The hunt is on for new journalistic game. Celebrities are protected, Muslims a politically incorrect target, Wiki leaks so last year, and the Bankers hunted to extinction. The aspiring journo-hunter has gone in search of new quarry – the Baby Boomers.
This year, the first of those babies born in the heady days and nights after May 8th 1945 when Britain celebrated the end of the slaughter of young men in time honoured fashion, will step up to the national handbag and meekly ask if they might have the pension they have been contributing to during their working life.
It will amount to £5,077 pounds on average. On average, they will have accrued an extra £2,000 a year in private pension. £7,077 or £136 pound a week. They won’t be living the high life.
Phillip Inman is ready for them, determined to bag the first flush.
“Baby boomers are Britain’s secret millionaires – The inadvertent burden baby boomers have bequeathed the young is sending Britain broke”
Taking a passing pot shot at the bankers for old times sake – “The boomers’ claims on the national income and assets are in addition to the City bankers and landed gentry. It was wrong when old money demanded more than its fair share, but it was affordable. With millions more having their hand out as a reward for retiring, we will soon be broke.”
‘Burden’, ‘having their hand out’, such is the buck shot heading the way of pensioners.
The Baby boomers paid for the social security, they paid for the NHS, they paid for the ‘free’ education, they paid with their lives for the freedom to enjoy all that – they willingly poured an uncomfortable percentage of their income into the ‘national asset’ that they are now seen as ‘having their hand out’ unfairly to.
The country is certainly broke, but it isn’t grand-dad looking for his miserable £136 a week that caused it to be broke – he was too busy going into work every day running the trains, the buses, looking forward to his gold watch.
It was the young who came out of the red brick universities in the 70s with their liberal ethics, their determination to support the fluffy pandas, the Congo basin, the Kashmiri separatists, the Sri Lankan women’s co-operative, Free Tibet, you name it – it was the young and aspiring political wonks who somehow imagined that grand-dads taxes could stretch to supporting any daft idea they cared to dream up.
Now that Grand-dad is making his way up the Treasury steps they are turning their propaganda machines round to fire at him – ‘he’s got his hand out’, ‘we can’t afford it’, ‘unfair, unfair’, they squeal.
The Institute of Economic Affairs has joined in and launched a vindictive attack on pensioners, calling for the abolition of free bus travel, TV licences and the winter fuel allowance, alongside accelerating the retirement age and reducing increases in the state pension.
‘Gerrof grand-dad’ they say, ‘it’s our money’ – ‘and whilst you’re about it, find another way of financing the care we aren’t going to give you in your old age, ‘cos we want your house too – that’s our inheritance!’
That money was loaned to you, you flibbertygibbet toe rags, entrusted to you to invest, to help you grow strong and well educated.
You squandered it, yes you, in your £250 designer jeans, and your Nike trainers, and your Blackberry glued to your ear. If there is any section of society that shouldn’t suffer in the economic cuts – it’s those baby boomers collecting their pension next month.
SBML is the landlord of the Raccoon Arms. He lives North of Watford and has an eclictic range of interests from Science and Technology to Politics including Woodwork and Genealogy. His political viewpoint has evolved from being a student demonstrator to more liberal views and has now seen the light in Libertarianism.
{ 28 comments }
Some of us paid extra. Graduated NI or State enhanced pension or whatever it was called years ago, to get a little bit extra. In the last budget payments promised against those extra contributions were specifically excluded from the basic pension cost of living increase. They have already quietly started breaking their obligations.
You miss the point by talking about 1945 Anna – and many of those chasing boomer backsides miss a different point.
The problem lies in all the free stuff we gave ourselves over those years – all the voting to get free education, free health, free museums, cheap opera, shinily pointless bits of rail infrastructure, a super-dooper social services system, great benefits if, for whatever reason, we find ourselves in times of trouble.
And to pay for all that free stuff, rather than cough up now we borrowed from our kids and grandkids. We ran up more and more debts – government and personal – chasing the rainbow. We believed all the good times would last forever and that the money trees would provide.
And yes, on the back of all this public largess and borrowing we racked up assets – houses we bought for a few thousand quid are now worth hundreds of thousands and pension funds piled up our cash for future use.
I got a free education up to age 22 – my son has to pay for his. I got free healthcare – my son, I am sure will have to pay for more and more of this. I got the chance of a final salary pension gold-plated by a buoyant stock market – my son will have to save the hard old way and hope inflation doesn’t kill it all.
