From housing insecurity to declining public services, growing numbers of people are struggling to build a secure future. The unrest in France raises a wider question: what happens when a society can no longer deliver on its promise of opportunity?
When students take to the streets over their schools, the first question should be what those schools tell us about the society around them. Yet as protests in France have widened and violence has escalated, much of the political debate has turned towards who is responsible for the disorder, and how it should be contained.
The violence is real, and it should not be excused. But neither should it be allowed to obscure the grievances that brought people onto the streets in the first place.
The protests began in September with French pupils demanding better-resourced schools, amid teacher shortages and deteriorating facilities. They have since expanded into wider demonstrations against rising living costs and declining public services, drawing in trade unions, workers, parents and other groups. In the aftermath of the violence, President Emmanuel Macron has threatened tighter restrictions on demonstrations while blaming extremist groups for the unrest. The argument over public order is becoming inseparable from the argument over what the state owes its citizens.
France is not the whole story. Protests elsewhere in Europe have raised different demands, from affordable housing in Spain to wages and public services in other countries. These are not necessarily parts of one coordinated movement, nor can the violence in France be taken as representative of everyone protesting. But there is a shared question beneath these different disputes: what happens when people lose confidence that the economic and political systems governing their lives can deliver them a secure future?
This is not simply a story about young people being angry. It is about the conditions under which anger becomes a political force, and what that tells us about the societies in which it develops.
There is a difference between a system that fails to deliver prosperity temporarily and one in which insecurity becomes a permanent feature of life for a growing proportion of the population. The first invites patience. The second eventually makes patience look like a demand that people accept their own exclusion.
For many younger people, the conventional milestones of adulthood have become increasingly difficult to reach. Education is supposed to open doors; employment is supposed to provide independence; years of work are supposed to create some measure of stability. Yet a job does not necessarily pay enough to afford a home, qualifications do not guarantee secure employment, and working hard does not mean someone can escape the pressures of rent, bills and food costs.
The problem is not that everyone has the same experience, or that previous generations had easy lives. It is that the relationship between effort and security has become less convincing. People can do what society asks of them and still find themselves unable to build the life they were told those efforts would make possible.
Housing exposes this contradiction particularly clearly. A home is a basic necessity, but it is also an asset through which wealth is accumulated and transferred. Those who already own property may benefit from rising values; those who do not must compete for access to something that has become increasingly expensive. Family wealth can make the difference between receiving help with a deposit and spending years paying rent without building an equivalent stake of one's own.
This is how inequality reproduces itself across generations. It is not simply a matter of older people having more than younger people. Many older people are struggling themselves, while some young people inherit substantial advantages. The deeper division is between those whose security is supported by assets and those who depend primarily on wages. Age can shape where people sit within that divide, but it does not explain it on its own.
The consequences are visible in Britain. In 2025, 28.7% of people aged 20 to 34 lived with their parents, up from 25.4% in 2015. In Scotland, the number of households in temporary accommodation reached a record 19,004 in March 2026, including 10,715 children. These figures describe different forms of housing insecurity, but together they challenge the idea that access to a stable home is something people can reasonably expect to achieve through work alone.
The implications extend beyond housing. When access to opportunity depends heavily on the resources a family can provide, education cannot fully compensate for inequality outside the classroom. When public services deteriorate, those with money can increasingly seek alternatives, while those without it must make do with what remains. The same pressures that make a secure home harder to obtain can therefore undermine the institutions meant to offer people a fair chance regardless of their background.
“A society cannot keep asking a generation to wait for a future that never quite arrives. ”
This is where the generational wealth divide becomes more than a dispute between age groups. It is a measure of how security itself is distributed. And that makes it a political problem, not simply an economic one.
A government can acknowledge that housing is unaffordable, promise to build more homes and present a timetable for improvement. It can recognise pressure on schools and services, then announce a programme to make them more efficient. Such measures may be necessary. But there is a more fundamental question about whether policy is changing the conditions that produce insecurity, or merely managing its consequences.
A system can be made more efficient without becoming more equitable. Better administration will not, by itself, resolve a housing system in which homes are treated as investment vehicles as well as places to live. Nor will improved performance targets necessarily restore confidence in public services if the resources available to people remain determined by their ability to pay privately.
This is the distinction between retuning the machine and questioning the machine itself. It is not an argument against reform, nor does it mean every institution must be dismantled. It asks whether the objectives guiding reform are sufficient. Are we trying to make an unequal settlement function more smoothly, or to change the distribution of security that makes it unequal in the first place?
Scotland cannot simply be equated with France. The political histories, institutions and immediate causes of unrest differ. But the question is relevant here all the same. If thousands of households are stuck in temporary accommodation, while younger people increasingly struggle to establish independent lives, the answer cannot be to ask them to wait indefinitely for conditions to improve. A promise that housing will become affordable in ten years may sound like a plan to someone who already has a home. To someone who cannot afford one now, ten years is a substantial part of a life.
That gap in perspective matters. Political institutions tend to work in budgets, targets, parliamentary terms and long-term strategies. People experiencing insecurity live it day by day. They cannot postpone paying rent until a reform programme delivers results, or put their lives on hold while politicians negotiate the limits of what is economically possible. When the response to an immediate crisis is always a future commitment, patience begins to look less like civic responsibility and more like a privilege demanded of those with the least room to wait.
There is also a danger in treating unrest principally as a threat to public order. Governments have a responsibility to protect people from violence, and legitimate protest does not make arson or attacks on others acceptable. But a political response concerned only with restoring order leaves the underlying question unanswered. If the grievances remain, suppressing their expression does not resolve them.
Nor should the existence of political opportunists invalidate those grievances. Parties can exploit disorder, and election campaigns can encourage politicians to portray events in ways that benefit them. That is all the more reason to distinguish between the actions of particular groups and the wider conditions in which protests take root. The fact that anger can be manipulated does not mean there is nothing real to be angry about.
The danger is that insecurity becomes normalised. People are told that unaffordable housing is a market reality, strained public services are a fiscal reality, and precarious work is an economic reality. Each problem is presented as a constraint to be managed rather than a political choice that can be challenged. Eventually, the cumulative effect is to narrow what people believe they are entitled to expect from society.
That is the deeper significance of the unrest now visible across parts of Europe. It does not prove that a unified generational revolt is underway, or that the political settlement is about to collapse. It does suggest that the distance between what people are told society offers and what they experience in practice has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
The task is not to romanticise protest or assume that anger will produce a better politics. It is to understand why the promise of a more secure future has lost credibility, and to recognise that stability cannot be sustained indefinitely by asking people to accommodate their own insecurity.
If work, education and participation no longer provide a convincing route towards independence and security, then the answer must be more ambitious than helping people navigate the consequences. It must address why security is so unequally distributed in the first place.
A society cannot keep asking a generation to wait for a future that never quite arrives. Eventually, the question stops being when the system will work for them, and becomes why they should continue to trust it at all.
