Welcome to gerontocratic Britain. Sir Paul McCartney, 80, was the star attraction at the once youthful but now desperately middle-aged Glastonbury. Sir Elton John, 75, filled Hyde Park last weekend. The state pension is shooting up, financed by a tax raid on the young. The latest Census revealed that we are plunging into a catastrophic baby bust.
The young and not so young are demoralised, downcast and have gone on baby strike, and not merely because they paid the price for protecting their elders from Covid. As the number of 90-year olds reaches an all-time high, there are 264,650 fewer under-fours than a decade ago, a 7.6 per cent slump. How many schools will need to shut, replaced by care homes and retirement villages? The signs are unmissable: Britain is a society that is losing trust in the future, and is increasingly terrified of its present.
The greying of everything, the dissipation of a defined youth culture, means that we are now peering into a precipice of demographic, economic, social and cultural decline. There will be fewer successful start-ups, less innovation, less reform and no more cool Britannia. Worst of all, we are facing a fiscal calamity, massively higher taxes and permanent economic stasis. Yes, of course, the gap can continue to be plugged by immigration, but will the public accept this indefinitely?
There are upsides to an ageing population. Older people are wiser: they have lived through political and economic cycles and are better able to place events in a longer-term context. They are less likely to be fooled into buying into a shiny new ideology or to fall foul of some political confidence trickster. There is a great value to experience that uber-youthful societies, in their revolutionary zeal and impatience, tend to overlook.
The old, whose income is contingent on a benign political and economic environment, are a powerful enforcer of political stability. They will continue to defeat Corbynites and oppose the kinds of wealth taxes that would cripple the economy. Their desire for higher interest rates will solve many of the problems of the past 15-20 years: tighter money will tackle inflation, send house prices lower, puncture bubbles and purge the economy of zombie firms.
Yet the ageing of our population is now happening for the wrong reasons. The problem is obviously not that there are too many older people: it is that there are too few children. There are now more over-65s (11.1 million) than under-15s (10.4 million), a dramatic reversal on 10 years ago.
A society with fewer children is inevitably more risk-averse. This is partly biological: elevated testosterone, progesterone and oestrogen levels in teenagers results in volatile, emotional responses. In extremis, this can lead to war and violence; it also means that younger people are willing to take risks, to create new businesses, to innovate, to think the unthinkable. They have little to lose and are desperate to win. Silicon Valley was created by the young, not by the middle aged.
As Paul Morland points out in Tomorrow’s People, the relative size of younger and older cohorts determines not just a country’s demographic centre of gravity but also its culture. An ageing population constrains the young directly and indirectly. Nightclubs have been shutting for years, well before Covid, and at a much faster rate than the decline in the proportion of younger people. When the old dominate a society, or reach a certain critical mass, the young themselves begin to act as if they too were older. They watch Netflix rather than go out.
The era of radical youth culture, Morland argues, was born with the baby boomers, a huge, incredibly influential cohort of teenagers and young adults, and has faded away with their ageing. For better or for worse, an obsession with YouTubers and TikTok is incomparable in significance to the rock and roll and sexual revolutions of the 1960s.
All of this is terrible news for the welfare state, invented when societies were youthful. In 1889, when Bismarck introduced his state pension, he set the retirement age at 70, even though life expectancy in Germany was around 39 at the time, according to Statista, an extraordinary con. Only the very fortunate would ever see a payout; today, the benefit is almost universal, triggering huge costs.
The ageing population has also made the NHS untenable: it is madness to think that the state, unaided by private insurance, can meet the exploding costs of the oldest population in history. It is crazier to believe governments can guarantee nobody will need to sell their homes to pay for care. We are also going to have to spend a lot more on defence. What will give? Will VAT hit 25 per cent, or national insurance rise and rise again? The economy would collapse.
There is no simple explanation for the global baby bust. Populations are ageing rapidly almost everywhere, whether countries are developed or still emerging, and the number of children as a proportion of the population is falling almost universally, usually to well below replacement levels. This applies to countries with generous maternity and paternity laws as well as those without, to those that subsidise childcare or not.
Britain’s extortionate house prices are so extreme that they are undoubtedly a factor, but the birth rate isn’t noticeably higher in parts of the country that are more affordable, or even in countries where housing is cheaper. There appear to be much greater forces at play, including increasing education, secularisation and urbanisation, as well as frustration: polls demonstrate that women often want more children than they are having.
