Millennials, don’t be fooled into believing the baby boomers ate your lunch – we were in the kitchen making it for you

In the early 1990s, when unemployment was rising and houses were being repossessed, our future did not look golden. One slip at work would mean not only unemployment but homelessness

Wasting away: the results of a refuse collectors’ strike in London during the 1970s. Every generation has its hardships (Getty)

I don’t want to sound like the Fifth Yorkshireman in the Monty Python sketch – itself the best ever parody of intergenerational discord – but I do sometimes wonder what is going through the minds of the young people of today. A misplaced sense of entitlement, maybe?

This isn’t an assault on “snowflakes”. Life can be very tough for school and university leavers, in some respects more difficult than I could ever have dreamed. But that is not the whole picture. Forgive me for saying this, because I know it is unwelcome, but there really is no such thing as “intergenerational fairness”. It is, in fact, a very silly idea indeed, and one that is linked to that irrational sense of entitlement that seems to pervade this debate.

Just because the Resolution Foundation, a think tank, says that the notional average income of retired people is now a little higher than that of people who are in work and younger, doesn’t amount to “unfairness” in any real sense. “Unfairness” relates to justice, about whether people are being treated on an equal basis to one another; and, if they are not, that this is on defensible, sensible grounds.

It is true that in some ways the younger generation have things harder than their parents did at their age, but that doesn’t make it “unfair”. It just means you’re passing through different economic times – times that may, in any event, change. For it to be “unfair” would imply that every generation has some sort of right to enjoy a standard of living equal to or higher than its predecessors.

That has been the recent experience, yes, but for centuries of human existence it has not. If we are now entering into a world of slower economic growth, then it is best to confront this and learn to live with it, rather than resenting it and wrongly raiding pension funds and taxing those who happen to have lived through a time of relative plenty as some kind of misplaced punishment.

On many measures, I will concede that my generation – I am one of the supposedly very lucky born between 1945 and 1965 – had charmed lives. Free university education, a couple of housing booms, rising incomes, windfalls from privatisations. But if we are well off, it wasn’t because of some chance accident of fate. We made the choices and went through the hardships that delivered a more prosperous country in the first place. Life was tough for us, too.

We were the generation that made Britain what it is today; despite everything, an advanced, rich, tolerant, multicultural, open society with more equality of opportunity than ever before in its history – including when we were trying to make our way in the world.

I have to say this to the rising generations of the 2000s: we did not eat your lunch, we made it for you. Indeed many of us feel far from fortunate and are envious of the coming generation, and not just for the obvious reasons that they are, usually, healthier and handsomer than us lot.

One reason why the older generation is £20 a week better off than those in work, according to the Resolution Foundation, is because many of these people in their fifties, sixties and seventies aren’t just pottering around the garden, planning their next cruise or visiting the grandkids, but because they aren’t actually retired at all.

Many in retirement have to stay in or go back to work because the benefits system doesn’t allow them to make ends meet, especially if they themselves are caring for an (even) older parent or loved one in declining health – an emotional as well as financial issue. Or, perhaps, because the much-vaunted pension schemes that they thought they could rely on in retirement have gone bust, been stolen, closed or arbitrarily cut because the parent company collapsed.

Many in the private sector have little or no traditional final-salary scheme entitlements. They have had to save and rely on the vagaries of the stock market. For those professionals who lived and worked in the south in the public sector, who took away a salary-based pension and maybe a nice part-time consultancy on the side, life is sweet; for someone in Hull who has worked in some menial role in the private sector and left with only a measly “money purchase” scheme (not related to their end salary at work), things are not so rosy.

Is that “fair”? There are intergenerational differences that all too often get forgotten in these ugly, divisive debates.

The Resolution Foundation’s numbers hardly tell the real story. Let’s take the obsession with property: it’s certainly true that my generation has witnessed a probably unprecedented rise in house prices over the last couple of decades. That, you could argue was a form of luck. But of course not everyone has been able to benefit from that in equal measure. Indeed, it is very much a phenomenon mostly confined to the south of England and London. Northern pensioners will have rather less equity in their homes than their southern cousins, again a rather arbitrary redistribution of wealth, “unfair” you might argue.

We, the baby boomers, have also had to live through a couple of housing crashes, and with the periodic reality that our homes were sometimes worth less than we paid for them. The phrase “negative equity” is unknown to today’s aspirational homeowners; it stills ends a shudder through the spine of anyone much over the age of 45.

In the early 1990s, when mortgage rates rocketed (yet again) to approaching 20 per cent, when unemployment was rising and houses were being repossessed, the future did not look golden. One slip at work would mean not only unemployment but homelessness. For some, that is precisely what happened – and with court judgements against their name that made it difficult, if not impossible, for them to get another mortgage. If we have now managed to pay off the mortgage then it was no doddle. When the squeeze was on, it meant doing without.

Can we even enjoy what we have, we baby boomers? Not for long. Such is the crisis in social care, there’s every chance that this supposedly great wealth we have accumulated will in effect be taxed away through having to pay for our own social or residential care, our houses and savings and pension entitlement in effect requisitioned by the local authority at a wealth tax rate of 100 per cent. That’s if we're unlucky enough to get dementia, Parkinson’s or some other long term debilitating disease. If we get knocked over by a tram or have a nice clean heart attack, then our heirs and successors get to enjoy the proceeds. There is, let me assure you, nothing fortunate or fair about any of that.

