Iain McWhirter

Young Scotland to Power!

Politcal columnist tuned YouScotland.com guest blogger Iain McWhirter wonders when young people are going to start the fightback.

What We Really Need is a Scottish Younger Citizens Unity Party....Grey power is on the march in the Scottish election, with the Scottish Senior Citizens Unity Party fielding a range of candidates across Scotland like former Glasgow provost Pat Lally.   Good on them,  you might say - pensioners have had a raw deal in the past, the state pension is a disgrace, and too many are living in poverty.But hang about. A lot of them aren't actually living in poverty.  Quite the reverse:  80% of the wealth in this country is now held by people over t he  age of 50. 

The present generation of older people is the richest in history, largely because they have enjoyed a quarter of a century of house price increases, index linked occupational pensions and measures like free personal care, free travel, free prescriptions and a whole range of tax breaks.  The truth is that the over fifties have never had it so good.

Contrast the situation facing younger people today. The under thirties have the burden of five figure student debt, unlike their parents who had free higher education.  They face the near impossibility of buying a house because wealthy older people, with no children, are sitting tight in their investments to take advantage of untaxed capital gains.   What's worse, older people have bought up all the flats as buy-to-let investments to boost their pension portfolios, meaning that prices and rents keep rising.

The average age of a first time buyer in Scotland is now 37.  It's hardly surprisng that six out of ten young men in Britain still stay in the family home. The result is a generation of "kidults" - young adults who are still tied to their parents long after they should be living independent lives and starting families of their own. Forty percent of women are single at the age of 35. No wonder Scotland has a population problem.

We are supposed to be a youth-obsessed ageist society, so  how has this happened?  Well to some extent it's a numbers game.  The baby boom generation, of people born after the Second World War, has moved through life dominating every era it touches - from the "my generation" Sixties to the "greed is good" Eighties and on to the "have-it-all"  Noughties.  There are just so many of them, that people under the age of thirty have fallen below the political radar.Moreover, people over the age of fifty are twice as likely to vote in elections. 

That's why some politicians are so eager to scrap council tax, which hits wealthy older people living in big houses and places the burden on the incomes of young families starting out on the housing ladder.  The  SNP and the Liberal Democrats say that it is unfair that pensioners living in large houses should have to pay large property taxes.  But there is one solution:  they could sell their houses to families who need the space, and downsize.

One reason property is so expensive is that older people have a monopoly of it and they won't let go. Take Bearsden in Glasgow.  This used to be a prime family suburb, somewhere to raise children in safety and space.  Now it is almost exclusively the preserve of older people living in large houses they don't need. There is no incentive for them to vacate because their houses are such good earners, increasing in value by far more each year than the average wage.  Property is the one form of asset wealth that is exempt from wealth taxes. Now the parties are wanting to make it even easier for them by exempting houses from local taxation altogether.

This is an abomination. A great injustice is being perpetrated here.  What we really need is a a Scottish Young Persons Unity Party, to combat inequality in the treatment of younger adults.   In the past, we had class inequality, then gender inequality, but the great divide today is a generational one. So why don't we hear the voice of youth protest any more?  Well, unfortunately this generation of under thirties somehow failed to learn the habits of dissent and protest that their parents developed to such effect.  Somehow, it didn't cross the generational divide. Yet, if the older of people today had faced the kind of economic discrimination that is being suffered by their children, they'd never have stood for it.  They would have  been out on the streets before you could say "Maggie Maggie Maggie, Out Out Out" .  There would've  been marches through the suburbs, house occupations, pickets of estate agents. Demands for a mass programme of house building, higher taxes on unearned income, and end to student debt.

So, young people of Scotland here is your opportunity. There is an election going on.  Get involved, make a noise, register to vote, alert your friends, lobby your MSPs.  I can assure you that the media would love it because young people are, well, young and attractive, fashionable and colourful.  Here is a chance to make your mark on society.  Kick out the jams, people - just like Mum and Dad did.

Comments

[Vronsky]

Unique among McWhirter pieces, this is excellent, requiring only one small tweak to make perfect sense. Do a global replace of 'old' with 'rich'. See?

[Bill Jamieson]

Oh, what a wonderful piece of polemic this is! The only phrases missing were "And another thing..." and "I don't believe it!" .

Well, tempting as it is to be swept along by the gale of this rhetoric, I must resist, and for these reasons:

1. Of course older people have acquired more assets. They have spent a lifetime working, saving and paying off a mortgage. Or are these assets, acquired out of after tax income, to be taxed away from them?

2. Many older people are asset rich but cash poor. Many do 'trade down' from family homes to smaller ones. Others prefer to keep the family home so that the family can stay when they visit. Is that so wrong?

3. Most pensioners are not cash rich. After a life time of paying tax - that's income tax, capital gains tax, council tax, VAT, excise duty, Stamp Duty, Fuel Duty, National Insurance and the plethora of other taxes that governments have introduced,is it not fair that at retirement people get a tax break?

