View from the Street: I’m paying your winter fuel allowance. What will my generation even get for it?

Finlay Whiteford (21)

Researcher

I’ll be honest with you: I’m bored of hearing about a crisis.

The term used to hold currency in the news; given by journalists to the highest priorities we had as a society. But having grown up through the financial crisis, then Brexit, a pandemic and a cost-of-living crisis – my peers and I have had quite enough.

That’s not to say there aren’t good reasons to declare one anymore. But when every policy issue is framed as a clickbait-y life-or-death emergency, we lose sight of the real issues in our collective future. Our politicians are drawn like moths to attractive narratives of protection, aiming to heroically save the fragile and frail from hard realities.

We all saw this clearly with the defining policy of the Starmer government’s first year: means-testing the Brown-era winter fuel allowance. No matter whether you had even heard of it, or found it in your bank statements before (perhaps accidentally), this obscure handout has come to symbolise the tyrannical grip of elderly voters and interests on governance now and in the future. The ‘crisis’ at hand? At best, the equivalent of 82p a day for every pensioner in the country – some 40% of those eligible never even claimed it last year.

For Starmer, U-turning to keep winter fuel payments will win back a sizeable white-haired electorate; the same generation that decries young people being handed everything on a plate, who blame our lack of housing and employment prospects not on their choices, but on our lattes and avocado toasts. My generation are supposedly all woke snowflakes, who have initiated a period of national decline – but yet we now have to continue paying for handouts the government itself believes is unnecessary.

By the way they talk, you’d think my parents’ generation had gone through war and left the country in a better state than they found it. We used to be a country that built stately homes, with a robust economy and state-of-the-art education. Instead, my generation will gaze upon our inheritance and despair: Cumbernauld town centre, weird supermarkets with clocktowers, and uniformly beige housing estates.

As a bonus, we also inherit a £300 billion house of cards in the form of an overburdened welfare system. The more we delay its long-needed but deeply unpopular reforms – triple-locked state pensions and nicey-nicey handouts – the harder it will be for my generation to continue financing it. By the time I reach state pension age in 2070, pension spending will have tripled as a proportion of GDP. Place your bets now as to whether I’ll get a winter fuel allowance.

I’m hesitant to use the term crisis here. But without some purposeful long-term ideas, our national future looks increasingly bleak. If we just follow the political sentiments of today’s older voters – reducing net migration to zero and prioritising pensions – we risk doing so at the cost of my future. Without migration, we stand to lose millions of people who could pay my pension or help raise my children – where is the compassion to my older self?

Done well, some long-term thinking could be our saviour. Norway already future-proofed its economy by investing its oil revenues over 30 years ago, and its children will use that long-term investment for an easy 20% of their future budgets. Instead, our national attitude was to spend our oil money right as we got it, and block any benefit to our next generations. We cannot make those mistakes again and be distracted by in-your-face gripes.

The lessons for us right now are simple: that compassionate politics only goes so far when it’s rooted in the present. When we get caught up in the crisis du jour and the next electoral cycle, we pretend that we can all have our cake and eat it too. That somehow, we can cater to the old and reduce migration while dodging the incoming consequences from our rapidly ageing society. When even the smallest of reforms become impossible, we set tomorrow’s children up for disaster.

Political compassion needs limits, guided by long-term benefit instead of short-term electoral prospects or bolting after yesterday’s headline. Though democratic and financial realities are increasingly weighted against them, the young people of tomorrow will thank you.

Finlay Whiteford is a researcher at Charlotte Street Partners, and a recent graduate in geography from the University of Glasgow. You can contact him at finlay.whiteford@charlottestreetpartners.com.