Letters: Don’t scapegoat the baby boomers
The grasping nature of the baby boomers is more extreme than Francis Beckett says (Baby boomers: powerful and selfish, 6 July). Baby boomers then in their 30s and 40s propelled Mrs Thatcher into power with a mandate to cut public expenditure to fund tax cuts. The biggest single reduction in public expenditure occurred with the break in the link between the state pension and earnings. Now that they are in retirement, the baby boomers are asking today’s workers to pay taxes that they were not prepared to pay to restore the link.
It’s more than the existence of university grants and no requirement to pay fees. In the 1980s, the surpluses that many occupational pension schemes had built up over decades were denuded as companies offered early retirement and pension holidays, contributing to workers now having to pay more into occupational schemes for poorer benefits.
Boomers bought council houses, taking equity that had been built up over generations. They voted for the building societies to be taken out of mutual status in return for a quick buck. They willingly privatised the public utilities. They are seeking to shift the local tax burden to the young, yet to re-orient public services to meet their needs to the exclusion of others. That process will be accelerated under the coalition government’s public consultation.
The young need to wise up, organise and state their terms for a new social contract between the young and old.
Colin Adkins
Wrexham, Clwyd
•?Francis Beckett has swallowed the argument in David Willetts’s pernicious book The Pinch. It’s a piece of scapegoating twaddle under the veneer of serious academic research and discourse.
Many older people have gone through divorces, lost their jobs and been unable to get others, or suffered health problems that have adversely affected their ability to provide for their future. They will also have paid taxes, NI contributions and the like, so they are entitled to benefits. The best many are set to receive is a meagre state pension and, if they’re in one of the Mickey Mouse private schemes sold in the 80s and 90s, they will find that the stock market cowboys have taken big fees for themselves, but left nothing meaningful as payment for the client at retirement age.
Many of those older voters have absolutely no chance of getting a mortgage, let alone buying a property for themselves. The twenty or thirtysomethings at least have years ahead of them and the prospect of higher earnings. In relation to earnings, the older people do not in the vast majority of cases.
Substitute “immigrant” for “baby boomer” and the Beckett-Willetts scapegoat angle is worthy of the BNP. It’s not good enough as analysis or a proper solution. Whatever the solution is, it is not the fault of the post-war generation.
Dave Massey
London
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