Boomers Are Not Okay

For more than two decades, the Conservative politician David Willetts was the member of Parliament representing Havant, a cozy middle-class town in southern England. He dealt with the usual problems: traffic in the town center, littering along the seafront.

After the 2007 financial crash, though, he noticed something alarming. He was regularly visited by young couples—the man might be a nurse, his partner might be a cashier at the local supermarket—who worked hard and lived frugally, yet found themselves “camping in the spare room of his parents’ house, with a baby in a box at the bottom of the bed, and they couldn’t see how they would ever get anywhere to live.” Often, Willetts would give them whatever help he could—very little—and then head over to a local residents’ association meeting, where he would talk to “completely decent people” in their 50s and 60s who owned their own home but wanted no further houses to be built in their neighborhood.

Willetts had stumbled onto in 2016 and in 2017; their Millennial children voted Remain and Labour. The single biggest error that Theresa May, the prime minister in the lead-up to the 2017 election, made during that process was to float the idea that older people might have to contribute more to the spiraling costs of their own retirement care. The “dementia tax” prompted an immediate, ferocious response, and .