'The younger generation have advancements we could only dream of - but I don't envy them at all'

But let's start with a content warning for the benefit of younger readers. The following contains scenes and imagery from somebody who is not of the young generation himself. 

They are a miserable lot. That's not a criticism but a fact, because indicators suggest they are the most unhappy and messed up young generation in history.

According to an NHS England survey a fifth of eight to 16-year-olds has a probable mental health disorder, with the proportion rising to 23.3 per cent among 17 to 19-year-olds.

If Labour carries through with its manifesto pledge to lower the voting age to 16, it will mean these already stressed youngsters will be saddled with even further responsibility to prey on their minds.

Despite enjoying the benefits of technological and medical advances of which previous young generations could only dream, and despite all the well-meaning efforts to protect them from damaging influences and dangerous risks, they are not full of the joys of life.

You read the memoirs of old 'uns who never had smartphones or colour television and they had a whale of a time in their carefree, irresponsible, and positively hazardous childhoods.

And yes, they climbed trees. It's not as if there aren't any trees to climb any more. In its 2019 manifesto Labour even came up with an innovative idea of planting two billion trees, although admittedly not specifically for children to climb.

Young people see themselves as enlightened champions of diversity, although that does not extend to diversity of opinion, when they are much more comfortable when everybody is thinking and saying the same and nobody is rocking the boat with challenging heresies to upset their world view.

The traditional dream was to own your own home and have a good job. Today the home-owning dream is more like fantasy for many, and the jobs that they want are to be TikTok influencers, which are hard to come by.

The internet has brought shopping opportunities but on balance is a mind-warping and brainwashing disaster for the human race, being a vehicle and platform for mass-produced bullying and venting of hate and toxicity on a scale never previously seen, while going to university is nothing like what it was, and is today a means to achieving lifelong debt.

Young people used to be an angry brigade, not being happy with the world and having a lot to protest about on the streets. What happened to the revolution? The only stuff-the-establishment people's revolution in modern times was led by older people - the Brexit referendum result in 2016.

On a positive note, there's abundant evidence that young people today are overwhelmingly good people. It's not their fault that these are rubbish times.

There was a time that the older generation would envy the young generation, because they seemed to have it all, and they were "the future."

Personally, I don't envy today's younger generation at all. They can't even enjoy warmer weather without guilt and shame.

...........

Donald Trump has suggested shifting all the Palestinians out of devastated Gaza and resettling them elsewhere, whether they like it or not.

You don't have to look far to see examples of the forced movement of people, like the Crimean Tatars in 1944. Stalin did for them, and many others.

You might think that seeking to "solve" a situation by getting the "problem" section of a community to relocate would always be controversial, but I cast my mind back to a television discussion years ago about Northern Ireland. One of the contributors was a well-known left wing MP, now dead. 

On air, he proposed "solving" the Northern Ireland problem by giving the Ulster Protestants money to relocate to mainland Britain, meaning Northern Ireland would become entirely Catholic.

How seriously he was suggesting that, I cannot know, but if you think the comments caused any sort of row, they didn't. 

Apparently it was quite acceptable to say that sort of thing if you said it about Ulster Protestants.