Neil Boorman - It’s All Their Fault

THAT TIME IS NOW

Every generation has to struggle for something that it believes in – democracy, equal rights – but ours is nothing to do with race or class. It’s going to be a fight between a debt-ridden minority of young adults and a glut of needy pensioners, who squandered the money they should have saved to support themselves and who will be supported by the working young.

Luckily, they have presented us with one big opportunity to make a change before the time bomb goes off.

There isn’t much that we can do to fix the car crashes that our parents made in the past; it’s a patch-up job at best. But we can prevent them from making any more in the future. The government has called a general election for 6 May this year. This is our one big opportunity to kick the Baby Boomers out of power before the future gets any worse.

To find out who’s standing in your local area, how old they are and what they stand for, visit www.itsalltheirfault.com.

We’ve never been very good at turning up to the election box. After all, what’s the point of voting for people who lie as a matter of routine and break almost every election pledge that they make? And thanks to the expenses scandal, we know that they’ve been fiddling money out of the system for years. You’d be forgiven for thinking that politicians are all in it for themselves, and you’d be right; after all 70 per cent of MPs currently sitting in Parliament are Boomers. But that’s okay; we won’t be voting for them in any case.

There are plenty of alternatives standing in the general election. The following non-Boomer candidates could be a taste of things to come, if we get our act together and vote:

X SAFE AS HOUSES

Sarah Teather, 35, MP For Brent East

http://bit.ly/SarahTeather

The youngest front-bencher in Parliament, Sarah was named one of the saints of the MPs’ expenses scandal. She was eligible to claim tens of thousands of pounds in expenses, but chose not to. As the Shadow Housing Minister, she wants to bring the housing market back down to earth. ‘For many, the dream of owning your own home is as far away as ever…Across the country 800,000 properties lie empty…Why can’t some of these empty state-owned homes be offered cheaply to first-time buyers who are willing to put in the work to bring them up to scratch?’

X YOUTH PIONEER

Rushanara Ali, 35. Standing in Bethnal Green & Bow

www.rushanaraali.org

Dubbed one of the most powerful Muslim women in the UK, Rushanara Ali is fighting for a seat in Parliament on the youth vote. ‘The boards of…public institutions that control billions of pounds of public money are…dominated by middle-class, middle-aged white men. It is little wonder that many people, especially the young, feel disconnected from those that hold power and make decisions that affect their lives.’ She’s pledged to bring 19- to 25-year-olds into politics. ‘The time is ripe,’ she says, ‘to help them take up positions of power.’

X VOICE OF REASON

Vince Cable, 67, MP for Twickenham

www.vincentcable.org.uk

In a parallel universe, Vince Cable is Prime Minister and a new world order is engulfing the idiocracy. He frequently warned that the economy was overdependent on cheap personal debt and an overvalued pound, long before the Credit Crunch kicked off. When the banks collapsed, he pushed for them to be nationalized rather than bailed out. And when the greedy RBS board threatened to walk over their £1.5 billion bonuses, Vince called their bluff and urged them to go. And he emerged as the cleanest senior MP in the expenses scandal.

X FEE SCRAPPER

Greg Mulholland, 39, MP for Leeds North West

www.gregmulholland.org

He campaigns to scrap student tuition fees. He fights against the sell-off and development of green belt land. He lobbies for the reinstatement of NHS dentists. And he’s marched against the war in Iraq. If there’s a reason why he’s not more famous, it’s because he’s too busy doing his job to organize any PR.

X SELF-LOATHING BOOMER

David Willetts, 54, MP for Havant

www.davidwilletts.co.uk

If there’s one single Boomer worth voting for, it’s Willetts who, on the basis of his speeches, could have written this book himself. ‘If our political, economic and cultural leaders do not begin to discharge their obligations to the future, the young people of today will be taxed more, work longer hours for less money, have lower social mobility and live in a degraded environment in order to pay for their parents’ quality of life.’ Amen to that.

Consider this book a manifesto and a call to action; a chance for those born in the Seventies and Eighties to respond to the chaos caused by those born in the Forties and Fifties. We are the generation that has to clear up their mess. This manifesto will explain why, and more importantly how.

Is it fair to say that every member of a generation behaves in the exact same way? No.Is it fair to say that a generation of people share certain characteristics? Yes.Each generation has a collective personality, which is shaped by the events of the time. For us, 9/11, the Credit Crunch and global warming defines who we are. For the Baby Boomers it was the post-war boom, which brought an explosion in population, unparalleled economic growth and a sea change in the way children were brought up.

Boomers are easy to identify. As of their birthday in 2010, they’ll be aged between 46 & 64.

The demographic model of the UK population looks like the side profile of your average middle-aged man: skinny chest and legs, and a great big sagging belly and arse in the middle. The skinny upper torso is the ‘Silent Generation’, in other words our grandparents, who were born before 1946. The skinny legs at the bottom are Generation Debt, born after 1964. The great big muffin top in the middle is the Baby Boomer generation, a population explosion that followed the Second World War.

The outbreak of peace in 1945 brought a tidal wave of euphoria to our grandparents, millions of whom returned home from the war to start new families. In the early Fifties, the majority of young suburban wives fell pregnant, which resulted in a sharp rise in births during the post-war years – the Baby Boom. By the end of the Boom in 1964, a whopping 11 million babies had been born.

You might think that we could have benefited equally, but with the advent of the Pill, birth control was so cheap, easy and effective that millions of Boomers put off having children until much later. This explains why our generation is so small in comparison.

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