When the Tories returned to government in 2010, they, along with a compliant establishment media, launched a massive assault on Britain’s poor. The full force of the media was deployed to highlight “benefit cheats” and “welfare scroungers,” as part of a wider drive to make the poor pick up the tab for the excesses of a banking system that was bailed out in 2008. And within these attacks on the poor was a particularly pernicious attack on the UK’s pensioners and soon-to-be pensioners.
Among the more cerebral minds behind the attack on the “baby boomer” generation was Tory MP David Willetts, whose 2010 book The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give It Back made the case that the generation born between 1945 and 1965 had accumulated vast wealth by undermining the prosperity of future generations, and that the state had a duty to step in to redress the balance. One consequence of this was that The Pensions Act 2011 was implemented both to equalise and raise the retirement age to 66 years (previously, women retired at 60 while men retired at 65). This was followed by the Pensions Act 2014, which raised the retirement age to 67 by 2028. The main reason for this being to save an initial £6.2bn a year from the rise to 66 years, and a further £10.4bn a year from the increase to 67 years.
Only those with a high degree of gullibility would have expected this saving to be passed on to younger generations rather than the banks. Nevertheless, at face value, the intergenerational economic decline seemed plausible. The early boomers – those who left school into the post-war boom – did very well from a growing demand for educated and skilled workers, from above inflation pay increases, and from relatively cheap and (following the shortages of the 1940s) abundant new housing. Those houses, of course, inflating in price through the 1970s, and exploding upward after Thatcher destroyed public housing while igniting the debt-based boom that lasted into the early 2000s. The benefits though, were less clear for the later boomers who left school in the late-1970s and early-1980s, as inflation was spiralling upward even as jobs were disappearing… although they undoubtedly enjoyed better conditions than those leaving school in the 2020s.
But are we really looking at an economic generation war, or could this just be another manifestation of something that has become taboo in both left and right political discourse… a class war? That is, while upper class boomers in the top ten percent of the income and wealth distribution have undoubtedly done very well, with perhaps another 15 percent of boomers within the professional-managerial class enjoying an enviable standard of living both during and after their working lives… especially those (mostly former state employees) benefiting from final salary pensions. But for working class boomers, many of whose jobs were destroyed by the neoliberal economic vandalism of the early-1980s (and whose peak earnings were expected to come in the decade between the Crash and the Covid) the distinction between wealth and income becomes more important. Because while many have considerable theoretical wealth in the houses they live in, they are often income-poor – with far more than the purveyors of intergenerational economic warfare care to acknowledge, relying solely on the state pension.
This, indeed, is precisely what was revealed in the course of the government’s U-turn over winter fuel payments. And it is notable that the establishment media has been reticent in asking further questions about the figure released by the government. The announcement itself was that pensioners with incomes below £35,000 will have the winter fuel allowance restored. Fair enough, the current average wage in the UK is £37,500. Although the case could be made that someone with an income of £35,000 ought to have no problem paying even the UK’s inflated energy prices. But the more important figure – which almost nobody has picked up on – is that more than three-quarters of pensioners have incomes below £35,000, with millions falling below the current £12,000 tax threshold.
The distribution of pensioner incomes then, is not dissimilar to the income distribution of working age people insofar as the average is skewed by the huge salaries and bonuses of those in the top 1 percent, thereby obscuring the very low incomes of those within the precariat class. Which, of course, is merely to point out that the distribution of income and wealth favours the rich far more than the old… or, to put it more straightforwardly, it is, and always was, a class war. And this reveal is already occurring in the housing market, where the supposed “wealth” of many of the boomer generation is evaporating before our eyes… particularly in the capital, where previously inflated house prices are down 6.9 percent in the year.
For most boomers, their houses are their only real wealth. And while politicians like Willetts may have imbibed the Kool-Aid about house prices going up and up forever, as the global economy races toward part-two of the banking and finance crisis, with banks tightening lending standards and few having the safe income to secure a mortgage, like “assets” more generally, those house prices are going to be severely downgraded.
Nevertheless, those determined to stoke a generation war to make the old pay the price of bank bailouts, pandemic lockdowns, and ill-advised sanctions on Russia, will continue to brush over the fact that the overwhelming majority of the generation born between 1945 and 1965 are income poor.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: An inconvenient boomer truth: Rings the bell nm
on June 13, 2025, 9:16 pm