I’LL TAKE MY OWN experience as an example, once again, only because it’s convenient. My grandparents were unskilled manual workers who never owned their own homes, but retired in their early sixties to be able to enjoy a few years of rest and relaxation, mostly on the Isle of Wight or Canvey Island. My parents owned their own home, had also retired by their early sixties, and between them enjoyed twenty years of rest and relaxation, during which time they travelled widely throughout the UK and Europe. My wife and I both work and are now approaching our sixties. We’ll never retire, will never pay off our mortgage – and we last took a holiday five years ago. Two of our children work in low-paid manual jobs; another has managed to fight their way on to a so-called graduate scheme that offers no guarantee of future employment. None of our children can afford to pay rent, so they’re all living with us, in our tiny downsized flat above a shop: we’re all loaded with debt and, because the cost of living is now so high, we split the bills between us; five adults, all working to maintain a single household. We live in an age of unrivalled prosperity, yet as a family, in many ways, we’re going backwards.
This is not a complaint, by the way. No one likes a whiner. It’s merely an observation, and it’s actually rather cosy, in a throwback kind of a way; urban shtetl living, circa 2024. And it is entirely possible that we’re outliers – maybe we’re just feckless and indolent. We missed the obvious opportunities: we failed to buy into crypto at the right time; we never did a buy-to-let; we should have done a podcast. Maybe so.Fine: our maladies and miseries result entirely from our insufficient efforts. Let’s assume so. The problem is, there are lots of apparently lazy and stupid people just like us, working full-time, doing our best and going nowhere fast.
In the UK we may no longer subscribe to the Whig view of history, but to quote the great Herbert Butterfield, not from The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), but from The Englishman and His History (1944), “in every Englishman there is hidden something of a Whig that seems to tug at the heartstrings”. It can tug all it likes. There is no inexorable march of progress: it’s now clear that unless you or your family have made serious money – by which I mean millions – you and your children are going to be worse off than previous generations.
Now I know, of course, that we live like kings compared to my grandparents and my parents. I remember clearing my grandfather’s possessions when he died. It didn’t take long, because everything fitted into a small suitcase, apart from a cheap mantel clock gifted to him by his employers, Bravingtons the jewellers, where he worked on the door, running diamonds from shop to shop in Hatton Garden, for the benefit of the dealers and their wealthy clientele. And my mot
