We baby boomers are reaping what we have sown

ADECLARATION of interest. I am a fully paid-up member of the baby boomer generation. Once I might have agreed with Pete Townshend in hoping “I die before I get old”. However, like Townshend, many of us have survived into our eighth decade. That presents a challenge for the generation that along with Freddie Mercury, wanted it all and wanted it now.

Talking about my generation, we were the ones who did get it all and by heavens, we intend to keep it. If anyone finds a way to take it with us, it will be one of us. We have had infinitely better lives than our parents. In general, we have little experience of grinding poverty and its accompanying diseases. The dangers and hardship of war largely passed us by. We were nurtured by the cod liver oil, orange juice and milk of the post-war welfare state. It educated us and paid many to go to university. It even provided my family with a roof over our heads.

Nothing wrong with that of course, but it created a sense of entitlement and egocentrism. As we have aged and moved into retirement, further benefits have been grasped. Soaring house values, final salary and index-linked pensions, free prescriptions, heating allowances, bus passes to name a few. If we can’t take it with us, our financial advisers and accountants will make sure the Revenue claws back as little as possible. After all, what has the welfare state ever done for us?

Our crisis-free existence enabled us to develop and live in ways markedly different from our parents. Many of them grew up in extended families within which different generations lived cheek by jowl. Looking after grandma and grandpa was another of life’s obligations. Not for the boomers it wasn’t. For many, the responsibility was passed to third parties as soon as possible. They’re someone else’s responsibility, not ours.

Ironically, most baby boomers haven’t died before they got old. Instead we have become the grandma and grandpa whom politicians wonder what to do with. The Scottish Government currently spends more than £5 billion a year on health and social care for the over-65s. As the proportion of working age Scots declines, we desperately require a strategy to meet the soaring cost of care for the elderly.

As American blogger Dana

Larsen has pointed out, this is not an issue unique to the UK and the United States. It is estimated that by 2050 nearly half of China’s population, 636 million people, will be over 50. The Chinese government accepts the impossibility of state provision for that number of people. China’s salvation however, might lie in their culture that values the experience and knowledge of the elderly. The Chinese have gone as far as enacting an Elderly Rights

Law based on the Confucian concept of filial piety. Elders can sue children who do not see to their needs. While we are familiar with the idea of maternity and paternity leave, the Chinese have gone a step further by allowing children time off from work to care for elderly parents.

In Japan there is a commitment to ensure no elderly person is “left behind”. It is commonplace for several generations to live under the same roof. In Vietnam it is often the elders who make decisions for the family group.

In Scotland the norm is for the elderly to be cared for outside the family, particularly if unable to live independently. More than half of the Scottish Government’s care budget goes on hospital care and other forms of long-stay care. In the long term that is unsustainable.

The Scottish Government’s strategy as set out in Reshaping

Care for Older People is based on three key principles of personalisation, independence and control over decision making. The target for 2022 is to rebalance care for the elderly in the direction of preventative and community-based services. The strategy and its intentions are commendable but has little to say on families’ responsibilities in caring for older members. Care, fully delegated to council and private providers is cripplingly expensive and lies at the heart of the impending crisis for the boomer generation.

The burning question is whether our children have the time, resources or indeed the inclination to adopt the patterns of care commonplace in other cultures. Many will believe, justifiably, that they are already so hard pressed they are unable to assume additional responsibility. We shouldn’t underestimate the growing resentment amongst the young regarding the perceived feather-bedding of older people.

We baby boomers should not hold our breath for a Scottish Elderly Rights Law. The uncomfortable truth is, we are reaping what we have sown.

As the proportion of working age Scots declines, we desperately require a strategy to meet the soaring cost of care for the elderly