to be annoyed that so many on mn seem to begrudge pensioners?

[Slartybartfast]

for mainly being too rich
so many of you seem to think that those who have retired at 65 and are likely enough to have a good pension have somehow cheated

Apart from the ill conceived dementia tax when has that happened?

Every single time! There was talks of taking away the bus pass or changing ni and income tax to be fairer and the uproar was ridiculous. My pil are very wealthy they still said they would take to the streets if the bus pass was ever taken away as they've earnt it and "always paid their stamp". Despite having more time retired than in work!

Bluelady is right 100% mortgages were available until quite recently.

Tapandgo - me neither never would most scots won't (idiot dad being a VERY rare exception).

"I can't believe people are still blaming thatcher!!!! She has been dead a few years and left front line politics over two decades ago." The policies from that govt/era are very much still having an effect we don't exist in decade defined bubbles, and yes Blair wasn't much bloody better (flipping Tory in disguise and no I never voted for him either)

Not just housing but the decimation of manufacturing, the effects on education, nhs....

The damage done by Thatcherism was always going to take a few generations to rectify whoever got in after.

"I am under 40" ah so you don't even remember Thatcher really.

"because of the huge amounts of labour that has come into the UK from the EU." Wow you're an immigrant/emigrant yourself yet fail to see the irony of making that comment

Not hold the government to ransom everytime an idea is floated that disadvantages you but helps other people. Can't see that day ever happening though.

My boomer parents are staunch left wingers of the old school who have voted against every single policy that increases inequality.

blue I don't want you personally to do anything about it. I'd like those that are in the group who believe my generation just aren't trying hard enough to acknowledge the opportunities aren't the same. And again not aimed at you, but acknowledgement that working age people are contributing to a quality of life that they won't ever have working or at retirement. And when working age people suggest they think it's shitty that the pension is triple locked when wages are dropping, or that taxes shouldn't pay for care so people can inherit, agree that it isn't fair. Rather than assume we want oaps chucked in a workhouse, or imply they deserve it when we don't.

I don't think you fit in that narrow minded group though.

Otherwise it's the government who need to do something about it, and in that case I would expect pensioners as a whole to agree that the current arrangements just aren't sustainable, and it isn't fair to just dump any change on the generation in their 50's. Same as it wasn't fair that one generation got a huge increase in retirement age when it should have been done gradually, starting many years ago.

"Much better access to education" no - have you heard the "joke" about "anyone can eat at the ritz"? Anyone is allowed to eat there - not everyone can afford it. The huge debt incurred is a big disincentive for many.

"far less sexism" no it's just much more subtle - women are still hugely disadvantaged in employment, financially, educationally, in healthcare, in the legal system...

"My boomer parents are staunch left wingers of the old school who have voted against every single policy that increases inequality." They sound great - but as a group pensioners tend to vote Tory and tend to vote against policies that benefit younger generations, when they disadvantage pensioners.

My mum has always voted labour (sadly also Blair 🙄) but partly as she would never vote Tory nor SNP, and feels a vote for any other party would be a waste.

Dad voted Tory when it was thatcher, labour the rest of the time.

In terms of paying for care (and I don't have a problem with it, incidentally), the real unfairness is that if you get any disease other than dementia your care is free. Cancer at 90 you don't pay a penny, dementia at 90 you pay the lot. And it's a lottery.

I'd willingly kiss goodbye to my (unclaimed) bus pass, heating allowance, free prescriptions, etc. I'd also be very happy to see the triple lock go. I've never voted Tory in my life and never will but the fact is that a Labour government is more likely to be generous to pensioners so where does that leave us?

I don't begrudge pensioners as a group - most pensioners I see in my work are very much low income, careful savers and in dire need of every penny. Also I believe that someone can be fortunate (e.g. able to buy a house at twice annual income) whilst also working hard.

On a personal level though, I have to hear lectures from an uncle who got a gold plated pension from a cushy job who thinks we live in a "poor person house" because we don't work hard enough and that definitely starts to grate.

The huge student debt is a disincentive I agree, but nevertheless a much higher proportion of 18 yr olds now goes on to university than in the 60s and 70s - in early 60s (so earliest bbers) it was around 5%-10% I think.

So the access is now greater, but at a higher cost - whereas in the 60s many couldn't even get a place. Although I imagine that most didn't get even to the stage of applying - leaving school at 15 was normal, and if you went to a secondary modern it would have been really quite rare to go on to university.

graph I remember thatcher. I was into the double digits when she stepped down and old enough to see poll tax protests etc.

Yes I am an immigrant to the Us. I came here on a visa which my father had to qualify for and my employer had to prove that I wasn't taking a job away from an American to reactivate it.

The fact is that wages have not risen because there is a huge supply of labour. That supply of labour is EU based and not British people. I was making sandwiches for Pret after graduation making £20/hr for 5am-8am weekdays in 2002. Those rates are history because now they have 20 EE people competing for the job so pay NMW. This whole 'flexible' working at NMW didn't exist mainly because labour was in short supply. Employers didn't think to piss off the workforce because the supply was tight.

Also, a policy decision in the 80s doesn't take generations to fix. In 1992 the government could have gone out and built proper housing. In 1997 the government could have changed legislation to open up planning rules thus increasing supply. Again through the 2000s so much could have been done to have dealt with the problems we face today yet nothing has been done.

Now we have the same problems which have grown because no one wants to deal with it and make the unpopular decisions.

