Losing The Generation Game

If no one now has to retire at 65, then will there still be emeritus positions in universities, or will everyone carry on until they drop, not only using the libraries, but being paid to? Will future ages have no concept that "the e means that you're out and the meritus means that you deserve to be"?

Really, I reckon, this is just a way of softening us up for the end of the payment of the state pension, and possibly even of occupational and private pensions, at a designated age. Before long, you will only be able to get them if you are signed off as medically unfit for any paid work. If you are not, then to paid work you will go, even if it is up to and including the day you die.

But Thatcher's Grandchildren will have been thoroughly embittered for many decades by the time that that hits them. They already are, as last week's Labour Conference made clear. Thatcher's cultivation and exploitation of greedy bourgeois self-interest, her transformation of her own class from people like her father into people like her son, has turned round and bitten the party that she refounded on that principle.

The successors of those who profited under her will never, ever vote for the party that took away what their parents had brought them up to take for granted. It will not - already, it does not - bother them whether or not the other lot would have had to have done the same thing. That was not how the cards fell. The other lot didn't do it. This lot did.

Nor will it matter much, if at all, what the other lot goes on to inflict upon them over the course of their lives. The thing that they will never forgive, nor ever forget, will be as it has always been for everyone: the Great Betrayal of their youth, the initiation into the disappointments and cruelties of the adult world.