How the old and young are being pitted against each other - Yorkshire Post Letters

I listened to a BBC podcast with Evan Davies being interviewed discussing the way that old people have stolen all the money and young people are skint but having to pay for old folk’s pensions and care.

They went on for some time as though the issue was not in dispute. It seems to be becoming one of those irrefutable facts, like, we can’t afford pensions ‘cos “we are all getting older” and migrants are the cause of all our social problems.

Their conclusion was that young people and old people were destined to be at each other’s throats. But then, why let factual information and data spoil a good story? The truth is a bit different.

Present day pensioners are well off – yes? Well, it depends who you are, but mainly no.

Of the approximately 13 million pensioners, three quarters of them (9.8 million) receive the equivalent of or less than the minimum wage (Data from Statista 2025).

In fact, half of all pensioners receive the equivalent of 50 per cent of the value of the minimum wage. The wealthier 10 per cent of all pensioners do actually do very nicely, receiving an average of £54,000 per year. So, if the first half of the “irrefutable fact” is untrue, what about the other side of the equation and the contribution of young people to old folks’ pensions.

There has been an erosion in earnings for most workers generally going back several decades. However, the biggest issue has been faced by young workers. Many young workers pay little or no tax or National Insurance because they don’t earn enough.

There are a million workers on ‘Zero Hours Contracts’ (ONS 2024) and over half are aged 24 and under. So, even if pensioners were living a life of luxury (which they are clearly not), it is certainly not the young who are funding it. The reality is that neither part of the original premise (peddled by the BBC and other commentators) is true. In fact, it couldn’t be more untrue.

Of course, there are other ‘us and them’ stories, like: we can’t get a decent home to live in because migrants have taken them all. Can we remember when Margaret Thatcher declared that she wanted to see a property-owning democracy and forced councils to sell off their council housing and prevented them from building more homes to rent?

I wonder if she succeeded? 40 years later we now find that 41 per cent of former council houses are owned by private landlords for private rent when they used to be in the social rented sector.

Councils across the country have had massive waiting lists for their social housing provision for many decades, well predating any concerns about migration. Large local authorities have consistently had in excess of 15,000 on their waiting lists for over 20 years.

I could explore other ‘irrefutable facts’ in a similar way but why are we constantly being fed these untruths? Perhaps because there is one ‘us’ against ‘them’ story that is being covered up by those in high places. Us, the vast majority of the population, and them, the multi-millionaires and billionaires.

For over three decades there has been a growing disparity between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In the last 30 years the wealth of the richest UK residents increased by 1000 per cent. Meanwhile, the majority of us have seen wages more or less stagnate, particularly in the last 20 years.

There are increasing calls for taxes on wealth, particularly in the run up to the forthcoming budget. Could it possibly be that all these attempts to get us all fighting each other might be to deflect attention from ‘them’?