I wash my hands of the entire rotten lot of them. The Conservative party needs to be obliterated – its become nothing more than a playground area for cynical, opportunitist medicroties who simply pretend to care about conservative values in order to win power.

How many more times will people fall for this demeaning scam?

I would strongly advise any former Tory voters to consider where it is possible voting for the SDP. Even if one is skeptical of their economic positioning (I’m not particularly) they at least put conservative values first and foremost, and have a genuinely intelligent and astute leader in William Clouston.

Obviously with our current system even a million votes won’t translate to any power, but from my perspective simply continuing to lend support to the Tory charlatans is to ensure no other possible option than Blairte rule for eternity and a continuing sinking of the country and certain transformation of Britain into a metropolitan hellscape unrecognisable from the nation I once loved.

How can the writer not see that it is mass immigration, not British pensioners, that is his enemy?

Import 500k new people every year and you need 700k new houses to accommodate them and the normal British first time buyers. That is why houses cost so much.

The Tories should limit immigration – all immigration, not nett, not legal, all – to less than 100k a year.

Then they would be a One Nation party.

A very modest semi detached house in an outer borough of London, in which a pensioner may have lived most of their adult life, is unlikely to be worth less than £600k. A tax 0.5% of the current value of the property is £3k per annum. For most pensioners that is a great deal of money. If they sell the now unaffordable property to buy a cheaper one elsewhere, HMRC will collect another £17,500 in stamp duty on the sale which that pensioner will never see. They then pay stamp duty and presumably property tax on their new property. If Mr. Jeffrey has his way, they are now also exposed to the risk that the residual cash pile they never asked for will result in them losing their now means tested pension. Rising property prices are not the fault of the current generation of pensioners. They are due mainly to negative real interest rates over the past decade and a half. Intergenerational conflict is better dealt with through policies to grow the real economy, and improve productivity, rather than by devising ways of taxing and terrifying the elderly. Perhaps the government could start by defunding the more useless university degrees, and promoting the training of young people in the skills actually required by the economy.

Wow my pension’s going up by 10%, a full £18.50 a week. Think I’ll go to Barbados.

Let’s be clear about something else. The current generation of pensioners are people who know about inflation, having lived through it. They know about the futility of saving cash.

They are people who in large numbers, made a fairly straightforward decision which was theirs to make; that investing in a house was a good investment. It would always be worth the current price of a house, after all. People always need houses, don’t they; it would provide them with somewhere to live, theirs in perpetuity and the prospect of a rent free old age, or an inflation proofed savings sum.

They were not greedy. They were not racist bigots. They were certainly not engaging in some sort of ideologically motivated, orchestrated wickedness, as is so commonly claimed today. They were ordinary working people of limited means, doing the best they could for themselves and those they cared about.

Let’s be quite clear about something. The State Pension is between £160 and £200 per week. Typically around £360 for a married couple.

The howling and bawling about “percentage increases” are designed to obscure the fact that they are percentages of a very small sum.

If anyone thinks these are generous sums to live on, they are welcome to try.

What absolute dross. The way to eliminate “intergenerational unfairness” and control the rental market is to provide an option – to build credible social housing on a credible scale, and control its letting at affordable rates to suitable applicants. This DOESNT mean immigrants, who should wait their turn like everyone else with NO housing benefit in the meanwhile.

Subletting should be ruthlessly clamped down upon, with both tenant and sub-tenant evicted and sent firmly to the end of the waiting list and left there. Any tenant found subletting without being resident themselves, should be disqualified from future social housing of any description whatsoever.

This all avoids a crucial feature of the post-WW2 social consensus, specifically that social homogeneity would be preserved.

The post-War generation didn’t expect these benefits simply for themselves, but for their heirs and successors in perpetuity. The post-War “boomer” would be born into a land of orange juice, vaccination and social housing. They would be educated at the expense of the State.

Their parents would bear the cost of their upbringing from their wages. In due course, those “boomers” would earn wages, pay taxes to support their parents in turn.

