Back in the day – a phrase never used back in the day by anyone I ever met – we were the knees of the bees. Being young was very heaven. Everything was better. Because we were just better. Sadly, young people today are just rubbish. Look at them on their meow meow, mainlining the Kardashians, doing pathetically downgraded exams and degrees in astroturfing. Look at their inability to get jobs in a recession. Look at the really lazy ones on the streets in sleeping bags, and the ones who don't even own any property. Hardly suprising when they turn up at school with no social skills and leave with fewer.

I am exaggerating, but not much. I hear these conversations all the time, and I feel disgusted with my generation. It is not that I am down with the youth or anything, but every day I see things I took for granted – education, housing, reasonable employment – being stripped away from younger generations. Of course, I am nostalgic for the time when you could change jobs in your lunch hour, live in a great squat and waft through a degree. But it really is different now. This is not down to our individual children's lack of ability. We need to grow up.

Those people who are surprised that David Cameron wants to take away housing benefit from the under-25s have not been paying attention at the back. From tuition fees to workfare to benefit cuts to young parents, to careers stitched up by free internships and temporary contracts, a clear ideological and electoral decision has been made. These young people don't vote, they don't pay much tax, and they are superfluous to a Tory win. It is older people who vote. Thus the freezing, half-starved pensioner is always wheeled out – not the comfortably-off guy playing golf in Marbella – to be pitted against feckless, hooded youth – as though we have to choose between them. We don't.

The reality is that under-25s are pitted against their own parents. If you have a house, you better keep it so they have somewhere to live. If you have a job, stick at it, bite your lip, because they might find employment tough.

The reality is that we are all in it together. I mean in a "sharing the bathroom" way not in the "big society" way that Rowan Williams rightly called "aspirational waffle". Cameron's fantasy is one of wealth, multiple dwellings and harmonious families. The reality is piling pressure on the vulnerable and writing off a generation. Politicians know that the younger a person is, the less the likelihood that they will vote. This is always called voter apathy. Voter anger is not registered. The lack of a stake in society that this indicates cannot be overestimated.

The Conservatives are happy enough to refigure all this not as a class issue, but as one of an intergenerational divide. They can cut their losses, just as they can apparently consider letting parts of the north decline as they will never win seats there. A generation or two of high unemployment and low wages is considered a price worth paying to bring down the deficit. This makes little sense economically (no jobs means less tax revenue, hence Osborne's frantic borrowing) and no sense socially. Cast your eyes globally at twentysomethings with few prospects and high expectations.

Whatever erupts may be contained. Anyway these kids only want trainers and TVs. But how do we also write off the graduates without any work? Or the hospital nurses who cannot afford to live in the cities where they work? Or the mothers who cannot afford childcare, so are living off the state? This is the end of compassionate Conservatism. Which actually requires some cojones. This government doesn't have them. Instead it panics and plays to its worst instincts.

This is cruel, and the word "growth" becomes meaningless if we do not grow and support our young people.

People my age should be embarrassed by this situation. Solidarity has to be cross-generational, not dismissed as some sort of youthful protest. We have to stop blaming young people for not voting. If there is no sense of a shared future – what we called civic society – and if people feel politicians are powerless in the face of "the markets", they will not engage.

A phony war between those who are in work and have property and those who are shut out of that loop must be refused. Children should not bear the brunt of adult dysfunction and that is exactly what is happening. How can we not be on the side of our own children? This disturbs me.

When I was young I had mice. I kept poking them, so they ate their own offspring. Which disturbed me. I see the same disturbed look on those who can't quite believe what the Tories are doing to young people, and I think: "Clearly you have never seen mice eating their own babies, have you?" Back in the day.