Baby boomers should not be a cash cow for future taxation

It’s interesting to hear and watch the criticism of the so-called baby boomers that seems to be popular at the moment, no doubt started by some Government dirty tricks department.

Governments of all persuasions use this tactic to set one section of society against another, and I am sick of hearing that our generation had it all and have left nothing for anyone else.

I remember rationing which went on for years after the war, with people living hand to mouth and wearing shabby clothes because they had to make do and mend. You had one week’s holiday a year on the east coast if you were lucky – and not many families could afford that.

The ’60s came in and we started to enjoy a better standard of living. Getting a mortgage then was not easy and building societies made sure you did not over-stretch yourself, unlike the crazy lending in recent years. I would also point out that the ratio between wages and house prices was not dissimilar to what it is today.

During Thatcher’s tenure, inflation at one time reached nearly 15 per cent, with interest rates topping 17 per cent. People with mortgages were getting letters from their building societies every few weeks telling them their monthly payments would be increasing, causing real hardship and in many cases repossessions. She wrecked traditional industries for which this country was famous, just to prove a political point and bring the average working person to heel.

Many of my generation saved our own money and invested in company pension schemes so we could hopefully enjoy a long and comfortable retirement.

Gordon Brown came along and set in motion a tax to take £5bn a year of our money from our pension pots, causing most final salary pension schemes to close and others to have massive shortfalls in funding, causing long term damage to the pension industry.

It’s always easier to hit the weakest and the most vulnerable in society, the unemployed, the disabled, working families who need extra help to support their families; these are the ones who pay for the mistakes of those at the top of the pile.

To suggest the baby boomers have had it all is just a ploy to deflect public opinion and portray us as a cash cow for future taxation to fuel even more profligate spending by central Government.

We have the winter fuel allowance, which has been reduced from £250 to £200 per household and every year we hear about elderly people frightened to run their heating during the winter months because of the high cost of fuel levied by the energy companies, another 
group with their snouts in the trough.

As far as the state pension is concerned we have one of the lowest in the EU and the western world at approximately £5,500 a year. The Germans enjoy a state pension of over £26,000, Sweden £25,000, France £15,000 with retirement at 60, Holland £11,000 and Ireland £10,000.

We are the third richest nation within the EU and sixth in the world, so who does have the wealth of this country? It certainly isn’t the baby boomers.