Opening the doors to unlimited incomers who would benefit without ever contributing was no part of that vision. Nor was institutionalised mass unemployment, underemployment and wage erosion.

Until the late 1960s this held good. The electorate managed to impose upon the political elite, their belief in immigration control which held good until the collapse if two-party politics in 1997.

If only the current PM had the courage and honesty to lay all this out before his MPs, his party and the country. He has a 2 year window in which to win the argument and reset the national agenda. It could be done (although arguably the biggest block to real change are his own MPs and the House of Commons as a whole). If he proposed a radical programme – planning reform and house building, fair allocation of resources between young and old, wealth, property and land taxes vs simple income tax, a serious attempt to make us self sufficient in energy and food (not the lunacy of Net Zero) – and spoke over the heads of his MPs and party members, to the country as a whole, I think he might be heard. Whether the parliamentary opposition would listen and offer support is an open question. But the country might, despite the huge trust deficit politicians as a class have built up over the last 25 years.

Come to think of it when was the Conservative Party any good? In the last hundred years or more only twice. Once in a War when a romantic party switch hing maverick luckily took charge of it and second in the 1970s when another inspired maverick shook it up no end – and much to the discomfort of the old guard . But it soon reverted to the pretty useless, muddled, self serving bunch of under performers it has ever been over the last century and more. Sadly the only real alternative over that same period has been even worse.

We spend more on pensions because of the sheer quantity of pensioners and today’s longevity. Pensioners are among the poorest groups in society. You try living on around £600 a MONTH. The young don’t have a worse standard of living than their parents and grandparents. They have more of everything – except home ownership. They don’t actually work as hard. Half of them don’t start work or paying tax until 22 compared with 18 or even 16 in the recent past. It’s not a stretch.or ‘unfair’ to expect them to retire later. Famous are going to inherit property wealth and are already subbed by older family members.

There aren’t actually that many of these so-called NIMBYs (5%) – and are they wrong? What’s the point of putting large housing developments in pockets of the countryside where singles and young families can’t find work or services. The young want to live in trendy urban disticts or neighbourhoods which took their grandparents a lifetime to acquire.

I agree that students loans should be low interest.

I have travelled a lot and every country was a “two-nation” as described. Can anyone suggest a genuine one-nation country in the world?

There is a divide between rich and poor. Scrabbling around to find a divide between old & young gives a false & unhelpful picture. Most employed young people are on very good incomes. Many older people live in squalid conditions in dire need. Can no longer work. Struggle to find care when physically or mentally incapacitated. Benefits for younger recipients should have kept pace with cost of living. The fact that they have not is not due to the old. They should not be set up as a punching bag for Gov decisions.

What should also worry the Tories at this point is that someone like me, who has always voted Tory and am now in middle-age with housing equity, pension savings and a reasonably good income, is also not going to vote Tory next time.

Someone like me cares deeply that younger people can’t get on the housing ladder and not out of pure altruism either. I’ve been saying for years that unless we get more houses built and restore affordability for the majority, the older generations will simply lose their housing wealth to new and rapacious taxes. I don’t want that to happen to me, so I will support a form of politics that crushes the NIMBY vote and gets land into development, even if it means the view from my window containing JCBs and mud instead of fields and trees.

Older people have got to get this into their heads: they can’t just keep their massively overpriced houses: they either get out of the way of planning reform or they end up selling their homes to pay wealth taxes. In due course we’ll see which choice is made, and at that point I recommend zero sympathy for anyone who complains that they couldn’t just keep the status quo.

The current pensioners, as a cohort (individual being unique and having each their own personal case) have been reaping insane money from this house price inflation.
Money that is taken from, as a cohort, the young workers.
Pensioners got cheap housing, home equity appreciation, triple lock pensions, cheap service employee (as immigration supresses wages) and state provided medical care (which elderly people disproportionately consume).
Young workers get supressed wages (through immigration), insane housing prices, inflation (they don’t have triple lock on wage, neither do they have job security). UK has expensive universities, expensive child care, but free NHS service.
Boomers are waging generational warfare