – shock, horror – who ought to be earning a living and providing for a young family or at least should be preparing to do so.

The youngish man on the snooker table would almost certainly not think of himself as a layabout, but as something much more exalted: a righteous warrior for social and environmental justice. Just like the mainly white and middle-class BLM protesters of the lockdown summer of 2020. Britain’s 20-somethings and even 30-somethings have replaced its teenagers as the pre-eminent rebels of the age and come out on the streets to gripe about a bewildering range of perceived outrageous injustices. Older cynics – the OK boomers – tend to see it as a form of peer group virtue signalling that fosters a sense of group belonging and superiority among the conceited young.

I would tend to that view myself, though the word “babyish” just keeps coming to mind, along with fogeyish notions of what previous generations of young men achieved in comparison – commanding whole platoons in the World Wars and such like.

Orange snooker bloke is not a one-off either. The statistics about the extending phenomenon of kidulthood are undeniable: for instance, there are now 3.6 million people aged 20-34 who still live at home with their parents. This is 28 per cent of that entire cohort of the population – up from 24 per cent in 2011 and 19 per cent in the late 1990s. That’s worrying enough, but dig a little deeper and an even more striking trend emerges. Of the 3.6 million, just 1.4 million are female, while 2.2 million are male. That’s 34 per cent of them: more than a third of grown men in their 20s and early 30s are living as what the pop singer Morrissey once memorably termed “box-bedroom rebels”.