We’re a selfish generation now paying the price of our selfishness – we believed the good times could go on forever, that there was no price to pay and that mummy state would care for us forever.
We’d get what we want is we just cry and little on Radio 4 in the morning.
No, Anna, I’m not especially fond of my generation – we never really grew up.
“And yes, on the back of all this public largess [sic] and borrowing we racked up assets – houses we bought for a few thousand quid are now worth hundreds of thousands and pension funds piled up our cash for future use.”
When I bought my first house, mortgage interest rates were running at about 16%. Once I’d paid it off (by hard work and saving) they dropped to 0.5%. My pension fund has been heavily raided by one G. Brown, and the annuity it will buy has reduced considerably in value in just a few years. My savings – such as they are – are being eroded by inflation.
I’ve done all I reasonably can to look after myself and the people close to me. Not racked up debts, paid my taxes, saved for a rainy day, not been a burden on the state.
You say that ours is a selfish generation – well, speak for yourself.
Well put, I feel exactly the same as you, in fact I consider myself to have been a very active part of the “Big Society” for the best part of the last 30 years – paying my taxes, paying my mortgage off, never being in debt. I haven’t put anything in to any of my pension funds for years, it’s gone where the sticky paws of the fund manangement people couldn’t get at it. So, Simon, you can enjoy your self-flagellation but don’t expect sympathy from the likes of me – some of us just paid our way.
Same here, Engineer, almost to a word.
WTF are the MSM up to with such a vendetta? This is the Nth of such articles I have read over the past few months, and they all take the same tack. It’s pretty offensive. As one has come to expect from a once fine newspaper. Moved to London and now it represents the London Metrosexual Liberal Elite. And related shits.
Yes, so selfish of me to chose to be born in 1950… though, funnily enough, I don’t remember actually choosing it.
Not everybody has final-salary type pensions – they’ve had to take their chances with private pensions, a double risk racket that offers no guarantee whatsoever. (The lucky ones will have put their savings in an old mattress).
I’m part of your ‘selfish generation’ as well.
I left school at 15. I have worked well over 30 years doing grotty shift work. I spent one entire decade working every bit of overtime available, never having a holiday, often worked seven days a week, saving every penny to help to pay my mortgage when it was sky high.
Do not owe anyone anything, never taken one penny in benefits, paid every tax known to man and never ran up debt.
Perhaps you never grew up, I had to bloody quickly.
I agree with you Simon there is a big transfer of wealth from today’s young (and tomorrow’s unborn) to the baby boomer generation. A smaller percentage of younger people vote than older people, and the unborn don’t vote at all. But I think most young people are in blithe ignorance of how badly they have been done over.
Hey man, chill out. Live hard, love hard and leave a good-looking corpse.
Oh well, back to the day job as The Lord Chief Justice.
Someone much wiser than me once said, “The trouble with socialists is that they always run out of other people’s money.”
Still true.
The Blessed Margaret of Fond Memory.
Liek Engineer I have not sponged off the state. I have either worked for someone else, or for myself. It was only after a stroke that I was forced to seek help from the state and then only for a short time. Courtesy of an NHS system I was able to rebuild my life and return to work.
In a few years time I will retire. Do I feel guilty about taking back some of my just desserts even though I had a ‘free’ education? Absolutely not – the taxman has had his fair share off me over the years so i feel I have paid my dues. Now it’s time for a little payback!
Well said.
Ah Anna, a subject I have in draft at the moment. I’m sick of being told I’m selfish, irresponsible and the rest. Who created the benefits culture? I certainly didn’t vote for anyone connected with that new lifestyle craze.
Young folk worse off than me? Rubbish. Like many of my generation I often worked two jobs to give my family what I thought was a better chance in life.
Well, hmmn, the baby boomers, aren’t they the lot who took too many drugs had nervous breakdowns, met an alcoholic in hospital and ended up pushing out babies or whose livelihoods and communities were finished off in the 80′s, trying to live off social from then till now and who are today’s luvemtobits matriarchs and patriarchs with huge broods of grandchildren all pushing out babies right now, or with drug/mental health problems because-it-gets-you-a-placelovemtobits? Hardly millionaires…..
