The complicated truth about generational inequality in the UK

I’ve spent the last few weeks making a documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches on what I regard as one the biggest new arguments of our times: the generation wars. The idea that (as David Willetts famously put it) the ‘baby boomers took their children’s’ future’ – and ‘should give it back’. I’ve been talking to various experts, being heckled at protest marches, wading through research and putting the established wisdom to the test. The result is on Channel 4 documentary:  The Wealth Gap.

Only Channel 4 really does documentaries about ideas: the asset bubble, the relationship between wealth and longevity. What made this one tougher is that we ended up making a rather different film than we thought we’d be making at first. We started off talking to various luminaries who told us the conventional story: the young are screwed, the old are minted. This, pretty much, had been my take too. So the documentary set about filling in the gaps.