These vital spaces have been the first targets of cuts in a nation that favours age over youth – despite being the remedy for blights such as social division, polarisation and loneliness.

A consensus seems to have recently settled in UK politics: that young British lives are not as they should be, and something must be done. Our teens and twentysomethings, we are told, are lonely, phone-addicted, “overdiagnosed”, and too often jobless, which entails a great blizzard of proposals – from welfare reform to the scaling-back of university education – that seem to have more to do with older voters’ prejudices than the real-life problems of other generations