But what is clear is that the situation in Britain is being exacerbated by younger people believing that society is rigged against them. Lockdowns were a calamity. Wages are depressed, higher education too expensive, housing obviously disastrous and it feels to many as if the old are too powerful, that their privileges – triple locked pensions, free bus passes and the rest – are being extracted from young workers.
It is no wonder that they are depressed, turning to the far-Left, embracing a demented woke ideology that pits groups and genders against one another, and even the kind of extreme green death-cultery which advocates zero children. The young need to be cut a fairer deal, or else Britain will be overwhelmed by a demographic and fiscal tsunami.
I would take issue with your fourth paragraph which states that older people are necessarily wiser, especially when you look at their voter record in GB and Us. More likely to be nationalist, less accepting of diversity and immigration, more likely to vote for those who pander to their bigotry and prejudices ( I’m a relative oldie myself, but one who keeps well away from the Daily Mail, Fox News and other purveyors of spite, malice and division)
It does seem interesting that even the Telegraph has noticed this now. So no more #BrexitBenefits?
Oh and wealth taxes do not automatically cripple the economy in the way that c
Tax cuts do not automatically grow the economy. The trickledown economy is an oft- debunked ideology – the wealth of the nation is better served by a bubble-up economy as every extra pound received by the lower paid goes straight back out in payment of goods and services, keeping the economy in growth
> It is no wonder that they are depressed, turning to the far-Left, embracing a demented woke ideology that pits groups and genders against one another, and even the kind of extreme green death-cultery which advocates zero children.
Wow, this hack is way off the deep end today. How far the Telegraph has fallen …
No surprise that the Torygraph is playing populist bingo – correctly identifying the issues and then hitting all the buzzwords;
“Green death-cult-ery” – check (that one’s my personal favorite, dripping with delicious irony…)
“*Believing* society is stacked against them” – check
They missed the avocados and coffee tho so no bingo, serious missed opportunity.
My favorite bit is always that you *know* the writers know better, because they’ve just taken the reality and twisted it on it’s head – the death cult is not the folks asking not to destroy the entire world, it’s the folks doing that for a profit. It’s genuinely mental that there are people who consume this daily and believe it’s an accurate assessment of objectively reality. It’s terrifying.
Behind a pay wall, what’s the point.
Britain is ‘broke’ if you ignore the transfer of wealth from poor to rich. That’s all anything is.
Bunch of middle aged white men working hard to benefit themselves and their mates. What could go wrong….
*Britain is fed up, bitter, and practically broke – and it’s all going to get worse* argues newspaper that has has helped more than many to make it that way.
I think that the paradigm of “increasingly fewer young people having to pay for increasingly more older people” is far from inevitable.
The demographics will continue to progress that way, of course – but at some point in the not too distant future, a political decision will be made for society to no longer feel obliged to support the elderly, and/or to push “voluntary” euthanasia.
We will then see the likes of the Dailies Telegraph and Mail full of headlines of the “Why don’t more of these selfish old bastards just top themselves for the good of the rest of us?” type.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that there will be more to go round for younger people, as business barons and their political enablers continue to press their ideologically driven agenda that the hoi polloi deserve to be worked to death for a pittance, whilst the uber-rich live like sheikhs of Araby.
>There are upsides to an ageing population. Older people are wiser: they have lived through political and economic cycles and are better able to place events in a longer-term context. They are less likely to be fooled into buying into a shiny new ideology or to fall foul of some political confidence trickster. There is a great value to experience that uber-youthful societies, in their revolutionary zeal and impatience, tend to overlook.
Which is why they overwhelmingly voted in favour of kneecapping their own country and continue to put a shower of cunt in the govt. Fucking torygraph with its autofellatio.
One or two accurate if not obvious observation wrapped up in heinous drivel.
Tories and not saying woke challenge (impossible).
Said the news company that loves to peddle the shit that led us to this point.right wing rag: “We must leave the EU and get rid of the red tape”also right wing rag: “PEOPLE ARE FED UP WITH HAVING LESS THANKS TO LEAVING THE EU
This comment is more of a criticism of all right wing rags when they post articles like this, when its partially their fault.
*I’m sitting here waiting for the sound of peasant boots in the street. Nothing yet.*
The Summer of Discontent
Strange, they got rid of the pesky Eastern Europeans, and it is still really bad. Wonder who is going to be the next scapegoat?
This dump has always been shite due to the people being so pathetically cynical, bitter and negative.
“Banter” is just bullying, it’s “funny” to be so negative. No it isn’t.
Yet pensioners cry whenever the government tries to alter the triple lock on their pension or tries to make TV licences means-tested. Younger people may be bitter and fed up, but older people seem to think that the world owes them everything just because they are old.
The Torygraph is mad that it got the Britain it demanded.
The Telegraph – because you don’t have to be working class to be an incredibly thick, bigoted moron.
And yet their front page headline is Boris is facing a kangaroo court against a majority of his own party.
Good to see that the Oxford comma is alive and well.
At least house prices are going up??? Ho har hmmm
It’s a fee payer. Like the rest of Britain in fact. So I’ll pass.
Hey guys, remember that time this terrible right wing propaganda rag wrote about 1%ers during the recession having a second home, 3 foreign holidays per year and private school for the kids and they had to drop to 2 of those?
The telegraph is a large chunk of why we’re like this. I hold the writers in contempt, especially the ones who were fired but still ended up failing forward for years until they ended up PM, but they are all morally absent sycophants.
We all know who’s to blame for that. And it can’t be blamed on anyone or anything else. Boris & Co.
This Gen-X boomer-sucker-upper is senile way before his time.
Keep reminding yourself, could be worse I could be a American living in the U.S.🫣
Compared to 95% of all the countries in the world, the UK is a virtual paradise.
It is going to get as bad as people want it to get.
We are free to reverse course at any time, but until people actually want that, it will keep getting worse.
>There are upsides to an ageing population. Older people are wiser: they have lived through political and economic cycles and are better able to place events in a longer-term context. They are less likely to be fooled into buying into a shiny new ideology or to fall foul of some political confidence trickster.
Was this written in an alternate reality where older voters *didn’t* overwhelmingly support a man who put catchy lies on the side of buses?
Vote Labour. Their not the same. Read the Manifestos and you’d see that.
Misread ‘Britain’ for ‘Brian’. Please say I’m not the only one.
34 comments
Welcome to gerontocratic Britain. Sir Paul McCartney, 80, was the star attraction at the once youthful but now desperately middle-aged Glastonbury. Sir Elton John, 75, filled Hyde Park last weekend. The state pension is shooting up, financed by a tax raid on the young. The latest Census revealed that we are plunging into a catastrophic baby bust.
The young and not so young are demoralised, downcast and have gone on baby strike, and not merely because they paid the price for protecting their elders from Covid. As the number of 90-year olds reaches an all-time high, there are 264,650 fewer under-fours than a decade ago, a 7.6 per cent slump. How many schools will need to shut, replaced by care homes and retirement villages? The signs are unmissable: Britain is a society that is losing trust in the future, and is increasingly terrified of its present.
The greying of everything, the dissipation of a defined youth culture, means that we are now peering into a precipice of demographic, economic, social and cultural decline. There will be fewer successful start-ups, less innovation, less reform and no more cool Britannia. Worst of all, we are facing a fiscal calamity, massively higher taxes and permanent economic stasis. Yes, of course, the gap can continue to be plugged by immigration, but will the public accept this indefinitely?
There are upsides to an ageing population. Older people are wiser: they have lived through political and economic cycles and are better able to place events in a longer-term context. They are less likely to be fooled into buying into a shiny new ideology or to fall foul of some political confidence trickster. There is a great value to experience that uber-youthful societies, in their revolutionary zeal and impatience, tend to overlook.
The old, whose income is contingent on a benign political and economic environment, are a powerful enforcer of political stability. They will continue to defeat Corbynites and oppose the kinds of wealth taxes that would cripple the economy. Their desire for higher interest rates will solve many of the problems of the past 15-20 years: tighter money will tackle inflation, send house prices lower, puncture bubbles and purge the economy of zombie firms.
Yet the ageing of our population is now happening for the wrong reasons. The problem is obviously not that there are too many older people: it is that there are too few children. There are now more over-65s (11.1 million) than under-15s (10.4 million), a dramatic reversal on 10 years ago.
