“grabby and entitled people”
“destructive behaviour”
“the entitled over 65s who are making unaffordable demands”
“the older cohorts who have already taken far more from the country than they will ever contribute”
“their own generation that screwed our economy and continues to do so”
“self-righteous retirees”
“a large proportion of the older generation refuse to accept economic facts”
“If people refuse to change their entitled behaviour”
villain
noun
/ˈvɪlən/
- The main bad character in a story, play, etc.
He often plays the part of the villain.
- A person who is morally bad or responsible for causing trouble or harm
Idioms
The villain of the piece
the person or thing that is responsible for all the trouble in a situation
Having graphs and economic terminology does not make you an oracle. Like I said, economists, policymakers and financial institutions played a major role in creating many of the structural problems the UK now faces.
The post-war generation born between 1946 and 1964 did not suddenly appear at retirement age out of nowhere. Those born earliest started retiring around 2006. Birth rates have been falling since the mid-1960s, so governments and policymakers had literally decades to prepare for the economic and fiscal implications of an ageing population and a shrinking workforce.
So with all that time on their hands, it's reasonable to ask what planning was actually done. Why did we have decades of ever increasing housing shortages? Why did productivity stagnate for so long? Why did policy become increasingly reliant on debt, asset inflation and rising house prices? Why were North Sea oil revenues not used more strategically? Why was reliance on expensive, badly negotiated long-term PFI expanded? What could have been done with the long-term revenues from utilities like water companies if those assets had remained publicly owned?. Ordinary retirees did not make those decisions. Governments, institutions, policymakers and economists did.
The increasing cost of pensions and age related spending is not simply because pensioners suddenly became older. Nor is it because they are greedy, selfish or want to screw the young over. It is because successive governments and policymakers failed to plan adequately despite having decades to prepare for demographic changes that were entirely foreseeable.
Instead of taking responsibility for those long-term policy failures, there often seems to be a greater willingness to blame PAYE workers and pensioners, whilst continuing to transfer more and more public assets, infrastructure and revenue streams into private profit, all while socialising the long-term costs and pressures of those decisions across wider society.
If people want to be angry at something, they should be angry at all the squandered revenue streams, poor planning and long-term policy failures that helped create the situation we are now in.