YOOF MYTHS

A poll of 17- to 22-year-olds, conducted by yougov.com for The Daily
Telegraph, suggests that they are far from being feckless "short-termists"
- - let alone anti-globalisation drop-outs - as often portrayed by their more
aged adulators and detractors.

Instead, they are concerned about jobs and debt, and have no great animus
against the educational system. A substantial majority does not want the
wholesale decriminalisation of hard drugs, though it would legalise
cannabis. And far fewer of the young take drugs - including cannabis - than
is commonly thought.

The values and activities of young people would therefore appear to deviate
little from that of the rest of the population. Yet it is one of the axioms
of both political ideologues and of the marketing industry that the "youth
market" is segmented.

According to the conventional analyses, young people are fundamentally a
breed apart in their tastes and habits - and therefore require entirely
different policies to deal with them. The publications of far-Left
groupuscules used, during the 1980s, to claim "Youth Says No to Thatcher"
as a means of stampeding the soft Left into their stratagems.

The message was: ignore them (that is, our definition of them and their
interests) at your peril. Likewise, marketing "experts" often con
lumbering, unconfident corporations on the grounds that only they can
"interpret" the unique youth market place to their "out-of-touch" elders.

This is not a plea for immobilism. The tastes of the young are shiftable,
not to say fickle. But then, so are those of everyone else. There is a
premium today on novelty that makes such trends all the harder to track. It
does, however, suggest a far more complex picture than has hitherto been
presented.

If these "givens" about drink and drugs turn out to be illusory, what of
sexual morality or political inclination? The suspicion must be that, as in
America, the real fissures in British society are less generational than
they are cultural and religious.

Meanwhile, let us scrutinise more closely the claims of those vested
interests that tell us what young people want.