Critics of so called baby boomers

[Pixxie7]

What is wrong with you people comments like waspi women are grabby and baby boomers have all the wealth because they bought their houses for a few thousands. I started work at the age of 16 with a salary of £7 a week, worked all my life. Did not have access to pension contributions until I was 52. Paid nearly 50 years of national insurance, which was for my pension which is not a benefit but a right, only to have nearly £50,000 stolen by the government. Imagine how you would feel if this happened to you.
Not saying you have it easy but you have far more opportunities than we ever had.

Let’s also remember that if Baby Boomers didn’t buy a house, then they had nice council houses available to them. Which many of them then bought under right to buy.

My grandparents bought their house in the South east for £2k 45/50 years ago. It's now worth £400k. My grandma never had to work and my grandad semi retired when he was about 50.

I can't even afford to rent in my home town and had to move up north. It makes me so sad that I'll never be able to move back. I'm sure they've had their problems too but but I'm sick of all the jokes about my generation. How we are all lazy, expect everyone to hand us everything on a plate ect. I work on a zero hour 'contract' (ie I don't have any sort of contract) and even though we are saving and luckily will eventually be able to afford a mortgage, we will struggle to get one because I don't have a contract from work. I don't have any family to help with childcare as I live so far away.

Pixxie7 If you are going to start your posting history on MN with a rant, you should probably learn the lingo first... and not jump to conclusions.

'you people' isn't a very nice way to describe a very diverse online community.

there's a case for saying that people born in the 40s and 50s enjoyed all the benefits of the welfare state/social contract, then voted it away from the rest of us from 1979 onwards...

08:14cooliebrown

I agree.

Not saying you have it easy but you have far more opportunities than we ever had.

Why do baby boomers only ever compare themselves to later generations, not earlier ones?

People in their 60s and 70s now have unimaginable lifestyle compared to their parents and grandparents, who put up with fishpaste sandwiches, holidays at Blackpool and granny flats.

“ I started work at the age of 16 with a salary of £7 a week, worked all my life. Did not have access to pension contributions until I was 52. Paid nearly 50 years of national insurance, which was for my pension which is not a benefit but a right, only to have nearly £50,000 stolen by the government. Imagine how you would feel if this happened to you.”

Nothing you have done in your life is unusual although you were clearly a low earner so didn’t contribute much to the public purse. Saying the government stole from you is hyperbolic and untrue

In fact, your post is a really good example of baby boomer entitlement

The immigrants in multi occupation housing are going to move onto better quality homes as soon as they can. The jobs are in London so they will stay there. It's not on to say they are just low paid and can live where we wealthy don't choose to.

OP, you are not helping improve the reputation of baby boomers here. I understand that you worked hard but you are failing to acknowledge the ways in which we were a fortunate generation. It is true that some younger people make generalisations about baby boomers ( how very dare anyone asume I voted for Thatcher and am now a committed Brexit supporter). People on both sides of this debate are just posting from their own experience and not seeing the bigger picture. Poverty is more a class issue than a generational one and it suits the government to fuel intergenerational resentments while their policies reinforce disadvantage.

There have always been immigrants in houses of multiple occupation. In the baby boomers day it was the Irish. My family owned HMOs housing them.

You've probably paid far less in NI and tax contributions than what you would get as a pension for 30+ years assuming you could claim your pension at 60 and you lived until 90. Even at 67 or whatever the new age is, you will get a lot more than most people younger than you who will work for longer and have far less perks than your generation had.

Then there is the younger generation paying for those pensions (unfunded), for healthcare for the older generation, you had free university education and were able to buy property very cheaply which many of you don't realise is not only impossible for younger generations but they are literally paying your mortgage or pension (BTL).

Please don't complain, you've had it very easy compared to generations behind you!

Ok can we just agree that whether we had an avocado bathroom or smashed avocado on toast, we all lived at bottom of t'lake and ate gravel. Everyone happy?

Goodness knows why govs have not built housing. More housing means lower prices.

The second sentence explains the first. A government that oversees a fall in house prices and the ensuing economic fallout will be voted out.

Baby boomer bashing annoys me too.

Stuff changes. We can’t all lead the same life.

If we want that then let’s go communist

I’m 48. Bought a house for 35k at age 23. Now mortgage free currently. A few homes on , House worth nearly half a million.

This is unheard of now for the younger generation but it’s not my fault and I won’t feel guilty about it.

I’m doing my best to save for my children so they can have a pot to get them started.

I will support any scheme to get first time buyers on the market

The waspi women issue, and the baby boomer issue are two separate issues. Sure they are a subset of baby boomers who have lost out, but they seem to forget that entire generations of people after them who haven’t or won’t benefit from the things they had and this is largely because by the early 2000s it was clear the nation just couldn’t afford it. These generations will also lose out on getting those pensions. The only difference is timing and that our generation has more opportunity to make up the shortfall. But we will have to pay to do that.

We didn’t get free tertiary education, mortgage relief, married persons tax allowances etc. On top of student loans we have to find money for private pension. Then we are told we just have to “prioritise” to find money to buy a house.

