British boomers, a generation used to having everything its own way, are experiencing what it’s like to lose out for the first time, The Economist’s Bagehot columnist noted in March with razor-sharp foresight.
Labour has been accused of betraying Waspi women after work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall confirmed there would be no compensation for the way in which the state pension age for men and women was equalised.
It comes hot on the heels of the winter fuel allowance being stripped from pensioners, leading to an outcry from all sides of the political spectrum.
Writing in The Economist in March, the Bagehot columnist argued that those born in the ’50s and blessed with free university education, low taxes and the “restorative effect of the EU’s single market on the sick man of Europe” have not been used to losing out.
“Whatever this generation wanted, this generation nearly always got. Remarkably, someone born in the 1950s would have been on the winning side of every election if they had voted with the bulk of their age group. The result was that baby-boomers paid in less and took out more from the welfare state than any generation before or since. In 2010 David Willetts, a Tory grandee and self-aware member of this blessed cohort, summed it up best in a book titled: “The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future—And Why They Should Give it Back”.”
Now, the times are a-changin.
Boomers are paying more tax, they are watching other generations benefit from perks they themselves never had and, crucially, have been on the losing end of an election for the first time.
Labour, facing a £22 billion black hole, had a choice of “whom to pummel”, and took from the pensioners for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is.”
Privilege built up over years will take more than a few budgets to undo, but it will also be a familiar story:
“Millennials will use their demographic weight—they overtook the boomers in size in 2020—to rebalance taxes away from themselves, shifting the burden onto other generations to spend on perks for themselves, much as the boomers did. “Being a great big generation makes you a powerful disruptive force: you pour through society like a flooding river breaking its banks,” wrote Lord Willetts about his boomer peers. Perhaps boomers and millennials are not so different after all. Everyone turns into their parents eventually.”