Читать книгу It’s All Their Fault - Neil Boorman - Страница 8

Those halcyon days are well and truly gone. We’ve been lumbered with so much debt and the cost of life’s basics has shot up so high that we’re guaranteed never to live as easily again. And it hasn’t happened by accident. The awful truth is that, as our parents have climbed the ladder of social mobility, they have kicked the rungs from beneath them and prevented us from following them.

But don’t take my word for it, just ask yourself this: who brought an end to the free education that they enjoyed when they were young? Who voted for low taxes while drawing easy handouts from the state? Who bought cheap houses, sold them for a fortune and priced out first-time buyers? Who awarded themselves record salaries and shipped the rest of the work overseas? Who cashed in on the market boom, then expected the taxpayer to bail them out when it went bust? You know who.

The enormous financial debt we’ve been handed is from their overspending. Everything about today’s self-obsessed modern culture (record rates of divorce, suicide and drug addiction) comes from their megalomania. And the environmental crisis, dangerously close to the point of no return, is a hangover from their overconsumption. None of this is news to our parents though. The alarm bells have been ringing for decades, but they’re world leaders at burying their heads in the sand.

Greedy? Selfish? Mummy and Daddy? It can’t possibly be true? Here is what well-respected thinkers from across the political spectrum have to say:

‘TWENTYSOMETHINGS WILL BE LUMBERED WITH HIGHER LEVELS OF TAXATION IN THE FUTURE TO PAY FOR THE LONGER AND BETTER RETIREMENTS OF THE AGEING BABY-BOOMER GENERATION…

THAT’S NOT FAIR,’

SAYS RYAN SHORTHOUSE OF THE GUARDIAN.

‘With their children departed and the mortgage paid off, their spending power is greater than that of any other age group,’ says Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail. ‘They use it to pump up their lips and suck out their thighs, go trekking in Peru, and work out in the gym, eat organic food and irrigate their colons to cheat death and anticipate several more decades of looking after Me.’

‘They won’t be around to see the results,’ says George Monbiot in The Guardian, ‘…they were brought up in a period of technological optimism; they feel entitled, having worked all their lives, to fly or cruise to wherever they wish.’

‘For too long the world has been run by…a generation that was simply born lucky,’ says Sarah Vine in The Times (who is married to 43-year-old Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Michael Gove). ‘Now the party’s over, they’re not rolling up their sleeves either. Oh no, they’re outta here, baby…It’s left to us to clear up.’

‘The boomers have poisoned the wells and ploughed salt into the fields,’ warns Bryan Appleyard in The Sunday Times. ‘In the midst of their success and greed, the boomers forgot…that society is a contract with three interested parties: the dead, the living and the unborn. Their children are paying the price of their amnesia. For the moment, they seem resigned, but, soon enough, they’ll want their world back.’

THAT TIME IS NOW

Every generation has to struggle for something that it believes in – democracy, equal rights – but ours is nothing to do with race or class. It’s going to be a fight between a debt-ridden minority of young adults and a glut of needy pensioners, who squandered the money they should have saved to support themselves and who will be supported by the working young.

Luckily, they have presented us with one big opportunity to make a change before the time bomb goes off.