Here's a little conundrum for you to chew
over: it's estimated that over the next decade, there'll be something like 13.5
million job vacancies in the UK, but only 7 million young people will be
leaving full-time education. So who's going to fill those jobs?
Don't say immigrants, because the
government says it wants to reduce net immigration to fewer than 100,000 a
year. So how about that much-maligned section of the population, the
baby-boomers, those of us born in the immediate post-war years and now
gracefully sliding towards, well, what exactly?
According to an article in the Financial Times this week, for the first time there are now more than a million over-65s
still working in the UK. The number has doubled in the past 20 years and is
likely to keep on rising. Yes, there are more of us, and we're healthier and
living longer. What's more, many of us need the cash.
In Japan, the problem is far more acute,
because there, the birth rate is falling dramatically while life expectancy is
sharply increasing. Not enough young people, too many old people -- it's not a
recipe for a healthy society or a healthy economy.
At least here in Britain, we're still
having lots of babies. (Well, when I say "we", I don't mean us baby
boomers, obviously …) In fact, the UK birth rate is currently among the highest
in Europe (an average of 1.93 births per woman of child-bearing age), in part
because of higher birth rates among migrants who tend to be younger than the
indigenous population.
Now, your attitude to all this will depend
on how old you are, how rich you are, and how much you enjoy your job, assuming
you have one. You can't be forced any more to retire when you reach 65, and
that's one reason why the numbers of oldies in work are rising. The retailers
B&Q are well-known for encouraging job applications from older people, but
apparently even McDonald's now have more than 1,000 employees over the age of
60.
Baby boomers get a bad press these days:
we're the 60s generation, pot-smoking, sex-obsessed, flower-waving hippies who
never had to fight a war or struggle for a job. The year I was born, 1948, is
said to be the luckiest year ever to be born in: we were delivered by the
newly-established NHS, we were never called up to serve in the armed forces,
and if we were fortunate, we got onto the housing ladder at the start of a
30-year-long boom in property prices.
Those of us lucky enough to go to university
(about 5 per cent of school-leavers in the 1960s, compared to more than 40 per
cent now) received a government grant -- and yes, it's true, we went around
quoting William Wordsworth every single day: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be
alive/But to be young was very heaven.”
Two years ago, the cerebral government
minister David Willetts (born 1956, and therefore himself a boomer) wrote a
book provocatively titled: "How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's
Future - And Why They Should Give it Back." His argument -- and I simplify
somewhat -- was that we risk leaving to our children a world in which they are
taxed more than we were, work longer hours for less money than we did, and live
in a degraded environment thanks to our love for central heating, fuel-hungry
motor cars and anything that runs on oil.
OK, guilty as charged -- up to a point. But
I'm not sure that we boomers can fairly be blamed for all the sins of our age;
after all, the world in which we grew up, the 50s, 60s and 70s, was a world
that had been created by our elders. True, we benefited from it, but we didn't
make it.
What we were guity of was a belief that we
could have it all, for ever, at no cost. The hippies among us believed (or
wanted to believe, which isn't necessarily the same thing) that if we all made
love, not war, the world would become a perfect place. Life would be good,
would always be good, and could never be bad. We know better now.
We also know that the country may still
need our labour for a few more years.
So perhaps we can attone for our past sins -- if sinners we were -- by
working till we drop. Last night, I was honoured to receive an award in memory
of the late BBC broadcaster Charles Wheeler, who remained a hard-working
reporter until he was well into his 80s. For that reason, among many others, he
will always be my hero.
thank you for addressing me as your friend, and we were born in the same year. I do not know anyone who smoked pot or anything else, and certainly did not 'make love nor war'. I had a 10.00pm curfew whatever I was doing, "you must be home before the pubs shut".
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