4. Many people now in "retirement" have to continue working - in fact the post reirement age group is now the fastest growing sector of the working population by age. More than one million people who have passed retirement age are still "in work". If life is such a paradise of abundance for older people, why is this so?

5. National insurance, to which most of us contribute through our working lives, is supposed to be a fund that finances retirement and sick benefits. There is no such fund. Governments have used and abused it for all sorts of expenditure.

6. Gordon Brown has raided the pension funds of savers to the tune of £5 billion a year. Is it any wonder there is pension poverty?

7. State pensions have not kept pace with earnings, and so pensioners need help with items such as winter fuel allowance and 'free' transport (provided out of the council tax they have paid over a lifetime).

8. Housing shortgage is not the fault of the oldies but local authorities who do not release sufficient land for new building. And building regulations and planning bureaucracy have played a big part in driving up the cost of housebuilding. Don't stigmatise older people.

9. I will take Mc Whirter's diatribe more seriously when it is signed off from the Bluebell Caravan Trailer Park, Lochgelly, having sold his house and given away his possessions to the deserving young.

10. Ps. Let me know when I can come and visit him shelf stacking at Dobbies.

Yours ever,

Bill
"Still Game"

[Mary M]

My husband and I are pensioners living in a 4 bedroomed house which is worth approx £210 000. A similar house in the nearest town would fetch £350 000 so the down sizing option might be a possibility for some people but not for us. Bungalows and small cottages (which are in short supply) are changing hands for far more than the value of our house. We would love to move from our current village situation but by the time we have allowed for solicitors fees, stamp duty and removal expenses we might find we cannot find a home we can afford. Our current Council Tax of £1800 takes almost two months of my husband's work pension. It does mean we have to think very carefully about having a holiday and we do worry very much about replacing our car. We have not and will not have any inherited wealth.

[Mary M]

And another thing. Mr MrWhirter says that plans for Local Income Tax would hit young families? Why? It would be paid INSTEAD OF the Council Tax. A young family would only pay more if the parents happen to be high earners. The Council Tax is totally unfair to poorer pensioners an indeed, to all low earners.

[bacagirafffe]

We are the only (or one of the only) western democracies to have all our local taxes raised in one way. What we need is not an abolition of a 'property' type tax and a replacement with an 'income' type tax, but a combination of the 2, like other sensible countries do. And maybe a tourist bed tax too, to recognise that some localities face burdens on infrastructure that occur outwith their tax base.

And that's before we talk about gearing ratios, the geographic, social and political lunacy of current Scottish local authority boundaries, the legacy of the poll tax and the inherent problems for local democracy that this causes... You can't solve one aspect without looking at the others.

[Gettingonabit]

I am really disappointed by Iain's contribution. His writing usually reveals a research and consideration that is missing in other commentators. However, in this case he has jumped straight to blame the obvious target, the older generation living in what in many families is still regarded as 'the family home' even if younger members of the family have moved on to their own place.

The notion that Scotland is so poor that it can't provided decent housing for all its people is laughable; or it would be if the evidence wasn't all around us that over the past century that mentality has led to a waste of resources on a vast scale. Westminster has run one of the most inept successions of housing policies of any western government, with Scotland as ususal vying for bottom of the league table in terms of policy outcomes: the Blackhills, Raplochs, Easterhouses, Red Roads ..... and on and on it has gone. If these people really had been responsible to their voters would this have been allowed to drag on generation after generation? That this happened is the real evidence of Scotland's dependence mentality - and guess who were the principal beneficiaries, not the Scottish people, just Scottish Labour!

Scotland is land-rich country, with a very low population density by international standards. Yet we continue to crowd our towns and cities into high-density developments while acres of developable land sits idle and untaxed, an embedded transmission of wealth to successor generations of the clan chiefs who sold out their country for a title deed to the lands held in trust for clan members.

If you want to see the kind of housing that Scots would build if they had access to their land, look at where the scots ended up through emigration; Canada, where even the 1950's-built army veterans housing is two storey back and front door, with good space standards, Australia, New Zealand. That was the real Scotland expressing itself.

Yes, Iain, we need to address the issues raised by the new pattern of household formation. But we need to do this by providing more decent quality housing; not by making older people feel guilty for continuing to occupy the property in which they raised their families and in which they feel comfortable with their accumulated memories.

Of course, older people also disproportionately occupy bedspaces in the hospitals that their taxes helped to build and develop over the years. If they can't be taxed back to fitness, perhaps another solution is needed to free up beds; involuntary euthanasia anyone?

Apart from that Iain, keep up the good work!

[Dark Lochnagar]

As usual Iain, you are on the money. What do pensioners need with 4 bedroom houses. The problem is that they want to leave the assets for their children and therein lies the real dilemma.