But Who Did The Pinching?

Referring to David Willetts's The Pinch, Beatrix Campbell writes:

Baby boomers born between 1945 and 1965 have made the world too expensive, too difficult and dangerous for their offspring. Although they commit more time to their children, they may be "better parents than they are citizens".

He claims that "housing is fundamental to shifts in power and wealth between generations". Baby boomers, he says, are "concentrating wealth in their own hands", primarily through housing. They are also accused of reducing household size – and by implication, happiness – and increasing indebtedness.

The unspoken screams from Willetts's book: the housing boom-bust-boom was initiated by Thatcherism's housing revolution. Instead of being mostly tenants – like the rest of Europe – we became owner-occupiers after 1979 when Thatcher permitted council house sales without requiring re-investment in public housing.

The result: 1.7 million houses sold, and now a waiting list 1.7 million applicants long. Add New Labour's contribution and we reach the lowest level of housebuilding since 1923, according to the National Housing Federation last week.

Willetts reminds us that at the end of the Thatcher era the housing boom and the pensions crisis converged: people began to regard their homes, rather than their savings, as their insurance against old age. There is a correlation between high owner occupation shadows weak welfare states. But these outcomes are the product of political strategy, not personal whim.

Willetts hails the larger households of Sweden – 3.1 children compared to the UK's 2.4 – for example, as contributing to greater equality.

But he doesn't tell us that we live in smaller spaces, often with no room for a dining table. It was Thatcherism that in 1980 abolished the Parker Morris minimum space standard. Nor that, according to the Royal Institute of British Architects' report Better Homes and Neighbourhoods, Londoners are living in the smallest rooms in Europe, and our new-builds are smaller than even space-short Holland and Japan.

Nor does Willetts disclose that the happier families of Scandinavia are living in societies where renting is more common than owning, childcare is accessible and affordable, and pensions and taxes are high.

What makes British baby boomers so different from their economic equivalents in Scandinavia and Europe? What is in our psyche or our genes that isn't in theirs?

It is the state, stupid. The problem isn't personal, it is political.

Yes, but who put Thatcher where she was? The Sixties Swingers hated with a burning passion the Labour Government of 1964 to 1970. The pirate radio stations were their revolt against its and the BBC’s deal with the Musicians’ Union to protect the livelihoods of that union’s members. Behind this union-busting criminality was Oliver Smedley, later a key figure behind the proto-Thatcherite Institute of Economic Affairs.

Those Swingers used the lowering of the voting age to put what they thought were the Selsdon Tories into office in 1970. They then went on to entrench their own moral, social and cultural decadence and libertinism, first in the economic sphere during the Eighties, and then in the constitutional sphere under Tony Blair. David Cameron accepts uncritically the whole package: moral, social, cultural, economic, and constitutional. Indeed, he embodies it.

When is this country going to wake up to what has really been happening over the last fifty years?