The coronavirus crisis has only made a poisonous generational divide worse
It is not a time for different sections of society to fight – we must all come together, writes Mary Dejevsky
Don’t you just love the self-appointed gurus of aged selflessness? In the early days, when coronavirus or Covid-19 was still just an “epidemic”, we had Esther Rantzen and Joan Bakewell all over the media extolling the virtues of (their own voluntary) self-isolation.
Then along strolled the historian, Sir Max Hastings, to tell readers of The Times and BBC Radio 4 listeners that his generation was the “most fortunate in history” and “monumentally selfish” to boot. “The first responsibility of the old,” he said, “is to avoid becoming a deadweight on the health system.”
And now we have a new guru, Mervyn King (whose tenure as governor of the Bank of England began five years before the financial crisis), warning that the “lockdown” must not last too long because young people would not stand for it. An “awful lot” of them, King told the Policy Exchange think tank, would say: “Well, the younger generations have suffered in the last 20 years; why on earth is our future being put at stake in order to help prolong the life expectancy of older people?”
Forgive me, but these high-minded advice-givers are, to a man and woman, unusually well-heeled traitors to their generation. They are individuals of substance and stature, with nice homes – maybe more than one – doubtlessly generous pensions, and a clutch of privileged grandchildren, and they are presuming to preach altruistic virtue to the majority of their contemporaries who enjoy nothing of the kind.
They are lending their voices to a pernicious song that has been played on a loop – sometimes louder, sometimes softer – since the coronavirus started ravaging the UK. With the experience of China suggesting that older people are more likely to die than the young, the song goes like this: the baby boomers are getting their comeuppance; their enormous houses will soon be ours; their cruise ships will be headed for the scrapyard; we, the young whose future you stole, will come into our own.
As you would expect, this sentiment was expressed at its crudest on social media, where the comments were not blocked for inappropriate content. I also had a sense, from my “permitted” daily walks, that many younger people not only regarded themselves as invulnerable – so no need for “social distancing” – but that it was the “old” who presented a danger. That is what happens when a government tells a certain group that they should isolate themselves for months because of age alone.
Now I suspect there has been a deliberate attempt by the powers-that-be to adjust that perception, with the prominent reports of much younger people who have died, even though they had no – as we have now learned to say – “underlying condition”. And there has been a telling change of tone from the government with the introduction of the more “caring” term “shielding” in telling the over-70s to stay at home.
But it is all a bit late in the day. In the UK, at least – and to a far greater extent, I suggest, than in most other parts of the world – the age-curve of the coronavirus pandemic has played right into an already poisonous thesis about intergenerational war. The argument goes that it is all a zero-sum game, and the supposed good fortune of the baby boomers has been built on the supposed deprivations of their descendants.
The seeds were sown about 10 years ago, with the appearance of two books that both expressed and influenced the zeitgeist. The journalists Ed Howker and Shiv Malik penned Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth, while David (now Lord) Willetts published The Pinch, whose message was similarly enshrined in its subtitle: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future – And Why They Should Give It Back.
Willetts subsequently built a whole think tank – the Resolution Foundation – on the premise of intergenerational injustice, which produced a series of reports on it before deciding that the failings of the social care system were maybe worthy of some study, too.
All these authors would doubtless agree with Hastings that the immediate post-war generation was the most fortunate and privileged in history. They experienced no wars, and enjoyed rising living standards, longer life, better health and wealth as they aged. For their descendants, though, especially following the 2007-8 economic crash, it was all another matter.
And that conclusion comes with at the very least an undertone of vindictiveness and envy, which could be heard in one of Malik’s more mild-mannered tweets: “So what are boomers gonna do when they survive Corona, only to find that rents and house prices have fallen through the floor and all that ‘wealth’ was just on paper... ”
By initially singling out the over-70s for self-isolation, with the very strong inference that they would otherwise make themselves a burden on the NHS and effectively condemn younger patients to death, the government’s message seemed to carry not only a nasty whiff of Darwinism but the idea that the interests of one (selfish) generation were necessarily pitted against those of another. Reports that Boris Johnson’s adviser, Dominic Cummings, had at one point advocated a policy of “herd immunity”, commenting “let them die” – both reports strongly denied – hardly helped.
Nor did it do anything to discredit the argument that the good fortune of the boomers must be paid for by the next generation. Yet this is skewed at best, and false at worst. For every Hastings or Willetts living in enviable security, there are thousands who eke out a living on a state pension that is one of the lowest in the industrialised world. To say that pensioners have been favoured by recent governments because they are more likely than others to vote, and to vote Tory at that, is to forget their pitiable plight at the start. The whole picture is distorted by the fact that a minority of pensioners are exceedingly well-off (and they include those NHS consultants who cut their hours to save on tax – remember that?)
As for house prices delaying ownership and having children – everything happens later these days; life is generally longer. Nor has the older generation survived unscathed. The financial crash penalised older people at least as much, if not more, than their children. While savings and annuity rates plunged to near-zero, their offspring’s mortgage rates descended to a record low. Is “wealth” unfairly concentrated among older people – well, of course it is. Unless inherited or won, it is the product of a working life. And now, if – as many are predicting – the bill for the coronavirus crisis precipitates a new upsurge of inflation, it is those on fixed incomes – primarily the elderly – who will feel it most.
The UK is one of the countries in Europe with the least generational solidarity. For whatever reason – and the tax system and housing policy are both part of it – it is, at once, less child-friendly and less elderly-friendly than many other nations. And the coronavirus emergency seems to have stoked, rather than lessened, those tensions.
Yes, some young people have been volunteering to help elderly neighbours; yes, officials have done something to make their language in relation to the virus less blatantly ageist. And, yes, one by-product of this crisis may be to show in fact how dependent one generation is on another – including on those grandparents dispensing free childcare.
For the time being, though, let’s not hear another word either from ultra-privileged boomers dispensing advice or from envious children angling to get their (potentially unwashed) hands on granny’s house.
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