Our Response to Covid 19 Must Not Widen the Generational Divide

In his recent Times column, Matthew Parris proposed that older people should be first in line to pay their dues towards kickstarting the economy after the coronavirus lockdown. His argument was that younger people have been forced to shut down their lives — forfeiting jobs and incomes, losing six months of school and university education — in order to protect their elders who are most vulnerable to the spread of the disease. Therefore, older people (and he includes himself) should pay off this debt to the young by contributing a proportionally greater amount to the UK’s recovery from their own wallets.

This is a principled proposition, and Parris has some good suggestions including a war-savings style campaign to help pay off government debt. He also suggests getting rid of non- means tested payments such as the winter fuel payment for millionaires, that successive governments have been forced to keep in place largely for political expedience (i.e. because older people tend to vote).

All interesting stuff, but actually I think he is wrong and we’d be taking a dangerous step if we were to go there.

Underpinning the welfare state is the principle of universality, not transactionalism. The post war social contract is based on a shared responsibility to one another for the benefit of our society as a whole, rather than a duty in exchange for a service rendered or a debt owed. I don’t pay my taxes for what I get out of it. Otherwise, taxpayers without children would be entitled to refunds from the schools budget and those without a library membership would pay reduced council tax.

Of course in reality, our tax and welfare system does maintain an element of transactionalism. Today’s workers pay for the state pensions of today’s pensioners, but then we will in turn (hopefully!) have our pensions paid by the next generation. Yet our system relies on the idea that we all pay into the pot according to what we can afford and we then have equal access to a set of universal services such as the NHS, roads, schools, and welfare.

I worry that reducing the Covid 19 crisis down to who owes the most to whom, and who has made the biggest sacrifice for whom, risks stirring the embers of intergenerational strife.

Before Brexit swallowed up everything else, there was a fairly grumpy debate going on about whether the older generations benefited from a raft of great things — free university education, affordable home ownership, generous final salary pensions — that younger people could only dream of.

It is easy to forget that in the early 2000s, pensioners were considerably poorer on the whole than working age people, and the raft of measures such as free tv licences and winter fuel payments were aimed at helping them. As was the pensions triple lock (actually a Lib Dem idea) which ensured that pensioner incomes did not continue to fall behind those of working age people. These measures seem to have been effective, and the wealthier ‘boomer’ generation has also started to retire. A recent Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis states that “as a whole since 2007–08, pensioner incomes have on average grown substantially more than non-pensioner incomes.” So the working age generations are starting to feel that they in turn are being left behind.

Then there is the notion that all older people voted Leave whilst younger people voted Remain in the 2016 referendum. This is not entirely true but certainly has a basis in fact. According to Ipsos MORI, a majority of 18–34 year olds in every social class voted to remain in the EU, while a majority of those aged 55+ voted to leave. This stokes the view that older people are perhaps thinking back to a world that many believed was ‘better’, but which younger people do not remember; and that younger generations will have to deal with any adverse economic consequences of our exit. This argument will doubtless rear up again once the end of the transition period is upon us.

But I don’t want us to keep stoking these divisions. Instead we need to use the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic to draw together as a society. I am not a Marxist, but Karl’s old adage “from each according to his ability to each according to his need” has a lot going for it, translated into the context of a 21st century democracy. Our democracy owes much more to our Christian heritage than most realise. That the welfare state is universally available and universally funded is based on the notion of grace — that we give irrespective of notions of being ‘deserving’ or having an ‘entitlement’. We give not because we owe anything or are paying a bill for a service rendered; we give because there is need and because it is right to give. The Biblical injunction to love your neighbour as yourself means stumping up cash as well as kindness, for those who have the means. But let us not forget the kindness.