They have suffered a remorseless assault on their living standards, and their values, and been told that a better world is beyond their reach. The most socially progressive generation in history have endured a rightwing culture war the Tory Brexiteers imported from the Republican right in the US. And it is this same generation who had it hammered into their skulls that there was no alternative, that this was the end of history, that their lot in life truly was all there was. Whether or not this generation turns out to vote in sufficient numbers – and the onus is on Labour to inspire them to do so – could determine whether Britain becomes the plaything of a deceitful charlatan for five years, or whether the ceaseless war against their futures finally ends.

It is not all about age, of course. A slice of Britain’s youth live a gilded life, no doubt concentrated in the 18% of under-25s planning to vote for a continuation of ruinous Tory rule. But the balance sheet for younger Britain – to be generous, I’ll include the 18-year-old on a plumbing apprenticeship and a 36-year-old nurse with two kids – is stark and chilling. As the Resolution Foundation showed last year, millennials have endured a decline in living standards on most measures. No wonder, then, that one poll found half of them believed today’s young people would have a worse lot than their parents, with just 22% believing things would improve. Nearly one in three born at the end of the 1980s were in a low-paying job in their mid-20s; for those born in the early 1960s, it was a quarter.

It was the wages of young workers that suffered the most, because of a fateful combination of the crash and Tory-Lib Dem austerity. An astonishing one in five young people are, in violation of the law, being paid less than the minimum wage, which is itself insufficient to live on.

Child poverty is hurtling towards 40%; growing up in hardship damages the prospects of its victims throughout their lives. Youth services budgets have been hammered by cuts of 69%. Real-terms cuts to social security, whether to tax credits or housing benefit, have pummelled the young. An ever-escalating housing crisis has become a defining feature in their lives as home ownership collapses, with half as many young adults on middle incomes owning a home compared with 20 years earlier, and what’s left of council housing not being an option for the vast majority.

Instead young people are driven into a rip-off and insecure private rented sector. In 1980 a private tenant on average spent 10% of their income on rent. That has now surged to 30%, and in London someone in their 20s on an average income can expect to spend 55% of their pay packet on an average one-bedroom flat. No wonder a million more young adults live with their parents compared with 20 years ago, with all the pressures and strains that places on family life.

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This is a generation that has been saddled with debt for daring to aspire to a university education from which all of society benefits. Students in England can now expect to graduate with an average debt of more than £50,000, and even having acquired this millstone, a quarter are in low-skilled work a decade after graduating. Young people are increasingly unable to afford a car – driving licence numbers among this generation have plummeted in the last 25 years – yet bus services outside the capital are expensive and unreliable, while train fares are extortionate. Young people were promised freedom and prosperity: instead they were burdened with insecurity and stagnation.

Then there’s the relentless attempt to belittle and insult the values they hold dear. Young people were mostly angered by Brexit not because of some sentimental attachment to EU institutions, but because of the cultural counter-revolution waged by Tory Brexiteers in its wake. Young people are pro-LGBT and antiracist, and yet they are lumbered with a government headed by a man who calls gay people “bum boys”, whose cabinet has no openly LGBT ministers but several who voted against LBGT civil liberties, who baits Muslims and black people, and who menaces migrants and refugees.

There is nothing inevitable about young people rejecting the Tories. When Margaret Thatcher secured her 1983 landslide, she did so with a nine-point lead among under 25s. When Theresa May lost her majority, it was partly thanks to Labour’s 35-point lead in the same age group; polling now suggests that advantage has extended to 42 points.

Britain’s young could prove themselves to be our political saviours. They have endured a decade of assaults on their living standards and their beliefs. The Tory elite calculated that this onslaught would have no political consequences because young people would not vote in sufficient numbers for it to matter. This hubris finally collided with reality in 2017, but it was not enough. And so this is the question that will soon be answered. Will enough young people march to polling stations, in the right places, to stop a hard-right Tory government committed to implementing hard Brexit by the end of next month? Will Boris Johnson’s entitlement meet its nemesis in the shape of a revolt of the young? There is very little time left. But if Britain’s nightmare finally ends, it will probably be the young who save us from it.

• Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist