Could I pass on the apologies of my five baby-boomer siblings to Phillip Inman (Can a nation in crisis rely on the baby boomer generation to step up? I think the UK is about to find out, 21 August)? They would downsize but can’t, because the local authority hasn’t asked them to (they all live in council houses).
They would give up the several luxury holidays a year but don’t have any to give up (unless a week in a caravan at the seaside counts?). They would give up their expensive pensions, but they only have the state pension and, even with the triple lock, it isn’t generous enough for any of it to be given up. That’s the price you pay for being part of the vast majority born into the wrong class in the 1950s and 60s and having to leave school at 15 or 16.
So this mea culpa comes in the form of an apology for not being part of the minority of baby boomers born into that comfortable, and often southern England, middle class that Inman seems to assume is the heritage of all of, rather than a small minority of, the baby-boomer generation.
A better understanding of history and the avoidance of generalising from one class’s narrow experiences might help to avoid the perpetuation of yet another form of hate speech. We already have more than enough of that to go around.
(I’m the lucky sibling – the one who managed to make it to university as a mature student.)
Nancy Harding
Cardiff
• I was irritated by the tone of Phillip Inman’s article. At 66, I am at the younger end of the “boomer” generation. My husband and I would love to sell our family home and buy a smaller bungalow (if anybody actually builds bungalows), and have been trying to sell our house since January, with no luck. Viewers admire the generous space of house and garden, but then say it would be “too much work” to look after, or “too far out in the countryside” (seven miles from the nearest town). We have a lovely village school, shop and pub and other local amenities, but this adds up to nothing.
Also, has Phillip tried moving recently? It is a tortuous affair. The costs involved are astronomical: stamp duty, fees for this and that, surveys and removals. You have to identify yourself over and over again on apps, taking selfies, divulging personal information, sending off copies of birth and marriage certificates, your passport. Is it any wonder that people decide to stay put?
Nicola Moignard
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
• What Phillip Inman is overlooking is the intricate web of social connections and sense of community built up over many years, which cannot be easily replicated by moving. If you are a boomer living in a larger family house that has seen your children grow up, welcomed their friends and families, hosted grandchildren, moved on to retirement but remained active in the community, you have created a sustaining network of mutual support.
These are the people who will notice a change in your routine and offer help or alert relatives. This is the community that rallied round in the pandemic and offered an essential lifeline in shopping, getting prescriptions and all the other little assistances. These are the people who will change a lightbulb, put a new battery in the smoke alarm, help with new technologies.
On the other hand, we are the people who will feed the cat, rabbit or guinea pig when neighbours are away, share resources and create a balanced generational neighbourhood. This mutual help is invisible, and cannot be quantified, but is the glue that holds a community together and is the reason I am not downsizing.
Christine Hill
Oxford
• If you Google “Beatles: Ailsa Avenue” you will see the moptops pretending to live next door to each other in our street, in the opening scene of their film Help! The “joke” is that their vast wealth hasn’t changed them, and they still live in humble terrace houses. This was 1965. We bought a house here in 1982, for £42,000 – a real stretch for us at the time, three and a half times our joint annual salaries, which was all we could borrow. Today these same small houses sell for about £1m. Which means that our children would have to earn about £300,000 to live in the same little house they were born in. They can’t afford to buy a dog kennel round here. The idea that this is somehow a great benefit to our family, and we should be taxed on our unconscious “profiteering”, seems downright harsh.
Mike MacCormack
Twickenham, London
• Thank you, Phillip Inman, for pointing out the error of my baby-boomer ways. I think I will “cash out” and jet off on a couple of holidays. I just need to cancel my commitments to a local charity (exclusively staffed by retirees), stop looking after my grandchildren so my children can pursue their careers, forget voting Labour in the selfish interest of having my taxes raised, and forgo my Guardian – which seems, with articles like these, to be intent on creating even more divisiveness in an already fractured society.
Denise White
Sale, Greater Manchester
• I trust that when Phillip Inman is finally able to retire (aged 75?) from the gruelling coal face of economic journalism, and gives up his comfy chair, nice desk and expensive laptop, he too will give back to the community. Failing that, any chance of him retiring now? Or at least changing the record.
John Hartley
Rawtenstall, Lancashire
• Not to worry, Phillip – we’ll all be dead soon.
Dorothy Mitchell
Sunderland
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