Book review: The Pinch

Published on Friday 26 February 2010 18:50

THE PINCH by David Willetts Atlantic, 288pp, £18.99

DAVID Willetts is stuck with the nickname "Two Brains" and this thoughtful book will do nothing to shed it. For the Tory MP for Havant and shadow minister for universities and skills constructs a clever and original argument, marshalling vast amounts of research data and policy wonkery.

Yet his "Two Brains" tag has always carried the sense of being "too clever by half", of never having acquired the instinctive political skills needed in the Westminster bear pit. His career has foundered. Here he offers few concrete solutions, and inadvertently exposes the flimsiness of some of his own party's policies.

Willetts's basic argument is that the UK's baby boomers, those born in the bulge of 1947-1965, have been greedy, robbing younger generations of future and present wealth. Add in the boomers' greatly increased life expectancy and you have a vast, looming pensions crisis. The resulting breakdown of the inter-generational contract is causing mighty problems and threatens even greater ones.

He sets out how the baby boom and a roaring economy had a series of unexpected consequences. It was not Sixties liberalism, he believes, but the surge in earlier marriages, caused by there being "more young men in good jobs than at any time in the 20th century", that set up the explosion in family breakdowns of the 1970s and 1980s.

The boomers then "converted a once-off surge in asset prices into higher income by borrowing against them" so that, despite the recession, the young are shut out of the housing market. Thus – in a typically arresting insight – he observes that while we think of modern twentysomething life as very fast, in fact their transition into adulthood is slower than ever, held back by lack of affordable houses or secure jobs.

Willetts's wider achievement is to re-imagine policy not as politicians usually do – across society – but vertically, across generations. This works at the level of the family, for him the crucial unit and microcosm of the wider society. But the mechanism operates across whole generations too – for example, in their environmental responsibilities. It is a new way of thinking about fairness and responsibility through the family prism in which most of us actually understand our lives.

Yet Willetts is thin on solutions. The family may well be the key but its contemporary woes are hardly addressed by the Conservatives' gimmicky and vague promise to reward marriage through the tax system. The pensions crisis? No solutions at all. The house-price bubble? Ditto: pricking that isn't going to feature in any Tory manifesto.

He acknowledges the political and economic power of the boomers without offering a clear idea of how to persuade them to reach out to younger generations. But the urgency of their doing so emerges clearly from this important book.