Thursday, October 31, 2013

The revolution will be along next year...(apparently)

Danny Dorling is on great form in this week's New Statesman, spelling out the extent of the transfer of wealth from the younger to the older generation in today's world. It makes for sobering reading. One sentence in particular leapt out at me: 'for the first time ever, a grand mother in her eighties can expect to enjoy higher living standards than someone in their twenties who is in work.'

This is not the finding of some far left think tank, but of the government's own social mobility and child poverty commission report published a few weeks ago.

The strange thing, of course, is that lots of older people feel left behind in the struggle to make ends meet and tend to think that the young are powering ahead. Sadly, the two groups (this is a broad generalisation, I know) don't mix, don't share their experiences and thus have little sense of solidarity.

Perhaps if they did, there would be a revolution of the kind Paul Mason talks abut in the same issue of the magazine. He quotes research by IT consultancy Gartner suggesting that 'a larger scale version of an occupy wall street-type movement will begin by the end of 2014, indicating that social unrest will start to foster political debate.'

Can't come soon enough, can it?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

" One sentence in particular leapt out at me: 'for the first time ever, a grand mother in her eighties can expect to enjoy higher living standards than someone in their twenties who is in work.'"
It is because of housing costs.
Sadly all political parties in this country think that higher house prices (which eventually causes higher rents) are a good thing.

We need more housing in the UK
A) Build more
B) Make pro single mums share homes.