Young people have paid enough –spare them from footing the coronavirus bill | Gaby Hinsliff

After the financial crash, Britain's young shouldered the burden. The Conservatives must not let that happen again

The kids are boomeranging back again. Up and down the country, overgrown children are shuffling home to roost, refugees from a virus that has stalled their adult lives mid-launch. University lectures and supervisions have all been moved online, so there's no point student children moping around deserted halls when they could be home ransacking the parental fridge. Gap years too are ending abruptly in a mad scrabble for the last flight out. And for those losing wobbly first jobs in the early wave of coronavirus redundancies, from bar and shop workers to freelancers whose commissions have dried up overnight, home is the refuge of last resort. But now what?

Everyone rightly sympathises with forlorn GCSE and A-level students, left in limbo when their exams were cancelled and still unsure of their path to university. But the worst hit in many ways are 18-year-old school leavers and final-year university students, due to emerge this summer into the world of work. Who will be hiring in the wake of what looks like a vertiginous crash? It's hard to see many openings at the bottom of the ladder, and the temporary jobs in pubs or coffee shops that graduates took during the last recession when the "milk round" recruiters stopped calling are precisely the ones now going to the wall.