GENERATION GAMES Pt IV: PENSIONERS IN THE DOCK

In the ongoing carnival of intergenerational finger-pointing that I have, with a certain grim relish, christened Generation Games, we reach the fourth instalment. Previous rounds have seen the Millennials decry the Boomers for hoarding houses, the Zoomers lament that even a degree in grievance studies no longer guarantees a living wage, and everyone under fifty unite in the cheerful conviction that anyone drawing a state pension is essentially a fiscal vampire sucking the lifeblood from the young. Now the spotlight swings once more onto the pensioners themselves, those silver-haired relics who, according to the latest bout of synthetic outrage, are not merely comfortable but positively plutocratic. 

Twenty-five per cent of them, we are solemnly informed, are millionaires. Fifty-five per cent of all welfare spending, apparently, sloshes their way. The solution, naturally, is as elegant as it is equitable: means-test the state pension, shovel a bit more towards the genuinely skint ones, and scrap the triple lock before the whole edifice collapses under the weight of all those audacious OAPs who refuse to shuffle off quietly. One can only admire the rhetorical sleight of hand. It is the sort of statistical prestidigitation that would have made a Victorian fairground conjurer blush. Take a cohort that spent fifty years paying National Insurance stamps on wages that would today barely cover a Deliveroo order, add the modest fruits of thrift and a housing market that once rewarded people for not setting fire to their own sofas, and suddenly they are recast as a cabal of Croesuses lounging in their winter fuel allowances like Roman emperors on heated marble. 

The pensioners I know – and I suspect the ones Emma from X knows too – did not “sit on their arses claiming welfare.” They clocked in at factories that have long since been turned into luxury flats for people who write think-pieces about “intergenerational fairness.” They worked Saturdays, bank holidays, and double shifts in the rain. Their idea of a luxury holiday was a week in a caravan in Skegness, not an all-inclusive fortnight in the Maldives funded by the taxpayer. They raised families on one-and-a-half incomes and still found time to pay into a system they were promised would look after them when the time came. Now the time has come, and the system is looking for someone to blame. Let us, for a moment, dispense with the polite fictions. The welfare state was never designed to be a perpetual motion machine of handouts. It was meant to be an insurance policy: you paid in during your working life, you drew out in old age, and the books balanced because the native population kept roughly the same size, worked roughly the same hours, and reproduced at a rate that didn’t require importing entire villages from abroad to keep the dependency ratio from collapsing like a poorly built tower block. 

The triple lock – that quaint mechanism linking pensions to earnings, inflation, or 2.5 per cent, whichever is highest – is not unsustainable because pensioners are greedy. It is unsustainable because the number of people drawing benefits has ballooned while the number of people paying the bills has not kept pace. And here, dear reader, we arrive at the part of the discussion that polite society prefers to conduct in whispers behind the potting shed. The real pressure on the public purse does not come from the retired steelworker in Dudley who once grafted for British Leyland and now enjoys a modest state pension and the occasional packet of Werther’s Originals. It comes from the swelling ranks of those who treat the welfare system as a lifestyle choice rather than a safety net. 

Large families – often from cultural backgrounds where having five, six, or more children is not merely a personal decision but a demographic strategy – arrive, settle, and reproduce at rates that make the native white working class look positively monastic by comparison. The native stock, that stubborn breed who once filled the shipyards and the potteries, tended to stop at two or three, send the kids to school, and hope they might one day own a semi-detached with a gnome in the front garden. Their reward, in the great cosmic joke of modern Britain, is to be lectured about “intergenerational theft” while the system quietly recalibrates itself to accommodate new client groups whose voting patterns are rather more reliably left-leaning on the question of generous benefits.

One does not need a conspiracy theorist’s tinfoil hat to notice the pattern. Politicians of a certain stripe have long understood that a shrinking, ageing native population – prudent, small-family, increasingly sceptical of open-ended welfare – makes for unreliable electoral mathematics. Far better, then, to encourage the arrival of communities whose larger households and higher fertility rates provide a ready-made constituency for the politics of redistribution. Mass immigration, legal and otherwise, has not merely added numbers; it has altered the very shape of the welfare ledger. The same system that once sustained the post-war generation now groans under the weight of extended families housed in former council semis, claiming every entitlement while the pensioners who built those houses are told they are the problem. It is rather like inviting the fox into the henhouse and then complaining that the surviving chickens are eating too much corn.

The proposed remedies – means-testing the pension, “boosting” the poorest pensioners, scrapping the triple lock – are the classic bureaucratic sleight of hand. They sound compassionate. They allow ministers to pose as champions of the deserving poor while quietly eroding the one universal benefit that still commands broad public support. But they do nothing to address the structural reality: a welfare state engineered for a homogeneous, working-class Britain of the 1950s cannot indefinitely subsidise the demographic transformation of the 2020s without someone, somewhere, picking up the tab. And that someone is increasingly the native taxpayer who has already paid his dues and now finds himself competing with newcomers for the same finite pot.

