Generation Scot Y E-Book

Kate Higgins

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Open Scotland
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 137

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

What is Generation Scot Y? Born in the 1980s and 1990s and comprising primarily of the children of the baby boomers, Generation Y is often perceived as being the generation that wants it all. Think you know what makes Scotland's 20-somethings tick? Knowing who Generation Y in Scotland - Generation Scott Y - is, matters for our economy, our society and our political culture. Generation has grown up with devolution: are they ready to embrace full nationhood? How has Scotland's independence referendum affected them and what does it mean for their future? In this book, political blogger at Burdz Eye View, Kate Higgins explores all this and more - Generation Scott Y's identity, influences, values, voting behaviours and aspirations. Far from being frivolous, this is a serious generation for serious times. This book only skims the surface but dip in and you'll discover something you never knew - I did and I'm the mother of one. And ultimately, you'll find that far from wanting to have it all, they just want a little of all that we've had. KATE HIGGINS

Leseprobe

KATE HIGGINS blogs at A Burdz Eye View on all things political and topical. She has spent the last 15 years working within the policy environment for charities, engaging with political institutions in Scotland, the UK and EU. She grew up with politics ever present in her childhood, carrying on the family tradition into adulthood, immersing herself in the independence referendum campaign and helping to co-found Women for Independence. Whatever happens on 19 September, she hopes to be able to retire from some aspects of it all and spend more time with her children and her garden.

Open Scotland is a series which aims to open up debate about the future of Scotland and do this by challenging the closed nature of many conversations, assumptions and parts of society. It is based on the belief that the closed Scotland has to be understood, and that this is a prerequisite for the kind of debate and change society needs to have to challenge the status quo. It does this in a non-partisan, pluralist and open-minded manner, which contributes to making the idea of self-government into a genuine discussion about the prospects and possibilities of social change.

Luath Press is an independently owned and managed book publishing company based in Scotland, and is not aligned to any political party or grouping.Viewpointsis an occasional series exploring issues of current and future relevance.

Generation ScotY

Scotland’s 20-somethings– a serious generation for serious times

KATE HIGGINS

LuathPress Limited

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2014

ISBN (PBK): 978-1-910021-48-4

ISBN (EBK): 978-1-910324-27-1

The author’s right to be identified as author of this work under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© Kate Higgins 2014

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE Defining the Generation That Straddles Two Millennia

CHAPTER TWO Considered Useless by Some, But Surely Not For Long?

CHAPTER THREE Does Generation ScotY Vote Early and Often?

CHAPTER FOUR Is Generation ScotY leaving the cage?

CHAPTER FIVE The Future is Coming On

CONCLUSION A Serious Generation for Serious Times

References

Acknowledgements

The lyrics to Marriage Counselling are reproduced with kind permission of Stanley Odd. (We are big fans in this house and so pleased you gave permission!)

As to everything else, where to begin? Firstly, thanks to Gerry Hassan for asking me to participate in his OpenScotland series. I hope I’ve added something… Thanks too to everyone at Luath Press for advice and support and actually publishing the thing. To friends and family who helped, critiqued and offered lots of positive support, many thanks. Now all you need to do is buy it…

And mainly a huge thank you to all of Scotland’s 20-somethings whose views and voices I’ve sprinkled liberally throughout. This book really is all about you and I hope I’ve done you some small justice.

Finally, a thank you to my own 20-something for giving me such a positive reference point for reflecting on this generation. I learned a lot about you from researching this book and appreciate you all the more now. And most especially, to the Boy Wonder who being still at home, put up with it all. Appreciative and understanding beyond your years, maybe one day you’ll get around to reading the end result. If your future comes on with just as much sunshine in the bag, I’ll be happy.

Introduction

I SPENT MY 20S variously graduating, having a baby, studying for a law degree, getting my first and second jobs, being homeless, buying my first car, beginning and ending three relationships, celebrating my parents’ Silver Wedding anniversary, becoming an auntie, losing the last of my grandparents, moving into my first and second rented homes and getting elected as a Councillor.

Yet, in my teens at university, I reckoned the pathway that would define success as an adult would be reaching the seemingly far off age of 30 married, possibly with children, a well-paid job, a decent car and owning my own home. By 30, I had achieved only one of these and probably not in the order that I aspired to.