Look around you. Today, interest rates have, literally, never been lower. Mortgages are freely available for those who have saved up for a deposit, and in many parts of the country this is still possible. The Government keeps inventing schemes to subsidise house purchases or renting, too.

Housing construction, we’re promised, will soon be expanded massively, which could make a radical difference to the availability of decent housing. Even if it didn’t, it would only take one housing crash to make many houses and flats affordable again and dissolve the “housing crisis”.

And even if house prices in the south stay high, a question does arise: who has a human right to own a flat in Clapham? There is nothing unfair about renting, or living in the provinces and commuting, and in past booms people now comfortably settled in their own luxurious houses had to do the same. There was never some golden age of a guaranteed cheap housing for all. That it is a corrosive myth that must be done away with.

Yes, in past decades property could be much cheaper to secure, but very often for a reason. In macroeconomic terms it was because the economy had collapsed. In micro terms it was because many neighbourhoods simply weren’t desirable. Many now popular parts of inner London were once seedy as well as costly.

Which brings me to some of the other sacrifices we baby boomers had to make, which were the basis for the economic growth that underpinned all the benefits (and drawbacks) of rising property values, an expanding economy, growing businesses and jobs.

My generation lived through the 1970s, when the unions ran industry, we had continual strikes, periodic power cuts and shortages of basic goods; and then through the 1980s, when Thatcherism, whatever its longer-term dividends, was a nasty, divisive and above all punishingly brutal economic discipline.

The period from 1973, when the oil crisis struck, until 1994, when the British economy started on its long run of sustainable growth with low inflation, was a protracted period of trouble and strife for a generation. It made even the recent financial crisis look like a tea party. If Britain wasn’t ungovernable, it was unrepairable. And 1976 Britain went bust, like Greece today, and had to get a loan from the IMF to keep going.

These were decades of rapid and brutal deindustrialisation, of persistent high unemployment often accompanied by soaring interest rates, rising taxes, stagnant wages and runaway inflation, shredding your savings along the way. If you were unlucky, as a member of the “lucky” generation, your monthly mortgage bill could exceed your monthly salary cheque.

Public spending in those days looks generous by comparison to today, but the NHS was still perennially in crisis, it was impossible to get onto a council housing list, state schools had notoriously poor standards and the old age pension, far from being generous, was decoupled from the link with wages so the only “guarantee” pensioners enjoyed was that that they would become poorer in relation to the rest of society every single year for the next three decades. That was why the Liberal Democrats, in coalition with David Cameron’s Conservatives, came up with that “triple lock” to increase the state pension – to correct a trend that had reduced an earlier generation of pensioners to poverty.

My generation certainly didn’t leave university with gigantic debts or tax liabilities to pay off their university fees. Then again, far fewer of us ever had the chance to go to university. Today it is approaching half of that age group. The culture is different now, and rightly; universities have expanded, polytechnics have joined them, and more and more young people enjoy the benefits of everything higher education can bring, intellectually, socially and, in due course, financially. The salary premium for having a degree is less than it was and graduate unemployment is sometimes higher – but that is inevitable when there are simply more graduates around. You cannot double the size of the tertiary education sector with no financial consequences. Besides, there is a strong argument that those who benefit personally from the investment should make a contribution to it, a closer approximation to “fairness” than many I have heard.

Health is also better for the younger generation, and on an age-for-age comparison too. There are new treatments, new drugs, a much more enlightened attitude to exercise, smoking and drinking than there ever was in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these cures are available free on the NHS.

A child born this year will easily make it to see the 22nd century; a good few years longer than one born in either 1917 or indeed 1967. He or she has a far better chance of avoiding a stroke, and of recovering from one better – and that is the prime cause of disability in later life in Britain. He or she will have a better standard and quality of life, and for longer than people my age. And what’s “fair” about that?

Was it, by contrast, fair that my grandparents’ generation had to fight a couple of world wars and make it through the depression, but that I didn’t? Was it “fair” that their ancestors had to fight off diseases such as TB that are easily dealt with today, and that they enjoyed no right to health or education, or the vote, and were still lucky to make it past 50?

Was it “fair” that people my age had to grow up in a world still disfigured by routine racism, homophobia, sexism, class prejudice and a truly gruesome attitude to people with disabilities? That was the rigidly stratified society that the baby boomers inherited and we changed for the better as we took control of the adult world.

Is it “fair” that tomorrow’s generation will see vast improvements in living standards we can only glimpse at today? Is it “fair” that, in real terms, almost everything apart from housing is cheaper and better today than it has ever been? Is having virtually cost-free access to more data, information, news, movies, music and everything else to be taken for granted? When I was growing up cars were rusty wrecks by their fourth birthday, there were three TV channels only (and colour TVs were a luxury), books and records were expensive, meals out were embarrassingly bad, pasta was an alien concept, curries came in powdered form and Alpen was about as adventurous as things were going to get at the breakfast table.

Millennials, you’ve got Facebook and Twitter. Next time you’re using them, remember that if we wanted to contact a friend or colleague we had to wait three months for the Post Office to install a telephone, or go out to find a pay phone box that worked and hadn’t been used as a loo.