A society with fewer children is inevitably more risk-averse. This is partly biological: elevated testosterone, progesterone and oestrogen levels in teenagers results in volatile, emotional responses. In extremis, this can lead to war and violence; it also means that younger people are willing to take risks, to create new businesses, to innovate, to think the unthinkable. They have little to lose and are desperate to win. Silicon Valley was created by the young, not by the middle aged.
As Paul Morland points out in Tomorrow’s People, the relative size of younger and older cohorts determines not just a country’s demographic centre of gravity but also its culture. An ageing population constrains the young directly and indirectly. Nightclubs have been shutting for years, well before Covid, and at a much faster rate than the decline in the proportion of younger people. When the old dominate a society, or reach a certain critical mass, the young themselves begin to act as if they too were older. They watch Netflix rather than go out.
The era of radical youth culture, Morland argues, was born with the baby boomers, a huge, incredibly influential cohort of teenagers and young adults, and has faded away with their ageing. For better or for worse, an obsession with YouTubers and TikTok is incomparable in significance to the rock and roll and sexual revolutions of the 1960s.
All of this is terrible news for the welfare state, invented when societies were youthful. In 1889, when Bismarck introduced his state pension, he set the retirement age at 70, even though life expectancy in Germany was around 39 at the time, according to Statista, an extraordinary con. Only the very fortunate would ever see a payout; today, the benefit is almost universal, triggering huge costs.
The ageing population has also made the NHS untenable: it is madness to think that the state, unaided by private insurance, can meet the exploding costs of the oldest population in history. It is crazier to believe governments can guarantee nobody will need to sell their homes to pay for care. We are also going to have to spend a lot more on defence. What will give? Will VAT hit 25 per cent, or national insurance rise and rise again? The economy would collapse.
There is no simple explanation for the global baby bust. Populations are ageing rapidly almost everywhere, whether countries are developed or still emerging, and the number of children as a proportion of the population is falling almost universally, usually to well below replacement levels. This applies to countries with generous maternity and paternity laws as well as those without, to those that subsidise childcare or not.
Britain’s extortionate house prices are so extreme that they are undoubtedly a factor, but the birth rate isn’t noticeably higher in parts of the country that are more affordable, or even in countries where housing is cheaper. There appear to be much greater forces at play, including increasing education, secularisation and urbanisation, as well as frustration: polls demonstrate that women often want more children than they are having.
But what is clear is that the situation in Britain is being exacerbated by younger people believing that society is rigged against them. Lockdowns were a calamity. Wages are depressed, higher education too expensive, housing obviously disastrous and it feels to many as if the old are too powerful, that their privileges – triple locked pensions, free bus passes and the rest – are being extracted from young workers.
It is no wonder that they are depressed, turning to the far-Left, embracing a demented woke ideology that pits groups and genders against one another, and even the kind of extreme green death-cultery which advocates zero children. The young need to be cut a fairer deal, or else Britain will be overwhelmed by a demographic and fiscal tsunami.
I would take issue with your fourth paragraph which states that older people are necessarily wiser, especially when you look at their voter record in GB and Us. More likely to be nationalist, less accepting of diversity and immigration, more likely to vote for those who pander to their bigotry and prejudices ( I’m a relative oldie myself, but one who keeps well away from the Daily Mail, Fox News and other purveyors of spite, malice and division)
It does seem interesting that even the Telegraph has noticed this now. So no more #BrexitBenefits?
Oh and wealth taxes do not automatically cripple the economy in the way that c
Tax cuts do not automatically grow the economy. The trickledown economy is an oft- debunked ideology – the wealth of the nation is better served by a bubble-up economy as every extra pound received by the lower paid goes straight back out in payment of goods and services, keeping the economy in growth
> It is no wonder that they are depressed, turning to the far-Left, embracing a demented woke ideology that pits groups and genders against one another, and even the kind of extreme green death-cultery which advocates zero children.
Wow, this hack is way off the deep end today. How far the Telegraph has fallen …
No surprise that the Torygraph is playing populist bingo – correctly identifying the issues and then hitting all the buzzwords;
“Woke” – check
“millennials” – check
“Globalization/urbanization/secularization” – check, check, check
“Green death-cult-ery” – check (that one’s my personal favorite, dripping with delicious irony…)
“*Believing* society is stacked against them” – check
They missed the avocados and coffee tho so no bingo, serious missed opportunity.