Looking back, it seems – and it was – an impossibly busy and formative time in my life. And running through it all was the thread of political awareness, of a belief in independence in Scotland, nurtured through formative experiences with my parents, then explored more fully on my own in the 1980s and 1990s.

By the 1990s, my political beliefs and attitudes were pretty fully fledged – they’ve developed since but are fundamentally the same. And they were shaped not just by that early nurturing but by the torrid 1980s. I subscribed to theNew Statesmanall through my teens; I flirted with Red Wedge (it helped that I liked their music anyway); I sneaked off to a miners’ strike picket line to show solidarity and don’t think I’ve ever been so scared since. We marched constantly in that decade: against unemployment, factory closures, service cuts, privatisation, the Poll Tax, nuclear weapons, the Falklands war, US interference in Nicaragua, apartheid, cuts in higher education and against job creation schemes for young people. In fact, there are few things I recall being ‘for’ in the ’80s, other than for better pay and conditions for teachers and for the demise of Margaret Thatcher.

Indeed, this past 12 months have seen the passing of four seminal figures from my youth, all of whom helped shape my understanding of politics in different ways. Thatcher, of course, was the hate figure: every child of ’80s Scotland was reared on loathing her. She dominated all matters political and has influenced how we all live our lives today. Mainly, we aspire to be home owners rather than renters; few subscribe to non neo-liberal capitalist economics; most of us have private pensions in some form or another; and like it or not, we might still be community-minded, but we are indeed all individuals now.

Tony Benn was another big political figure for me growing up. In fact, UK politics preoccupied much more in the ’80s than they do now, and the fight for the soul of the Labour Party was viewed romantically by a bystander like me. I remember reading the 1983 Labour manifesto and loving every line; I was puzzled by the ridicule and opprobrium heaped upon it by UK media and bemused that the electorate – largely elsewhere on these islands but not exclusively so – rejected it.

The very recent death of Margo MacDonald marks another closed chapter on my formative political years. We mixed in quite different SNP circles when I was a child, but her no-nonsense campaigning zeal, bright and fiery intellect and ability to combine left-wing political aspirations related to class, opportunity and equality with a belief in self-determination were attractive qualities to a gawky and gobby Scottish female teenager.

Lastly, the passing of Nelson Mandela really did seem to mark the passing of an era, prompting a real bout of melancholic introspection. Which global figures of towering political importance, who embody a movement and are capable of capturing the imagination of like-minded individuals all around the world, will be mourned by Generation Y 20 years hence?

This book aims to explore the influences, attitudes and behaviours of 20-something Scots today and to discern what has influenced their political thinking. It won’t have escaped their attention that this is the year of the independence referendum. Has this awakened their political appetites? Are they engaged? How do they intend to vote? Is this the much trumpeted ‘Independence Generation’?

If we are to understand Scotland’s 20-somethings, we also need to know something about them and of them. Who are they? How do they live? Moreover, we need to examine their characteristics within a global context.

Generation Y is athing. The idea of a Generation Y was first posited by Neil Howe and William Strauss inGenerations: the History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069(Howe and Strauss, 1992). But they used the term ‘Millennials’ to denote the generation born from 1982 onwards whose lives would straddle and therefore be impacted by two Millennia. So struck were they by how different this generation might be from their parents, the so-called Generation X and Baby Boomers, that they published a separate book in 2000 solely on Millennials:

Over the next decade, the Millennial Generation will entirely recast the image of youth from downbeat and alienated to upbeat and engaged – with potentially seismic consequences for America.

HOWE AND STRAUSS, 2000

The phrase ‘Generation Y’ was coined later, appropriately enough by the then editor ofAd Age, the advertising industry magazine, in 1993 (Crain, 1993). Since then, an astonishing amount of research has been conducted into the habits and mores of this generation and some of the early theories about Generation Y’s characteristics have proven hugely influential. But, unsurprisingly, some of these initial theories have also been debunked (Twenge, 2006; Morrison, 2013).

Generation Y and Millennials have also been termed Generation Next, the Net Generation and Echo Boomers, in reference to their parents, who have been termed Baby Boomers. For the purposes of this book, ease of reference and consistency, the term Generation Y is used to describe 20- somethings from any part of the world and Generation ScotY (pronounced Scotty, natch) for those 20-somethings who currently live in Scotland but were not necessarily born here.