I totally understand that it was governments who did these things, but those governments were voted for by people. And maybe it isn’t the fault of individuals that they got these things. But at the very least BB can recognise the privileges they had, and how that has damaged things for the generations who followed and stop calling us lazy, entitled, snowflakes who don’t know how lucky we are.

I have never seen a mangle and my children aren't going to die of smallpox. Hurrah!

stopped voting for increasingly right wing governments which look out for the rich and fuck over everyone else, we’d all be in a better place.

That odd. What happened the property prices and economy when labour were in charge? I am sure they came into power around 1997?

Labour say they dont look out for the rich, but you would be mad to pretend they dont.

you had free university education and were able to buy property very cheaply which many of you don't realise is not only impossible for younger generations but they are literally paying your mortgage or pension (BTL).

Op didn't have free university education - she left school at 16. The fact that the privileged minority had free university tuition was no benefit to her whatever - in fact she was paying tax on her £7 a week at age 16 to fund it for others. It's quite possible, likely in fact, that university was simply out of reach for her - if you were at a secondary modern in 11 + areas in the 60s/70s it would be very unlikely that that would ever be presented as an option.

I do totally totally agree about the housing point for young people though - although this op doesn't seem to have a btl, so she can't really be blamed for that either. I think many bboomers do realise the problem - if you have adult dc it is hard to miss it!

I have no more sympathy for waspi women and baby boomers feeling sorry for themselves than I have sympathy for young people feeling sorry for themselves. Stop being competitively miserable. Nobody deliberately ripped anybody off.

A baby boomer is anyone born after the war. In the baby boom post 1944. Both of my parents are in their 70s and both clearly baby boomers born ‘45 & 47. They are the epitome of baby boomers. Fre

People born in the 1950s are regarded as baby boomers. It wasn't a commonly used term though. My parents, married in 1948 talked about 'the bulge' of babies born straight after the war finished.

But it's swings and roundabouts, speaking as one who is a baby boomer. It was much better financially for men than women. I remember the time when two different wage rates would be advertised - men £x, women £x -1/3. As already mentioned, women were often in part time jobs; even in full time work they were not allowed to join pension schemes. It's one reason why I went for the Civil Service because they had equal pay and a pension scheme open to both. Precious few people went to University anyway, but women were pushed into teacher training, which wasn't then an all graduate profession. Apprenticeships for women seemed to be limited to hairdressing. Nursery provision for children was sparse - hence starting up playgroups as a sort of stop gap. As one of the early 70s wave of feminists we worked jolly hard to see improvements.

If you were an unmarried mother up until about the mid -seventies, well thank goodness attitudes have changed there.
So a generation slightly younger than me, 60s and early 70s born enjoyed some of the benefits that we had striven for.

But it's all come crashing down now, since the recession of 2008. I agree it's bad for millenials now. Don't forget that Austerity has been a political choice. There was apparently, no magic money tree, but Johnson says he's found one, but he's a liar anyway.

Icant, I completely agree. The government is taking from everyone and pitting everyone against each other - rich/poor, old/young, employed/unemployed, born British/immigrants... and that’s without brexit! I don’t live in the UK anymore, but I go back often and notice the toxic atmosphere. It’s very sad.

Every generation has its positives and negatives - I’m not quite a baby boomer and my younger years weren’t easy, but I can see that things are very difficult for young people now too (I have 3 DDs in their early 20s), but people have gone through worse in the past.

That’s not to say that I don’t hate what’s happening to older friends who have had part of their pensions stolen (women who didn’t have a pension of their own, or if they did, it was based on their much lower earnings and who were pressured to give up work when they had children, but who fought for the rights so many women take for granted now), or for my DDs who have been saddled with huge debt with no idea about whether the goalposts re repayment will change - they’re both wrong.

I just wish we could stop being so divided and understand each other better.

There are arguments for and against both generations, but may I correct this mistaken idea that my (BB) generation all had access to a free university education?
When I applied to uni, in 1974, there were only enough places for 10% of the population to attend a university. The 10% came disproportionately from the wealthy and privately educated, and, to a lesser extent, from the grammar schools. The average person had no hope of going.
Nearly 50% of today’s youngsters go to uni, with the chance to benefit from graduate level jobs afterwards.
And the majority will never have to fully repay their student loans.

But the immigrants still haven’t pushed up house prices. When they do buy they buy in the less desirable areas or rent multi occupancy housing

My view/experience is immigration does push prices up, as does London gentrification, as does people moving out for a better way of life - for whatever reason, more people = increased demand = increased prices?

It distorts areas. My once 'affordable' hometown isn't anymore. Landlords snap up the starter homes, turn them in to HMO because they can double or triple their income. What are the FTB or second step people supposed to buy now? Large communities of people wanting to settle with others of the same culture, so actively moving to the town and buying the 'forever homes' due to their size. You now have more people wanting to purchase, which in turn drives the prices up. New builds popping up everywhere and the council marketing the town as perfect for commuters - who move here because they were priced out of where they want to live which is great for them, but not for the local people, who work and grew up here and don't stand a chance of ever being able to afford to buy here now. In our local paper the council were gleeful of the substantial increase in property prices.

While being baby boomers, both my parents had free university education, lower taxes and large final salary public sector pensions. They both still vote labour and certainly didn’t vote to leave because they want the next generations to have what they had.