My favorite bit is always that you *know* the writers know better, because they’ve just taken the reality and twisted it on it’s head – the death cult is not the folks asking not to destroy the entire world, it’s the folks doing that for a profit. It’s genuinely mental that there are people who consume this daily and believe it’s an accurate assessment of objectively reality. It’s terrifying.
Behind a pay wall, what’s the point.
Britain is ‘broke’ if you ignore the transfer of wealth from poor to rich. That’s all anything is.
Bunch of middle aged white men working hard to benefit themselves and their mates. What could go wrong….
*Britain is fed up, bitter, and practically broke – and it’s all going to get worse* argues newspaper that has has helped more than many to make it that way.
I think that the paradigm of “increasingly fewer young people having to pay for increasingly more older people” is far from inevitable.
The demographics will continue to progress that way, of course – but at some point in the not too distant future, a political decision will be made for society to no longer feel obliged to support the elderly, and/or to push “voluntary” euthanasia.
We will then see the likes of the Dailies Telegraph and Mail full of headlines of the “Why don’t more of these selfish old bastards just top themselves for the good of the rest of us?” type.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that there will be more to go round for younger people, as business barons and their political enablers continue to press their ideologically driven agenda that the hoi polloi deserve to be worked to death for a pittance, whilst the uber-rich live like sheikhs of Araby.
>There are upsides to an ageing population. Older people are wiser: they have lived through political and economic cycles and are better able to place events in a longer-term context. They are less likely to be fooled into buying into a shiny new ideology or to fall foul of some political confidence trickster. There is a great value to experience that uber-youthful societies, in their revolutionary zeal and impatience, tend to overlook.
Which is why they overwhelmingly voted in favour of kneecapping their own country and continue to put a shower of cunt in the govt. Fucking torygraph with its autofellatio.
One or two accurate if not obvious observation wrapped up in heinous drivel.
Tories and not saying woke challenge (impossible).
Said the news company that loves to peddle the shit that led us to this point.right wing rag: “We must leave the EU and get rid of the red tape”also right wing rag: “PEOPLE ARE FED UP WITH HAVING LESS THANKS TO LEAVING THE EU
This comment is more of a criticism of all right wing rags when they post articles like this, when its partially their fault.
*I’m sitting here waiting for the sound of peasant boots in the street. Nothing yet.*
The Summer of Discontent
Strange, they got rid of the pesky Eastern Europeans, and it is still really bad. Wonder who is going to be the next scapegoat?
This dump has always been shite due to the people being so pathetically cynical, bitter and negative.
“Banter” is just bullying, it’s “funny” to be so negative. No it isn’t.
Yet pensioners cry whenever the government tries to alter the triple lock on their pension or tries to make TV licences means-tested. Younger people may be bitter and fed up, but older people seem to think that the world owes them everything just because they are old.
The Torygraph is mad that it got the Britain it demanded.
The Telegraph – because you don’t have to be working class to be an incredibly thick, bigoted moron.
And yet their front page headline is Boris is facing a kangaroo court against a majority of his own party.
Good to see that the Oxford comma is alive and well.
At least house prices are going up??? Ho har hmmm
It’s a fee payer. Like the rest of Britain in fact. So I’ll pass.
Hey guys, remember that time this terrible right wing propaganda rag wrote about 1%ers during the recession having a second home, 3 foreign holidays per year and private school for the kids and they had to drop to 2 of those?
The telegraph is a large chunk of why we’re like this. I hold the writers in contempt, especially the ones who were fired but still ended up failing forward for years until they ended up PM, but they are all morally absent sycophants.
We all know who’s to blame for that. And it can’t be blamed on anyone or anything else. Boris & Co.
This Gen-X boomer-sucker-upper is senile way before his time.
Keep reminding yourself, could be worse I could be a American living in the U.S.🫣
Compared to 95% of all the countries in the world, the UK is a virtual paradise.
It is going to get as bad as people want it to get.
We are free to reverse course at any time, but until people actually want that, it will keep getting worse.
>There are upsides to an ageing population. Older people are wiser: they have lived through political and economic cycles and are better able to place events in a longer-term context. They are less likely to be fooled into buying into a shiny new ideology or to fall foul of some political confidence trickster.
Was this written in an alternate reality where older voters *didn’t* overwhelmingly support a man who put catchy lies on the side of buses?
Vote Labour. Their not the same. Read the Manifestos and you’d see that.
Misread ‘Britain’ for ‘Brian’. Please say I’m not the only one.
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