The first chapter collates what we know about Generation ScotY while the second considers some of the research and theories about their characteristics and attempts to apply these to our own 20-somethings. The last three chapters are devoted to exploring their voting intentions and influences, the role they are playing in the referendum and how they intend to vote on 18 September. Relevant data has been mined, quotes and comments purloined so that the voice of Generation ScotY is heard throughout.

CHAPTER ONE

Defining the Generation that Straddles Two Millennia

WHAT AGE DO YOU have to be to qualify as a member of Generation ScotY? Helpfully, there is no one defining demographic, though most agree that the starting birth date is 1982 (Horovitz, 2012; McCrindle, 2012). And while some suggest Generation Y continues right up to the Millennium, most consider its endpoint to be in the 1990s, either 1994 (McCrindle, 2012; Donovan and Finn, 2013) or 1997 (Peters, 2008).

So for the purposes of this book, Gen ScotY is defined as running from 1982 to 1997, with interest focused on, but not confined to,bona fide20- somethings – that is, those who were born between 1985 and 1993:

According to the 2011 Census, there are 363,940 young adults in Scotland aged 20 to 24 and a further 345,632 aged between 25 and 29. Thus, Generation ScotY makes up 13.3 per cent of Scotland’s total population (709,572 of 5,295,403 people) (Census, 2011). There are more women than men, in line with general population trends, but the gap does narrow to just over 1,000 in favour of women in the younger age group. Interestingly, there are more Scots in this age group now than there were recorded in the previous Census in 2001.

Scotland is similar in terms of the size of its Generation Y population to other countries. In part, this might explain some of the interest in researching the characteristics of Generation Y: for the first time in two decades, the pool of potential employees, consumers and voters has grown.

Ethnicity and Identity

There is nothing about the accident of birth of being Scottish that I think I can be particularly proud of. We’re not somehow better than people who are born in or who live in any other geographically and politically defined population of people. But we’re not any worse either.

KIERAN HURLEY

Of the 363,940 young people aged between 20–24 recorded in the 2011 Census as living in Scotland, 336,988 categorised themselves as White. Of these, 82.5 per cent considered themselves to be White: Scottish, with 9.2 per cent considering themselves White: Other British. The next largest group are those who consider themselves White: Polish at 1.9 per cent of the population. Of those who consider themselves not to be White, by far the largest grouping is those who think of themselves as Asian, Asian Scottish or Asian British (20,372) with 2,442 considering themselves African, 600 Caribbean or Black and 1,451 categorising themselves as from Other Ethnic Groups (Census, 2011).

It is a very similar picture among 25–29 year olds: 92.6 per cent of these young adults consider themselves to be White, with 81.3 per cent calling themselves White: Scottish, 7.8 per cent White: Other British and 4.6 per cent considering themselves to be White: Polish. There were 17,475 adults in this age group describing themselves as Asian, Asian Scottish or Asian British, 4,211 as African, 607 as Caribbean or Black and 1,831 as being from Other Ethnic Groups (Census, 2011). Across both age groups, only 774 describe themselves as White: Gypsy/Traveller.

The 2011 Census tells us that even in its young adult population, Scotland is still predominantly White and clearly comfortable with describing itself as White and Scottish. This is borne out by how Generation ScotY describes its identity, demonstrated in the table below:

However, these Census findings are only partially reinforced by data from an IPSOS Mori survey into the State of the Nation in 2014, conducted for British Future, and it should be remembered that this data, while only a snapshot on a very small sample size, is much more recent.

This State of the Nation survey shows a significant minority of young adults considering themselves more Scottish, Welsh or English than British, but most respondents considering themselves not just Scottish, Welsh or English but also British:

Whether it is the different sample size and age range, or whether there has been a shift in attitudes to identity over the last few years, there is clearly a difference. Yet from both datasets, we can draw tentative conclusions, that most of Generation ScotY considers itself to be at least more Scottish than British. However, they are not the only age group to do so and indeed, are not the age group most likely to either.

In the 2011 Census, 20–24 year olds were only fourth most likely to consider themselves solely Scottish, with 25–29 year olds eighth most likely. More of those surveyed in older age groups saw themselves as Scottish only. The same is true to having dual identity (both Scottish and British), although they were also the age groups least likely to think of themselves as solely British, which, as might be expected, the much older age groups are more likely to do.