The war on pensioners

Who controls the media in Britain? Depending on your political outlook, you might answer: the Conservatives, the liberal-left chattering classes, Rupert Murdoch or the BBC. But if the coverage of the elderly is anything to go by, then we can perhaps agree on one thing: the headlines are decided by a cohort of 25- to 45-year-olds who believe that other people’s parents and grandparents — a.k.a. Britain’s pensioners — have stolen their future, dashed their dreams and nabbed all the plush property.

How else to account for a headline such as ‘No pay rise? Blame the baby-boomers’ gilded pension pots’ and a plethora of articles maintaining that pensioners have ‘never had it so good’, at the expense of the young, who will be ‘boomeranging’ back to their childhood beds, too poor to buy a home until they are in their own straitened dotage. The source for one recent wave of generational alarmism was a report published by the Resolution Foundation, a generally laudable outfit which focuses on low incomes.