Surely too the baby boomers were they trying to start families in a huge recession then when they finally bought a place they had to pay 15% interest on the mortgage, and the tax relief finally went and the Mrs had to go out to work to pay for food because one salary didn’t cut it anymore and only covered the mortgage. Who carefully paid into Equitable Life? People who knew how to put up a frame tent and still know how to put up their own shelves? Who get made redundant in their 50′s and can’t get another job?
I think they must be thinking of Tony Bliar.
I feel rather left out of this as I was born in the 1930s.
Can I have some enmity directed this way please? or I might accuse you all of ageism.
Don’t even suggest it. There will be some pillock out there ready to accuse your generation (and my mum’s, by the way) of making excessive demands on the NHS by having the temerity to fall ill, by misuse of public funds by claiming your pension, by stopping young people from having a house by living in one. They are that blinkered.
Besides, your generation had it’s fair share of enmity when it grew up dodging Hitler’s bombs. Given that it was your generation that had to put the country back together afterwards, most of us think you’ve earned a decent retirement.
“There will be some pillock out there ready to accuse your generation ….. of making excessive demands on the NHS by having the temerity to fall ill………”
Nearly correct.
The pillock will “…. accuse your generation ….. of making excessive demands on the NHS by remaining alive………”
Gordon Brown stole those pension-values so he could fritter it away on his grandoise schemes.
The boomers paid with their lives? That was the Great Generation(?) who fought WWII. The Great Generation set up the welfare state, or the previous generation whatever that was called. The Boomers went to Uni and got stoned and invented the New Left and New Progressivism and so on and staggered out of the universities around 1970 to Change The World. A 1945 Boomer was 25 in 1970, remember. Some of them paid with their lives, primarily Americans, in perhaps futile wars like Viet Nam (which the British stayed wisely out of). The average Boomer missed conscription, and war, and “paying with their life” entirely.
So your timeline seems a bit off, Anna.
It’s not perhaps wise to tar entire generations with a single brush. The Boomers created a lot of good things like lots of technologies and proper pop music, and so on. But that is also the generation of the pressure group, the NGO, the progressivist campaign, the expanding state and, of course Political Correctness. The New Labour cohort were the Boomers in power.
So, “don’t blame the Boomers” seems to involve a certain degree of denial of reality.
Cameron and Clagg are my own generation, which has various names but I call it “The Shit Generation”.
Ian B,
Yes, you are quite right with that one Ian – the boomers didn’t pay with their lives, their parents did. My bad.
Divide and rule eh? Don’t it just work?
Je suis un ‘baby boomer’. I was personally responsible for:
(in reverse order)
The credit crunch
Negative equity
Global warming
Gordon Brown
John Prescott
Tony Blair
The Iraq war
Destruction of England
Immigration
The EU
Comprehensive schools
blah, blah, blah.
It was my deliberate intention to commit my sons to a life of servitude to the state. (I refuse to call it the State.)
It’s all my fault.
I really should have been savvy enough to equip myself with hindsight in the informative times of the 1950′s. I was four years old after all.
I admit to saving for my own retirement and struggling to buy my own house rather than rely on the state to provide for me. Fail.
What a bad lad. And now sad. And now mad.
(I am not sadbutmadlad!)
Mea culpa.
I keel myself!
Very good post, if it was up to me it would get ‘best comment’.
Nobody chooses when they’re born and one vote can’t change the system.
I was born in the 30s as well. And so I was too old and busy to enjoy all the drugs and wild sex and carnaby and stuff. I even had short hair. I knew that those young uns would one day be sorry they enjoyed themselves so much.
I have to agree with the article. Majority of comments too.
Melts me, really, that even in this day and age of numpties everywhere one goes, that there are genuine intellectuals still around.
PUBLIC WARNING: Get ‘EM WHILE YOU CAN! INTELLECTUALS ARE A DYING BREED! ROLL UP, ROLL UP!
More Power to the Baby Boomers. I really do fear you preclude a terrifying Orwellian, science-fiction future. I miss you, more than I care to explain.
Not all the boomers are to blame. Not all the boomers voted Labour.
My understanding is that debt went down signinicantly in the late 90s, and then labour came in and cranked up MASSIVE debt before the recession and raided the pension pot.
The question to ask, is that if we had kept to 1990 levels of spending (+inflation), would this even be an issue, or are their simply too many baby boomers retiring for their input to match their outake.
I can’t really find a simple source to answer that question.