Are you over 60? Well, stop reading this right now. You really shouldn’t be troubling your mind with news. Leave it to people who care. Get back to your knitting.

The current batch of pensioners aren’t much use to anyone, you see. It seems that they haven’t really had much of an impact on the world. Compared, that is, with the next lot: the baby boomers. According to The New Old, a paper from the think-tank Demos, (sorry, it’s not a think-tank but a “greenhouse for new ideas”), the baby boomers are “the most influential generation in recent social history” and are going to transform how pensioners behave.

As Demos puts it: “A new generation of 17 million older people are marching towards retirement with a clear set of demands. The boomers are unlikely to put up and shut up”. That’s because “at every stage of their lives the boomers have been at the forefont of radical social, economic and political change”.

Wow. It must have been amazing. What dreary, conservative, uninvolved lives previous generations led in comparison. There was fighting a world war to save Europe from fascism, yes. But that wasn’t that important; certainly not compared with the heroic struggles of the marchers against the “Corrie, Benyon and White amendments to abortion legislation; anti-nuclear campaigners arrested in demonstrations at Greenham Common Air Force Base”. I kid you not. That is the evidence Demos cites of the baby boomers’ “distinguished track record of political activism”.

There was setting up the NHS after the war, I’ll grant you. But that hardly compares with moral courage involved in reforming the divorce laws or prescribing the Pill.

And there was the introduction of the welfare state. But what a trifling achievement that was compared with “demonstrating against war in Afghanistan and Iraq”. Demonstrating against war takes real guts. How limp those older generations were, molly-coddled in their trenches.

Forget, if you can, just how offensive this drivel really is, how little understanding of history, politics and basic economics it shows, and how patronising it is to pensioners who lived through times of struggle of which the Demos writers seem to be wholly unaware. It does nonetheless merit reading, if only as a classic demonstration of the self-obsessed, innumerate, smug, illiterate mush which passes among some apparently influential think-tanks as a worthwhile exercise.

It is axiomatic that the more jargon-dependent a proposition is, the more worthless the idea. On that calculation, The New Old actually detracts from the sum of human knowledge. Demos proposes that we “harness elderpreneurship”, “build new forms of mutual and public support around the beanpole family”, and . . . OK, I’ll stop.

The problem posed by a rapidly ageing population is easy to understand. The older we get, the more dependent we are on others, whether it is for pensions, health- care or other forms of support. Yet because we are living longer, the proportion of those in work relative to those drawing their pensions is changing, with an ever smaller percentage of the population working and paying taxes to support those who are not.

The long-term answer — given the continual shrinking of the tax base — is to switch from a tax-based system, which is based on the generation in work paying for the upkeep of the generation which has retired, to one where people save and invest their own money, over their working lives, to fund their own retirement.

It’s really that simple. And it has nothing to do with elderpreneurship or marching against the Iraq war.
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