Dr Peter Moore: Baby boomers weren't quite the spoilt generation

I apologise. I’m one of those awful baby boomers born after the Second World War between 1946 and 1964.

It was our generation who ruined the environment while getting cheap houses and having free university education.

Now we want to pull up the drawbridge so that today’s younger generation, Generation Z, cannot buy a house but spend the rest of their lives paying for the education which we got for free.

I have some sympathy. A graduate on £51,000 a year will pay 51 per cent tax if we include 40 per cent higher rate tax, two per cent national insurance and nine per cent student loan. This is higher than a baby boomer on more than £150,000.

To make the situation worse house prices are high but, if they cannot afford the deposit or a mortgage, rents are also high.

Now we’ve left the EU there is no longer the option of working in Europe for a few years as The Beatles did in Hamburg.

A recent poll showed that only nine per cent of young people were enthusiastic about their job. And anyone who was a student over the last two years had to cope with the Covid lockdowns and online university education without the social life of a student.

It is not surprising that they look enviously at us old geriatrics.

There are over three million over-65s who have a property and assets worth over £1million although my house is not worth £1million. Perhaps I should have bought in the South East.

I accept that my generation were lucky. My parents fought and lost friends and family in the Second World War and my grandparents fought and lost friends and family in the First World War.

Straight out of university at the age of 25, my father was leading a convoy across France to Dunkirk before fighting in Burma.

But sometimes Generation Z’s caricature of our easy life is not entirely accurate.

I do not want to start an argument over who had the toughest time like Monty Python’s Yorkshiremen, but I would like to point out a home few truths.

In 1969, when I started college, only six per cent of school leavers went to university. If we include polytechnics and teacher training colleges, which are now universities, the figure is 14 per cent.

Although I am grateful for my free education, the majority of the nearly 50 per cent of students who go to university today would not have got in.

Higher education was a privilege for a small elite. This does not mean that Generation Z have less ability than my generation but does create a genuine problem for Government, how to pay.

We also struggled to buy our first house. I have just found a pay slip for when I was a hospital doctor in 1977.

As an SHO, three years after qualifying, I was earning £2,859 a year, which included nights and weekends, working a 120-hour week. By today’s money that is under £20,000.

When I joined my first GP practice at the age of 30 I earned £7,500 a year including nights on call, which is just over £35,000 today.

I did face major financial difficulties in the late 1980s when my mortgage interest rate went up to 17 per cent. I had negative equity in both my home and my surgery building.

But is my generation also guilty of creating climate change? Generation Z will have to live with the consequences far longer than us baby boomers.

In hindsight, we might be responsible but I cannot feel too guilty for something I knew nothing about.

Before anyone shouts that we should have known the first UN environment conference in 1972 discussed chemical pollution, atomic bomb testing and whaling but hardly mentioned climate change.

We must support Generation Z who are the future. It is a credit to their generation that they have not rioted as us baby boomers did over the Vietnam War.

It is not fair to ensure that our generation have protected inflation-proof pensions while Generation Z struggle but we weren’t quite the spoilt generation that is sometimes portrayed.