Читать книгу Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics - Philip Collins, Philip Collins - Страница 16

Walshaw Hall, once the grand pile of James Kenyon, is now a residential care home. Britain is growing older and a society so elderly presents political problems of a sort no nation has ever before encountered. A new line is being drawn: old against young. It is not true, as it is sometimes alleged, that my mother’s generation, born just before, during and after the Second World War, have purloined the assets or stolen the future. Cohorts do not act consciously as a single cunning alliance and, besides, ensuring dignity in old age is one of Britain’s biggest concerns. The provision of social care, for example, does not currently respect this principle.

The flow of assets towards my mother’s generation has largely been an effect of size. The doubling in education spending between 1953 and 1973 occurred because of the boom in babies that needed schooling. Those babies have now grown up and, in the strange way that the end of life mimics the start, need looking after again. The growth in life expectancy, from fifty-one for men and fifty-five for women born in 1910 to seventy-nine for men and eighty-three for women today, means that more of the large generation have survived into old age and expensive infirmity. This is why NHS spending keeps increasing. This is why pensions now account for a quarter of all public spending. This is the baby boom and bust.

My mother has gone now, but plenty of her generation are still going strong and, quite understandably, feel justified in drawing their entitlements. After a lifetime of paying in, retirement is their moment for a pay-out. However, because they are such a large generation they are taking out more than they ever put in. The generation born between 1956 and 1961 will take from the welfare state 118 per cent of their contribution. To be a pensioner was once a proxy for being poor and it is a cause for celebration that this is no longer true. The trouble is that we are struggling to pay the bill. The problem is exacerbated by the machinery of politics. Older people vote in greater numbers than younger people and, for that reason, the value of benefits to pensioners has tripled since 1979. Pensioners were deliberately protected, in a way that no other group was, from the consequences of austerity after the financial crash. Politics has become an auction house in which most of the lots appeal to the elderly.

The consequence, unless we settle the question of generational justice, will be a spending crisis of the first order. On current trends, the share of public funds taken by the Departments of Health and Work and Pensions will create an apocalypse for the Department for Communities and Local Government. They will erect the closed sign on the door of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Transport will run slow and Business will not carry on as usual. Britain is facing conflicts that will bear out Pierre Mendès-France’s timeless maxim that to govern is to choose. The loving family would always choose to spend the marginal pound on the child in the nursery rather than the grandfather at home. The state, acting in loco parentis, chooses to do the opposite. The easiest solution would be for the young to change the political incentives by voting as a phalanx, but that requires a recovery in the esteem of politics which is the seventh question that we shall need to consider.