Morning:
13°c
The devil, as ever, is in the detail. And the devil, I am coming to believe, was born between 1946 and 1964, fully returns the Rolling Stones' sympathy and probably owns a second home in Provence. For the devil is a baby boomer.
The Tories have announced that they will review raising the retirement age from 65 to 66 by 2016.
As the boomer generation untie the string on this so-called austerity package, they are finding that it rather throws their plans to retire - perhaps to the French château they picked up for 30 francs in 1986 - into disarray.
My mother has just secured her own long-desired retirement, so I am aware of the anxieties this may bring.
However, seeing as the day I down tools and start a really big jigsaw will not arrive for another four decades, my own consternation has a different focus.
And I find it hard to extend sympathy to a generation who will enjoy unprecedented affluence in their twilight years - affluence which my own generation (the iPod Generation, if you must, though I prefer the questioning note of Generation Y) will pay for but find unavailable for ourselves.
A typical baby boomer's pension will pay two-thirds of their final salary on retirement after 40 years' service. Generation Y employees can only dream of such cosseting.
If we have pensions at all, we generally make do with contribution-based schemes, which are likely to pay out between 20 and 30 per cent of our final salary.
My own financial future is an ill-defined domain of insecurity, rented accommodation, debt repayment and freelancing into my eighties.
By contrast, baby boomers - who have enjoyed a lucrative and accessible housing market, handsome job prospects, grants for university and some quite cool music - can contemplate a more concrete happiness.
Yet thanks in part to the free school milk they so enjoyed - perhaps also their enviable, experimental sex lives - baby boomers are also pretty healthy.
If 60 is indeed the new 40 surely they should be willing and able to work for just one more year? Perhaps not in 2016, either - perhaps sooner?
Still, the particular detail which raised my indignation most was a snippet mentioned by the Conservative leader in an interview yesterday.
David Cameron, 42 (thus Generation X), pointed out that there exists already a cross-party consensus that the retirement age should be raised to 66 by 2026 anyway; the Tories are merely suggesting bringing the date forward.
That the consensus currently hangs around a date 17 years in the future - near enough to make it seem as if it wasn't just made up on the spot, yet far enough away not to alienate core voters - indicates just how far into touch politicians are willing to kick the issue, to be retrieved by those unfortunate enough to be young today.
If the Tories' maths are correct, moving this date forward 10 years would save £13 billion. But since the savings are so vast, why not bring it forward sooner? Generation Y should push all parties for this.
The boomers will make their usual noises but there are enough of us to count at the polls - particularly if Labour chooses to go one better.
Until then, I can contemplate the not-very-amusing irony that the existing plan will raise the pensionable age to 68 in 2048. Just in time for my own retirement.
An author in search of his characters
As part of the BBC's 2010 arts season we can look forward to Sebastian Faulks offering us a series that will trace the development of literary characters.
"He knows very much about the craft of the novel," enthuses head of arts programming Mark Bell. I only hope Faulks pays more attention to the development of other writers' characters than he does his own.
In a recent interview about his new novel, A Week in December, he was asked why he made the evil financial genius at its centre Jewish. He replied: "Did I? I can't remember why, actually. But it's not a big deal."
To an aspiring novelist, mislaying such a key detail would surely be unthinkable. Perhaps it is not such a surprise that the Booker Prize judges similarly mislaid A Week in December when they compiled their longlist.
Final word on Facebook
The life of Kevin McGee - who this week hanged himself at his Edinburgh home at the age of 32 - was marked by firsts.
When he married the comedian Matt Lucas in 2006, he became half of one of Britain's first celebrity gay couples; when they divorced 18 months later, an early gay divorcee.
On Monday morning at 5am, he left one of the first Facebook suicide notes.
The status update is seen as a trivial form but it has seldom been put to more poignant use than "Kevin McGee thinks that death is much better than life".
Rest in peace.
• Straying into Butlers, a sort of bric-a-brac store on Kensington High Street, recently, I found the walls daubed in quotations, including: "The superfluous: a very necessary thing."
Voltaire said that in 1736, shrewdly predicting how needless purchasing would become necessary to our wellbeing. Ho hum. Can we have the recession back please?
Reader views (15)
Darius, London UK
"c`mon ladies, you can do it - DEMAND equality - NOW!"
In my experience for a feminist, equality is getting something that a man has and they don't, but very definitely not the other way round.
- Morvan, Saulieu, France
National insurance contributions are paid by workers and once the NHS has taken its cut, the balance goes into the National Insurance Fund for the purpose of paying state pensions and some social security benefits. For the year to March 2008 official government figures show that 9,600,000,000 pounds more was collected in contributions was collected than paid out in state pensions and benefits. The balance of the National Insurance Fund stands at more than 50,000,000,000 pounds. This has been loaned to Treasury for other purposes such as paying politicians' pensions and expenses. How has such a huge 50 billion pound surplus been accumulated? Well 1% of the balance would be required to provide annual state pension increases to former NI contributors living in frozen countries such as Australia and Canada. Most of it however is by not paying sufficient increases in state pensions generally.
So state pensioners have already paid for their state pensions through National Insurance Contributions. The real issue is what governments have borrowed the money for. So if there are any investigative journalists left perhaps they could ask politicians what their intentions are for the 50 billion National Insurance Fund surplus of contributions they have led us to believe was to be a basis for our retirement.
- Richard Lane, Kariong, NSW, Australia
There has never been a generation that did not think that they had been sort changed somehow by the previous generation.
No generation passes without great turmoil.
War and economic difficulties brought on by the greed of a few being the most common.
The problems you speak of are the result of forward looking individuals in government as a result of the Great Depression.
They tried to provide a degree of stability to the succeeding generations.
