Don’t blame the baby boomers – they had it tough too

Here’s a competition for you: ‘The most irritating discussion on Radio 4 in the past month.’ Answers in not more than 140 characters — but on a proper postcard, preferably written in fountain pen. My own choice was an edition of The Moral Maze that heaped abuse on ‘Baby Boomers’ (usually understood as those born in the decade after the second world war, including me as a happy arrival of January 1955) for ‘raiding their kids’ piggy-banks’ and other offences of ‘generational theft’.

The argument — vehemently made by the former Labour policy guru Matthew Taylor, and rebutted by Melanie Phillips when she could get a word in — is that the cohort now at retirement age is, in a moral sense, disgustingly well off. Having enjoyed free education, steady careers, rising property values and no major wars, they look forward to gold-plated pensions, bus passes and winter fuel payments. And they ought to be ashamed of themselves, because their unwillingness to sacrifice any part of this accumulation has left the cohort of 40 years behind them with miserable job prospects, mountainous debts, scant chance of buying a house and even scanter chance of a decent pension when their own time comes.

Governments are afraid to penalise these ‘selfish’ middle-class wealth–hoarders because they are far more likely than the demoralised young to vote in elections. ‘Fairness’ would begin with ritual surrender of bus passes; but it must go on, said Taylor, to real redistribution through punitive rises in inheritance and council taxes.

Most popular

Julie Burchill

Will I ever pee again?

I was listening to the late-night Saturday repeat as I drove home in a heightened emotional state after an epic Opera North performance of Wagner’s Siegfried at the Sage Gateshead. The boy Siegfried had triumphed heroically over adversities meted out to him by his elders, pierced the ring of fire (a nice metaphor for today’s graduate job market) and given Brunhilde an ecstatic seeing-to.