I accept that many baby boomers benefited from being able to buy their council houses very cheaply. But things weren’t easy for those who didn’t, especially in London and the south east.
I bought my first flat with a friend, because neither of us had a partner, we couldn’t afford to buy alone, and we could see that with rapidly rising prices we would never be able to get onto the property ladder. The flat lost more than 10% of its value. Yes, I paid 15% interest rates. Both then and a few years later when my husband and I subsequently bought a house together, we were encouraged to take out endowment mortgages. They spectacularly underperformed and covered only around 2/3 of the amount we had borrowed. We had to come up with the rest ourselves.
I don’t accept that education, employment and benefits have been in our favour either.
Many of us had free university education, but the vast majority didn’t. When my 75 year old husband went to university in 1969 only 6% of 18 year olds went to university. By the time I went 10 years later it was 7.5% (with 15% in total in some kind of higher education).
I am not sure those of us who remember the early 80s would agree that that was a great time for employment. The unemployment rate is currently around 5%. In 1984 it was almost 12%.
I don’t know enough about benefits to know how those have changed over the years, but a number of others have already mentioned the very low rates of maternity pay that used to exist, and of course there was no financial help with childcare.
I don’t think this pitting generation against generation is at all helpful. All generations have some advantages and some disadvantages. My parents’ and grandparents’ generations were brought up in the two world wars (both grandfathers were in the trenches) so on the whole I think we are all pretty lucky these days.