The pensioners’ crime, it seems, is not that they are rich. It is that they are inconvenient. They remember a Britain that functioned without the constant administrative wheeze of “enrichment” initiatives and integration strategies that never quite integrate. They remember when “working class” meant people who worked, not people who claimed. They remember a time when the welfare system was a backstop, not a career. In the great generational gameshow, they are the last contestants who actually read the rules before playing. The rest of us, it appears, have simply rewritten them to suit the new audience.

And so the rhetoric rolls on: pensioner hate dressed up as fiscal prudence, intergenerational envy marketed as social justice. Meanwhile, the real conversation – about numbers, about incentives, about who exactly is being replaced and why – remains firmly off-limits. One can only hope that the grey army, those stubborn veterans of low wages and high principles, continue to remind us, in their quiet, uncomplaining way, that a society which turns on those who built it has already lost the plot. The triple lock may be expensive. But the alternative – a benefits system that rewards non-contributors while punishing contributors – is not merely unsustainable. It is, in the driest and most sardonic sense, suicidal.

THE KING WHO FORGOT TO DEFEND THE FAITH

In the great British tradition of royal discretion, King Charles III has lately elevated silence to an art form. Christmas broadcasts remain de rigueur, of course—nothing quite says “constitutional monarchy” like a velvet-voiced sovereign murmuring platitudes about hope and hedgehogs while the nation nurses its hangover. But Easter? Apparently not. On Maundy Thursday 2026, with His Majesty performing the ancient ritual of handing out purses of specially minted coins to pensioners at the Royal Maundy Service—less a ceremony than a polite redistribution of small change—the palace quietly confirmed there would be no Easter message. Tradition, they explained with the straightest of faces, does not demand it. One almost admires the brass neck: last year, in 2025, the King somehow found the time. This year the calendar proved mysteriously inflexible.

Dan Wootton, that indefatigable scourge of royal fence-sitting, has called the omission “wrong.” One suspects he is exercising heroic restraint. The real scandal is not the missing press release but the spectacle of a Defender of the Faith who appears to have misplaced the faith somewhere between the mosque and the organic allotment. Charles III remains, on paper, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, a title Henry VIII once prised from the Pope with all the tenderness of a Tudor divorce. Easter, that inconvenient festival of resurrection, might have been thought to warrant at least a courteous footnote. Instead the monarch offered the verbal equivalent of turning up to evensong in full regalia and then refusing to take communion on grounds of dietary sensitivity.

The palace line—delivered with the weary sigh of a civil servant who has seen this memo before—is that an Easter address is not an annual fixture like the Christmas broadcast. Quite so. One does not expect the King to materialise every April like some ecclesiastical jack-in-the-box. Yet the timing is exquisite: on the very day he is photographed performing a rite soaked in Christian symbolism, the official record falls eloquently blank. It is the sort of studied neutrality that makes one wonder whether the coronation oath has been quietly rewritten in invisible ink.

Step forward Rudy Giuliani, late of New York and still in robust voice on Piers Morgan’s sofa, who has obligingly labelled the King the “Muslim Monarch.” Crude? Undoubtedly. Accurate in the way only tabloid bluntness can be? One fears so. For decades Charles has cultivated the persona of the enlightened pluralist—visiting mosques with the enthusiasm of a man discovering a superior brand of incense, quoting Sufi poets as though they were the new Betjeman, and once airily rebranding himself “Defender of Faith” rather than “the Faith,” a grammatical slip that caused more ecclesiastical apoplexy than any number of royal indiscretions. Tolerance is all very well, but when it reaches the point where Easter Sunday passes without a murmur while the royal garden receives its annual documentary, one begins to detect the faint aroma of selective piety.

The comedy—dry, one trusts, rather than hysterical—resides in the constitutional contortion. The coronation vows still bind the monarch to the Protestant reformed religion “established by law,” yet the King’s personal enthusiasms have always tilted towards the ecumenical buffet. Britain in 2026 specialises in this sort of institutional embarrassment: a Church of England that no longer quite believes in itself, a monarchy desperate to appear “relevant” without quite knowing what relevance entails, and a commentariat that treats any defence of the old order as faintly gauche. Wootton’s objection is not, one gathers, that Charles secretly harbours a prayer mat in the Buckingham Palace linen cupboard. It is that the King’s public reticence feels less like magnanimity than a tactical withdrawal. Tolerance is a splendid virtue until it becomes the only one on offer, at which point the faithful are left staring at an empty throne on the one day the calendar actually requires it to be occupied.

The replies to Wootton’s post supply their own grim amusement: Cromwell invoked as though the Lord Protector might return to demand a properly Puritan Easter; