British boomers are losing out for the first time

The 1950s were a good decade to be born in Britain. A newly minted welfare state ensured that your early years were free from squalor. For the lucky few who made it there, university cost nothing. During your peak earning years, taxes plunged thanks to Margaret Thatcher, oil gushing from the North Sea and the restorative effect of the EU’s single market on the sick man of Europe. Rocketing house prices more than compensated for a few years of high interest rates. Defined-benefit pension schemes, then still the norm, ensured that retirement would be prosperous.

Whatever this generation wanted, this generation nearly always got. Remarkably, someone born in the 1950s would have been on the winning side of every election if they had voted with the bulk of their age group. The result was that baby-boomers paid in less and took out more from the welfare state than any generation before or since. In 2010 David Willetts, a Tory grandee and self-aware member of this blessed cohort, summed it up best in a book titled: “The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children’s Future—And Why They Should Give it Back”.