A tip for young Drifters: don’t moan — get angry

Last June, this column argued that shows such as Made in Chelsea and The Only Way is Essex owed their popularity to the fact that they articulated a modern phenomenon.

In the past few decades, we have invented a new chapter in our lives, between adolescence and adulthood, which I call Drifting. A combination of economic forces (scarcity of jobs, property prices, etc) and cultural ones (marriages taking place later) — has led to countless twentysomethings experimenting with jobs, partners and living arrangements in a decade of indecision and anxiety. “I call our generation,” I wrote, “the Drifters.”

And so there I was last week, catching up with Made in Chelsea, and along came an advert for a new comedy on E4. This would be about three girls, the advert said, who live in Leeds, have finished uni, can’t get a job, or a place to live, or a boyfriend they actually like. It would be called … Drifters! In case anybody at C4 is interested, I’m still waiting for my cheque.

Actually I have rather high hopes for this show, partly because it is written by the people behind The Inbetweeners and partly because Nick Mohammed, one of its stars, is one of the outstanding comic talents of his generation. It’s timing is ideal, too. This weekend, one newspaper published a feature about “Yuffies”, or “Young Urban Failures” — Drifters in all but name.

Startled by this outbreak of consensus, I got to thinking about what exactly is behind the rise of the Drifters. Economics and culture can only explain so much. To isolate just two of the former, a recession caused the job market to shrink and the young, being inexperienced, lost out; while the ridiculous inflation in property prices is the cause of a vast, intergenerational theft by the old from the young.

Culturally, we fetishise the freedom to experiment, especially sexually and socially, more than previous generations did. Meanwhile the British family is an institution under assault.

But it dawns on me that the rise of the Drifters may have a specific political cause too, which is the total lack of representation for them in Westminster.

It is a curious fact that, because the leaders of the three main parties are in their mid-forties, the priorities of Westminster today largely ignore the generation behind them. We have a veritable blizzard of policies aimed at improving childcare (Messrs Clegg, Miliband and Cameron all have young children). And we have a skewed welfare policy that protects the largesse afforded to the old (Messrs Clegg, Miliband and Cameron know the old are much more likely to vote).

Alas, the Drifters miss out in this arrangement. They are generally too young to be in parliament themselves but too old to be recognised as children by the party leaderships. They vote in much smaller numbers than the old, not for reasons of demography but disinclination.

Under-represented and lacking in influence, it’s no surprise then that Drifters get a raw deal from policy, paying through the nose for university, lazy pensioners and housing. Alas for them — and I say this out of solidarity — it’s their fault. If the Drifters want laws that reflect their priorities, they need to stop moaning and start legislating.

Amol Rajan is editor of The Independent. Twitter @amolrajan