A wealthy nation can afford to offer a comfortable and secure existence for all of its citizens. If it chooses not to do so, that is a political choice. If rationality reigned supreme, this would prove the starting point for all decisions about how society is organised. Bad news: it doesn’t, and instead much of the vast riches generated by the graft of millions of workers ends up hoovered into the bank accounts – and offshore tax havens – of a tiny few. The result? It’s easy to encourage the general population to believe that they’re locked in trench warfare over ever-scarcer resources, with so little to go around that politics is merely the art of managing a zero-sum game.
Enter, then, the question of the triple lock on the state pension, which both Tories and Labour have confirmed will feature in their upcoming manifestos. First introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in 2010, it ensures that pensioners’ entitlements increase each April in line with whatever is highest: inflation, the average increase in wages, or a 2.5% minimum. That means more than £100bn is now splashed on the state pension each year, by far the biggest single item of social security spending, while working-age benefits have fallen drastically behind. When you include other entitlements, well over half of the welfare state ends up in pensioners’ bank accounts. At the same time, more than 60% of older Britons own their home outright, sitting on golden eggs that have only appreciated in value.
You can see why Britain has become a petri dish of generational resentment. Since the dawn of the triple lock, our working-age population has suffered the most protracted squeeze in living standards since records began. Younger Britons, in particular, have been devastated by a social tsunami: real-terms cuts to their education, stagnating pay packets, student debts, collapsing homeownership, a rip-off private rented sector, a devastated welfare state – well, we truly could go on.
The resentment only deepens. While older Britons have been gifted with the protections of social democracy, they have consistently voted for their grandchildren to be blasted with the icy chills of “sink or swim” capitalism. It is not widely appreciated that, when Labour suffered its 2019 electoral cataclysm, it actually won more votes from the working-age population than the Tories; 57% of Britons in their 60s voted Tory in 2019, for those in their 70s, that figure rose to a staggering 67%. Younger citizens largely saw Brexit as an attack on their futures, a rupture only made possible thanks to grey voters, while much of the so-called culture wars boils down to a backlash among older Britons against the increasingly progressive values of millennials and generation Z.
But believing that the woes of the young can be solved by diminishing provision for the old is a grave mistake. More than 2 million pensioners languish beneath the poverty line – an increase in relative poverty rates compared with a decade ago. In a list comparing incomes against the cost of living in 30 European nations, the British state pension appears at a mediocre number 16. Britain is the sixth-largest economy on Earth, yet even now remains incapable of offering a basic contract: that every Briton should be assured comfort and security in their final years.
Those who advocate a less generous state pension are unintentionally attacking the young. After all, we are all aspirational pensioners. If our state pension increases at a lesser rate, where will that leave today’s 25-year-old, whenever they’re able to retire? After all, siren voices already advocate hiking it to 71. It is the working class, as ever, who will be punished. On average, the less well-off not only have shorter lifespans than the affluent: they tend to suffer ill health sooner, robbing them of comfortable retirements. They are less likely, of course, to have assets and means to supplement the state pension. Those robbed of security in earlier years will suffer the same fate later on, especially if they have less.
There is a predictable retort: what of the 3 million pensioners with household wealth valued at over £1m? Why do they need state pensions at all? This inevitably always takes the conversation to the question of means testing, which is not only expensive and bureaucratic, but leaves many vulnerable citizens failing to claim support they need. As it is, more than a third of families eligible for the means-tested pension credit, for example, do not claim it.
The answer here is obvious. The dividing line that really matters is who has wealth, and who does not. Generous universal entitlements are the only proven means of ensuring that all who need support receive it. You can then simply recoup revenue from wealthy pensioners through taxation. Indeed, a detailed study by the Wealth Tax Commission in 2020 – which brought together academics and tax specialists – found that a one-off wealth tax on millionaire couples paid at 1% a year for half a decade would raise £260bn. Much of that would come from prosperous pensioners, of course, but also from Britons of any age of substantial means. This vast sum could lift the living standards of all struggling Britons, irrespective of age.
And that’s what matters. Politicians of all parties have left us believing that there simply aren’t the resources to solve our problems. That reduces society to a cauldron of often dangerous resentments, variously encouraging many to believe that our lives would be better if the undeserving would stop hogging meagre services and entitlements: often, the demonised foreigner, or supposedly feckless fellow Brits.
For many younger citizens, their worldviews understandably defined by their chronic economic insecurity and inclusive social values, there lurks the spectre of the bigoted, entitled, selfish boomer, whose dreadful electoral choices have robbed them of their futures. It’s an understandably seductive narrative, but offers false solutions that will only hurt them more.
This is a rich nation. It suits those with booming fortunes to pretend otherwise, because it would lead to demands that they stop appropriating the nation’s wealth. It suits them well when we squabble among ourselves.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
