Morrissey in concert in Seattle in March 2013. 'He is the very definition of old news,' writes Carole Cadwalladr. Photograph: Mat Hayward/FilmMagicIf you think there's been a tad too much coverage of the newly released autobiography of a 54-year-old expat who was a culturally relevant force sometime back in the last millennium, then you are, perhaps, showing your age. You're under 40, perhaps, or over 50. You were not yet born, or still at the toddling stage, or had – what's the word? – oh yes, "grown up" by the time the Smiths burst on to Top of the Pops. You think the media's obsession with Morrissey's book is a bit weird.
It is a bit weird. And I say that as somebody who was a teenager at the time. Who learned all the lyrics to the album The Queen is Dead and over-identified with the whole doomy, solipsistic, "if-a-double-decker-bus-should-crash-right-into-us" maudlin adolescent angst that is at the heart of all Smiths songs.
And then I grew up. The last time I considered Morrissey an interesting or in some way relevant public figure was sometime back around 1992. He doesn't matter. He is the very definition of old news. And yet there he is splayed across all news outlets, front pages, bulletins, Twitter streams etc, which says far more about the people who dominate our news outlets and run our country than it does about Morrissey.
In a week in which the social mobility guru Alan Milburn published a report that described a growing intergenerational divide, the result of policies that are impoverishing the young at the expense of the old, the cult of Morrissey offers a small but significant clue as to why this might be so. It's the fortysomethings, mostly male, mostly white, who identified with Morrissey's tales of outsider woe a billion years ago, who are now running the country and controlling the nation's media, filtering experience through their eyes and returning it to us as news and policy briefings. Even David Cameron at Eton found common cause with the subjects of those songs: the dispossessed, the marginalised, the unlucky, the alone.
And those people are still with us. In greater numbers than ever. It's the 40-plus cohort who have changed. Not all of them; there are plenty of struggling fortysomethings out there. But many of those who live in London or the south-east, which includes pretty much all MPs, who had the sort of jobs that enabled them to buy houses – when they were still homes for people to live in rather than an international asset – are as comfortably off, myopic and self-absorbed as Morrissey.
The Morrissey generation is running the country, and even if they came from Preston or Hull or Lanarkshire, and shared a background not unlike his, they are now closer, in just about every way – security, capital, lifestyle – to the likes of David Cameron than some young lad from Manchester.
The oppressed have become the oppressors. They're just not owning up to it. All teenagers feel like victimised outsiders at some point. That's why young people keep on rediscovering Smiths tracks from nearly 30 years ago, gratified to hear their own pain articulated and reflected back at them. The difference is that this generation (or at least that vast part of it whose parents can't gift them a deposit for a flat and/or their tuition fees) is actually being victimised.
Friday's news that rents rose nationwide by 9.2% last year was as nothing compared to Thursday's news that British Gas prices are set to rise by exactly the same amount. You probably didn't even hear about it because, while 36% of the population rents, almost no one in public life, in government, in the media does.
Do the effing sums, someone. Anyone. A politician, perhaps? Hello. Paging the Labour party. Is there anybody out there? Because 9.2% of average annual rent – £9,084 – is a damn sight more than 9.2 per cent of average energy bills. British Gas customers – that is eight million households – face an average increase of £123 a year. Bad, but nothing compared with the £835 increase a year for the 8.3 million households in rented accommodation – £835! And that applies across the country, though if you live in London or the south-east, it could be more like double that.
That average rent increase? It needs to be found out of an average household income after tax of £16,034. How, exactly? Where? And Help to Buy? You could rename it Help to Put Rents Up Even Further. It could be retitled Help to Make Poor People Poorer. Help to Make Young People Even More Fecked. Because house prices are intimately linked to rental yields and this is just more disaster in the offing.
The British Gas news affects the Morrissey class; the rent increase won't. And even for people who do worry about these things – the Labour party, supposedly – they've got the focus completely wrong. It's not the energy markets that require state-sponsored intervention, it's the artificial inflation of house prices by government-designed policy.
Sod Morrissey, a bitter, old hasbeen who a couple of years ago told the Guardian that "it's a relief to feel relaxed in more places than just one" (he has homes in Los Angeles, Rome, Switzerland and Britain) and who called the Chinese a "subspecies" for their treatment of animals.
The class that he now represents – a middle-aged, capital-rich, metropolitan elite – doesn't give a toss about you. They've proved it in every way it is possible to prove.
Where's the new Morrissey? When will we hear from him, or her, or them? When will working-class, young people realise they are being robbed blind and that there is not a soul in power who represents their interests? Rise up, young people, because you have nothing to lose but your disenfranchised future and an extra grand a year in rent. "There's ice on the sink where we bathe," sang Morrissey once upon a time. "So how can you call this a home/When you know it's a grave?"
That's you, that is. Write a sodding song about it. Or failing that, have a revolution. This isn't a Thomas Hardy novel. You're not actually destined to be screwed over by the lord of the manor and left to die on a neolithic rock. It's politics, not fate. Eff off, Morrissey. And all who sail within him.
