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Pensions don't
worry me or Mr
Blair The older I get, the more I realise that I picked just about the best moment in British history to enter the world. It was 1953, Coronation year and the dawn of the New Elizabethan Age. By timing my entrance so well, I missed the war, rationing and National Service. Winston Churchill was Prime Minister, and generous tax allowances were available to parents with dependent children, keeping food on the family table throughout my childhood. When sex was invented in 1963, it was in good time for me to start to take an interest in it. Aids was still decades away, and new antibiotics were available to cure almost everything else. At Cambridge in the early 1970s, not only were my tuition fees paid for me by the state, but I received a maintenance grant with which to cultivate my taste for cigarettes and alcohol. There was no nonsense about "work experience" in those days, which meant that I could go straight from Cambridge, debt-free, into a proper job (if "proper" is the right word to describe journalism), earning a modest salary that covered my modest needs. When I married in 1980, at the age of 26, I had no difficulty in finding a mortgage to secure my place on the bottom rung of the London housing ladder, buying a small flat in Battersea for £28,000. At the time, I grumbled like anything about my mortgage repayments (although I was happy enough to claim the tax relief on them, which was then on offer). But I needn't have worried: the great housing boom of the 1980s was just getting under way. When my wife and I started to breed, we sold our Battersea flat for a handsome profit, took out a bigger mortgage and bought a beautiful little early-Victorian house in Stockwell, south London, for what then seemed a crippling £52,000. Only three years later, as the family grew, we were on the move again, selling our Stockwell house for nearly three times as much as we had paid for it and buying our present, much larger, semi in the suburbs. Still I complained, cursing the fact that we had bought our new house at the very peak of the boom, in September 1988, just as property prices were about to slide. Had I been less self-pitying, I might have reflected that I had not only bought at the top of the market, but I had sold at it, too. Fortune had yet more in store for me, as for so many others of my generation, who were lucky enough to have jobs in Mrs Thatcher's tax-cutting 1980s. Just as things were beginning to get desperate, and our four boys were driving us ever more deeply into the red, the housing market suddenly picked up again. Lenders begged me to increase my mortgage, offering me money to spend as I chose, at what seemed like ridiculously low rates of interest. So it was that our house paid the school fees for our two oldest sons, and put me back in the black at the bank. And now we baby-boomers of 1945-1955 have been dealt yet another trump card in the hand of life. Lord Turner's report on pensions, leaked to yesterday's Financial Times, is full of miserable news for the under-50s. It recommends not only that they should be coerced or cajoled into contributing considerably more to their state pensions than anybody does now, but that they should all be made to wait another two years, until they are 67, to become eligible to receive them. Tony Blair is said to support this idea. But the great thing for me and Mr Blair, who is my age, is that none of this is to come into effect until 2020. The Prime Minister and I will then be safely past 65 (if we live that long), and drawing our state pensions, unless we choose to keep working. What a blessed generation we belong to, compared to those before us, who had to suffer the deprivations of the war years, and the generation now growing up. My heart bleeds particularly for the young, saddled with student debt and with no hope, most of them, of getting their feet on the housing ladder. Even our grotty flat in Battersea would be beyond the means of most 26-year-olds, except for those with rich parents or swanky City jobs. It is this poor, put-upon generation that Lord Turner and Mr Blair now expect to look after us pampered baby-boomers in our increasingly protracted old age. As time goes by, there will be fewer and fewer people of working age, supporting more and more of us oldies. Huge numbers of those who are made to pay more towards their own pensions will not even live to claim the fruits of their savings. On current projections, no fewer than 970,000 of the under-50s will die before they reach Lord Turner's recommended retirement age of 67. I cannot believe that the report's proposals will solve the pensions crisis. All that they will do is push the problem further into the future, imposing ever-increasing burdens on succeeding generations. They will also leave pension funds at the mercy of politicians, who have shown that they cannot be trusted to keep their hands off them. The best, the most public-spirited, solution to the pensions crisis is clearly the one that I have adopted myself: breed lots of children, so as to maintain the balance between the young and the old; and then drink and smoke yourself into an early grave. We baby-boomers picked a wonderful moment to enter the world. I don't like to end on a gloomy note, but the way things are going for the country, the best moment for our exit may be sooner, rather than later. Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright
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