Thoughts on individualism, the distance of family and the challenged state of social democracy

 

Typical of me, I’m afraid. I’m tipsy and decided my first serious post would be socio-political. I’m truly sorry. 

Title is a little dramatic. 

I read an opinion article on the FT (I’m still rinsing my free student subscription) about how “France and Britain are in thrall to pensioners”. It was a great read, but nothing I didn’t already know or think about. Though there is a pretty damning statistic - the average pensioner in France has an income 5% higher than the average income. That, in my opinion, is bonkers. 

We’re long past the point of the delusion that we “pay in” to a system and get to redeem our coupons when we’re retired, so I’m not going to address it as an argument. No, everything comes in and out of the Treasury year by year and it’s coming out for pensioners more strongly than anybody else. The Triple Lock (or as I like to think about it, mathematical eventuality of 100% GDP spending on pensions) is a mechanism to strengthen the state pension to ensure that (at the time, quite modest) state pensions could provide suitable sustenance. Now, my rather wealthy grandparents get £24k a year between them, which they have little use for. My grandad has a final salary pension, they have no mortgage and plenty of other assets. But touching it is politically toxic - it is very hard to remove benefits once they’ve already been given, as the government has discovered when they tried to means-test (not even scrap!) the Winter Fuel Allowance (which my grandparents donate to charity). Of course, I know many of my friends grandparents who are definitely not in such a good place but the fact that a sizeable chunk definitely are signals something is wrong. 

I’m no sociologist but I think the political nature of greater benefits for the older amongst us and the interlinked strength of the grey vote on the constituency map are results of individualism running too rampant. We used to live in very tight knit groups, with generations living under one roof, or the same town or neighbourhood. Many of us still do, but many of us don’t. I see my grandparents 2-3 times a year (though it might be 4 or 5 this year which will be a pleasant treat and hopefully a new trend), so for the most part, my interests are quite literally on the other side of the country. I think it’s hard to gain a bigger picture of society when you don’t spend a lot of time with the people who will constitute its future. Of course, I admit that this goes both ways and I have strayed into a radical reactionary position because they too, are not in front of me. I think earlier generations had that benefit and inter-generational help, companionship and relationship was much more potent than it is today. 

Of course to an extent capitalism requires such distance. My mother’s parents moved from the Netherlands to West Sussex in the 70s, leaving their entire family behind. My grandparents temporarily moved from Southampton to Melbourne for work. My parents moved from London to Izmir as missionaries, and then to Durham. The nature of the global world, its opportunities and freedoms, allow us unprecedented access to chase what we want and many of us do.

So I think we need to strike a bit more of a balance. My aunt & uncle have done this well. They moved to Canada for about a decade and then moved an hour away from my grandparents and had kids, who my grandparents see all the time. I think that is a great balance. Maybe, in the end, I’m simply projecting my longing to be a bit closer to them myself. I know time is our one true gift and I know they have less of it. 

No, nevermind, efficiency and big picture cap back on, that can’t just be it. There is clearly something wrong with the way our inter-generational relationships have gone and we continue to fail to make work pay as it should to compensate our increasingly ageing population. We must do something to make everything more equal for us all. Tax the value of land, anyone? Henry George’s ghost must surely be floating through the Treasury and whispering in Rachel Reeve’s ear about now. Probably not though.