On the face of it, Tuesday has been another red letter day for intergenerational unfairness. New data from estate agency Savills finds that the over-50s now own more than three-quarters of the nation’s property wealth. At the same time, the man favoured to be the next prime minister has U-turned on a commitment to drop university tuition fees.
The picture is of course a little more mixed. Not on housing – congratulations once again if you purchased a home in the mid-1990s. But on fees. Last month, Philip Collins called Labour’s (then) policy to scrap them a “a vast subsidy to the middle class“. And it is true that moving the financing of universities off students and onto the Exchequer would not only be very expensive but deliver uneven distributional effects.
