It is sometimes said that other people's parents are always nicer than your own, but your grandparents are always nicer than other people's. As a saying, it does much to explain the teenage mindset, those years of adolescence where the presence of those that spawned you can, to some at least, feel unbearable. I never had that problem. I still scrutinised other people's parents, of course, but I never thought they were nicer than my own. They just always seemed to have more money than mine did.

I thought of all those other people with nice but perpetually skint parents this week, when David Cameron pledged to cut housing benefit for those under the age of 25 not in work, education or training (the so-called "Neets"). The assumption seemed to be that these youngsters would return to the paternalistic bosom of the family and be provided with food, shelter and "tough love". Even, if necessary, further education and training, because that's what their own families, with their trust funds and their networks of contacts, would do. No thought was given to those families who can't provide these things, or what would happen to their children.

I was lucky that when I signed on for jobseeker's allowance and housing benefit after university, I knew that even if my parents couldn't provide me with cash, they could at least give me love. The safety net of the welfare state, meanwhile, provided a roof over my head so I could stay in London for long enough to find a job and contribute to the UK economy like those good, taxpaying citizens so beloved of the Tories. The alternative – to have gone back to an extremely economically depressed, rural area with few jobs and a shoddy public transport system (I don't drive or have a car), a mother who was desperately trying to leave for those same reasons, and a poorly father who worked freelance part-time – was unlikely to get me back into work. They gave me love and an education; the welfare state helped me get a career.

I worry even more for those unlike me, whose parents can't offer anything, even love. Those with perpetually skint but not-so-nice parents, or those coming out of care. I worry for young mums, with kids to support. "Young people" are not a homogenous group in need of arbitrary policy – they are adults, quite vulnerable adults, actually, with different needs and desires and circumstances. You can't just slap a Neet label on them and order them back to the tech. You can't just force them to borrow 27 grand for a course they don't want to study.

But then, I suppose if they're in work or education, rather than at home, thinking about other things, such as how spectacularly shafted they have been by the previous generation, then they're that little bit more malleable.

I probably sound angry, and that's because I am. Over the years I've seen a raft of policies that make things tougher for young people, from the scrapping of education maintenance allowance to workfare to tuition fees. I've felt increasingly alienated by the government's failure to limit the power of the buy-to-let landlords who impoverish us, and the failure to provide us with affordable housing. How can young people hope to engage with a government that seems to hate us so much? How can that government expect to get our vote, when the time comes?

There are older people out there who worry about us, I know that. My grandparents certainly did. My grandmother was one of those people whose not-so-nice family had failed her, but she muddled through, reaping the benefits of the most prosperous generation that ever lived, the baby boomers. But she understood how it was to be young, to struggle.

The Conservatives don't understand. They don't understand why we don't send one another poetry instead of pictures of our genitals (Gove), and they don't understand why we don't just get up off our lazy backsides and work. They don't understand that some of us don't have parents who can see us through, and that those that do still crave, nonetheless, independence. Some of the older ones don't even understand why we think it's OK to be gay, or how we quite like being European. And as they age, they'll expect this feckless bunch of worthless youngsters to fund their soaring medical bills and spoon-feed them, and nod politely when they make politically incorrect comments about immigrants.

Much like other people's grandparents.