Nothing makes you feel more like a de-developing nation than being reprimanded by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Rachel Reeves can take solace in trace amounts from the fact that the IMF advised her only to “stay the course” on spending limits – whatever energy or inflation crises are down the line, she shouldn’t cave to demands for government support. Basically, “when the facts change, do not change your mind” – the opposite of the economists’ classic, but then, haven’t we all had enough of classics?
It’s a milder rebuke than the one delivered to the then chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, in 2022, about which the BBC’s economics editor, Faisal Islam, admitted “even I was taken aback”, creating a ripple effect: other, lesser economy-watchers were taken aback at the abackness that had taken the unflappable Islam. But it still has a sting in its tail, enjoining Reeves to keep her focus on “controlling the rising welfare bill, as well as delivering further efficiency measures in public services, while protecting the most vulnerable”.
After 16 years of austerity or austerity-lite, there isn’t much to trim from disability or unemployment benefits, which is why we see analysis slide instead into unserious questions about who deserves what. Is that person claiming welfare suffering from a “real” disability or an endlessly contestable mental illness? Is the unemployment rate a result of lack of opportunity or lifestyle choices? Where it is discussed in any detail, the problem is always young people. They are unfit for the labour market because of the school curriculum, unfit for any market since they’re in the grip of a mental health crisis, and the jobs aren’t there anyway – this was the “perfect storm” identified in February by Alan Milburn, ahead of his report on Neets (young people not in education, employment or training) this summer. The more urgently the welfare bill needs to be slashed, the more heated this debate becomes, until we’re all rightwing pundits asking each other whether ADHD is real or just a fig leaf for a generation that can’t concentrate on anything longer than a TikTok video – and whatever the balance of truth and fairness in that, it surely can’t fall on you, the taxpayer, to fund it?
The numerate younger voter – of which there are legion, the curriculum isn’t that bad – can be forgiven for asking a couple of follow-up questions. Why, when low-income benefits mostly go to in-work parents rather than Neets anyway, are pensioner benefits (a total of £31bn, excluding the state pension) untouchable? Not only have they been defacto ringfenced by the government’s U-turn on means testing the winter fuel allowance, the new consensus is that even trying to reserve that benefit for people who truly needed it was the stupidest thing an incoming government has ever done.
Why, when pension benefits and the state pension amount to £178bn annually – which is greater than the housing benefit, disability benefit and unemployment or low-income benefits bills combined – do we never talk about the triple lock?
Nor do we ever look directly at the tapered tax relief on private pensions, which straightforwardly delivers more, pound for pound, to higher earners. This alone is the most expensive non-structural tax relief in the country, costing nearly £35bn a year – roughly 10 times the amount we spend on affordable housing annually. What would happen if you flipped that? Would young people be able to pay their rent?
These figures, or at least the skewing they describe, are all so familiar that it feels almost rude to mention it, like blundering into a conversation about Brexit to say that it actually hasn’t made us richer. The centre ground of politics cleaves to a particular etiquette where you don’t repeat things everyone has heard before, even while they remain unresolved. And the rationale – offered as a gentle truism, a level of political cynicism that we can handle – is that pensioners vote and young people do not.
That electoral calculus may have made sense when the triple lock was introduced in 2011, along with the obvious benefit of protecting one group so the whole country wouldn’t unite against austerity. But as this generational imbalance reaches maturity, it is no longer rational. Voters are coming of age now whose first experience of the state was when their Sure Start centre closed and their child trust fund was scrapped. Their prospects of home ownership depend almost entirely on intergenerational transfer, their further-education debt the Treasury will decide on a whim, and their value in the job market, vaunted as the fruit of their degree, could only be realised in vacancies that don’t exist.
If they make any demand on the social safety net, their problems are minimised as self-created, and whenever there’s a book that needs to be balanced – whether to boost defence spending or unspook the bond markets – the spotlight is back on the snowflakes. Young people can see what policies that actively seek to prevent hardship look like, but they have never seen one applied to them. They will not vote for a party that thinks this is OK. It is not because they are too woke.
The paradox is, nobody asked for this generational imbalance – it’s the most fundamental building block of nation-building and social cohesion, to want things to be better for the next lot. But we’ll be frozen here until we stop staying “welfare bill”, start saying “pensions bill” and just see where the conversation takes us.
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Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