The only thing the Baby Boomers have done to your generation is to have fewer childern in order to provide a better life for each of them.
The result being that because of your privileged life of self indulgence and no or late marriage with few children there is no one to continue paying for your privileged life.
There are and never have been any guarantees in life you
have to react to it as it comes.
Save in the good times because assuredly bad times will come.
Consuming all when the good time are here means when the hard times come all you can do is to complain.
If they had not fought and won the first and second world wars think of the state of your generation now.
- Dwight, London
I like many others of my generation have recently retired after working for fifty years, never worked for
any government agency or any big corperation. I therefore had to fund my own pension and at times when other commitments made that impossible, nothing went in
I did however pay taxes had no debts and never went on the dole. Like many others my final pension is less than
half of the origional quotes
- Sam, Budleigh Salterton Devon UK
Can I just say, T Nicholson, that my generation will also pay tax and national insurance and for 40 years and more, but when we come to retire will have a LOT less!
As for credit cards, I believe it was the baby boomers who started using them, and taught my generation that this was the way to afford luxuries.
I am 33, I have a degree from a top university and I am so worried about how I will be able to afford to have kids, let alone an annual holiday somewhere cheap.
I don't have a car, nor a topnotch mobile and I certainly don't take exotic holidays.
- Melanie, Balham, London
Sorry to go on about the pensions issue, but in the current debate no-one seems to realise that it's already on the statute books (The Pensions Act 2007) that, for anyone born after 5 April 1959, i.e. all those currently aged 50 or under, the State Pension age will gradually increase from 65 to 68 between 2024 and 2046, so Dave's talk of 66 has already been superseded.
- Pam, East Kent UK
Richard - not all the people who are now affected by this are either baby boomers or have final salary pensions - unfortunately for me.
- Andy, southend, essex
Darius: Regarding your comments about the inequality between the state pension ages for men and women (currently 65 and 60 respectively), these are actually being brought into line by way of a tiered system with effect from next year. Between 2010 and 2020, women's pensionable age will gradually increase in two-year stages until it reaches the same as that for men, i.e. 61 in 2010 up to 65 in 2020 (assuming there no other changes in the state retirement age in the meantime). When the state pension was introduced in 1948, women were regarded in a very different light to the way we are today, and pensions are only now being brought into line to reflect today's equality between the sexes. We were very much considered to be the "weaker sex" in those days - which is possibly why we were treated in, what might seem to today's generation, this advantageous way. By the way, until fairly recently (and this still affects some older pensioners), if women had not worked and therefore not paid full NI contributions (on the whole because they were married and did not go out to fulltime work) or had worked but opted to pay the minimal "married woman's stamp" (of six old pence per week!), they did not receive any pension at all until their husband reached 65, when they then received the married couple's pension (less than two individual pensions).
- Pam, East Kent UK
We 'baby boomers' have paid tax and national insurance for 40 years so we are entitled to what we get. Besides our generation lived within our means. If you ain't got the cash you can't afford it.
But generation x or y want everything now, the car, top range mobile, ipod, music centre, wide screen tv, designer clothes, exotic hols. And how do they get it? The plastic card, hence, record personal debt.
- T.Nicholson, Bedale, UK
I agree with Richard Godwin's comments. As a grandparent, I fear for my children's and grandchildren's futures and wonder whether they will ever be able to retire, never mind at 66 as proposed by the Tories. Although I am not that well off as a single pensioner on not much more than the state pension (most of us do not have final salary or index-linked pensions, Richard), I am grateful that my generation, brought up in the post-war years, coupled the introduction of the welfare state, were the first generation of working class people who, generally speaking, had the best of everything with the greatest opportunities ever - affordable housing, good healthcare and education, full employment, and so on. This has all gone, never to return for today's young people and I think it's time a lot of today's selfish and complaining "oldies" recognised how lucky we actually were, and are.
- Pam, East Kent, UK
Why don't the BBC choose someone young and vibrant to present the programme on novels? It's not that I worship the cult of youth, but Sebastian Faulks?? He is so pompous and stuffy, just like Yentob and that middle aged clique of arts/literary types.
- Jo, Hackney
I suspect I'm not alone in my generation in having to get through redundancies, carless (even tvless) periods to save money, mortgage doubling virtually overnight etc. Nor is it my generation who wrecked the private pensions schemes and the banks.
Of course I was brought up by an older generation whose mottoes were:-
Do unto others as you would be done by.
The Lord helps those who help themselves.
Borrow as little as possible.
- Stanners, Bury Lancs
Kiwi, I understand your arguments but boomers have had, by in large, gold-plated privileges. As the article above suggests health, education, pensions have all been taken for granted. Cold war insecurities?! Well, there was a threat, but I'm sure the generation before that who lived through the Blitz could put the insecurities in context.
There should be more pieces by young writers like this sticking up for our generation, given that baby boomers make such an impression at the polls.
- Cath, East London
"...And we’re all in it (this mess) together"
True, but at different levels. The devil is indeed in the detail.
How is it right, for example that in these days of STILL having to strive for equality, women can retire years before men (especially as on average they live longer)?
Perhaps Dave thinks that equalising this injustice WITHOUT DELAY would put women voters off?
Wouldn`t seem to be very "in it together" then, would we?
Equalising retirement age would make a massive difference to the finances, so, c`mon ladies, you can do it - DEMAND equality - NOW!
- Darius, London UK
The average 'baby boomer' has worked hard to save for their futures, to educate their kids and to inch a little further up the social scale. Baby boomers, per se, have had to make do despite Cold War insecurities and anxieties, National Service, shrinking job markets, etc. It's easy to look over the fence and decide the grass there is greener.
- Kiwi Expat, London, UK