We do have much better access to education! My mum is extremely intelligent but was expected to leave school at 16. Very few people let alone women from her town went to uni, it was one or two from the grammar schools.
She was then expected to quit work on marriage (she didn’t, all sorts of issues) and was flat out fired when pregnant

I’m gen x and even though we were poor growing up I’ve had so many more opportunities educationally. What my mum could have achieved with similar ... :/

I think a lot of this is a south east and London phenomenon- houses up north are still pretty affordable and my folks certainly aren’t sitting on a fortune. I begrudge them nothing - they’ve worked for it and always had a social conscience (both work with homeless cafes and food banks and volunteer.)

Bluelady is right 100% mortgages were available until quite recently. But they weren't always available. Someone here said they came in when inflation was high, so there wasn't the same need for building societies to build in a buffer to what they loaned. In the early 80s I felt very fortunate to get a 90% mortgage.

Same as it wasn't fair that one generation got a huge increase in retirement age when it should have been done gradually, starting many years ago. Of course the generation that got hit with that are the younger boomers.

leaving school at 15 was normal, and if you went to a secondary modern it would have been really quite rare to go on to university. Yes, because you didn't have access to O-levels at secondary modern. They brought in CSEs for secondary moderns, but these weren't taken seriously by employers, which is why they eventually brought in GCSEs.

Set against that, university today has rolled up all sorts of non-university training - teacher training, nursing training for example. And teaching and nursing weren't graduate professions - as a girl, you'd be unlikely to encounter a graduate teacher if you didn't go to grammar school. Of course, these were the good old days when boys did woodwork and technical drawing, while girls did cookery and needlework.

These older folk bought their houses when the mortgage rate was as much as 19% so nothing has dropped into their laps by chance!! They will have worked blooming hard to achieve home ownership.

The NHS funding issue today is a direct result of PFI used to build hospitals, built using plans for smaller populations. This all happened under Blair.

IMO the Tories are at fault for not looking to fix the PFI timebomb for the past decade and Labour are at fault for not fixing the housing problem.

The longer you let problems continue the bigger the problem gets and big problems are harder to fix than small problems.

Access to education in general terms hasn't made much difference overall. Jobs that didn't need degrees in 1960 now do. We'll always need low skilled workers, and all education has done has raise the bar higher to get anything above that level.

Not to mention what supermum says about the consequences of the flooded labour market for low paid jobs. That's exactly why the traditional local employment is all zero hours now.

It's not even just a retired vs working problem. Plenty of people locally in their late 40's and 50's who raised families with one doing the early shift and one doing late or nights to juggle dc. Social housing available and if their car was off the road or dc ill, they knew who worked which shift and helped each other out. Now anyone working there is on zero hours, so no guarantee of juggling childcare, or secure income, or ability to help each other. Those older workers did overtime for an emergency or to put away for a luxury, now people do it because the following week they might only get 4hrs.

The only NHS issue affected by PFI is funding. Which is spectacularly irrelevant to this thread.

I've read lots of posts on here and am wondering why many posters imagine us pensioners are on fantastic pensions. I worked from the age of 15 to 66, 35 years full time. My pension from work is £7000 a year, not quite the £70k that some folk seem to think. I also receive the full state pension. I'm hardly raking it in. Many rural bus routes keep going purely because of bus pass holders. It wouldn't be worth it to bus companies if there were only one or two fare paying commuters travelling on the bus but if there were an additional 10 or so bus pass holders it makes the route more profitable.
It's also a good idea to remember that once concessions taken away from pensioners they will never, ever be given back to the next generation. We have no way of increasing our income.

The only NHS issue affected by PFI is funding. Which is spectacularly irrelevant to this thread.

PFI is irrelevant? Loading debt onto future generations isn't relevant

And you're getting taxed on £3.5k of that.

it wasn't fair that one generation got a huge increase in retirement age when it should have been done gradually, starting many years ago. Of course the generation that got hit with that are the younger boomers

Correct. That retirement age hike at short notice has caused a lot of difficulties for a lot of people. No chance to pace themselves better, and no access to pension so forced to keep working. The rise in retirement ages have shut down job opportunities for young people too ~ that isn’t the would be pensioners fault.

This is a generation (especially women) who had to be twice as good as men to get the same job, but never good enough to get the same pay or promotion and a generation educated with different curriculums for different genders ~ some careers where simply not in striking distance.

Not sure it’s a generation to be envied

PFI contracts are for 30 years. We're ALL paying for them.

When did the baby boomer age start and finish? I am an immediate postwar baby and have seen many many social and economic changes since then so don't see how you can lump all us all together. I fought my parents to stay on at school after 15 and wasn't allowed to even entertain the idea of university although there were relatively few of them around until the 1980s anyway.
I know the millenials don't like to hear it but the world was completely different from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. No equal pay, no equal opportunities, no employment protection laws, no pension schemes for most of us apart from the state pension, no race and sex discrimination laws, no legalised abortion, no easy divorce , child benefit for the first child only, no credit cards, no 100% mortgages, few aspired to homeownership (that came along with Mrs Thatcher and her 1980s Right to Buy)

When you are complaining that 'we never had it so good' to borrow McMillan's terminology, please remember that most of are aware that young people are struggling today, but don't think that we baby boomers have had our own equally difficult times. You don't know what lies ahead, just as we didn't and still don't.

tap that's my point, the age had to be increased but because nobody wanted to do it, it got to the point that one group took the whole hit, instead of the generation above being given some of that burden. But with rare exception, I don't think the older boomers would have been exactly happy with any change to what they expected just to help the younger boomers.

And that is my point regarding retirement now. The age is going to have to go up more, contributions towards social care increase, state pensions not rising as much and so forth. And I don't think it's fair to wait till those in their 50's get there and change the goalposts. Much fairer for some of the already retired to share that change so it's milder for all.

You make a good point, how do you think we should do it? Genuinely interested.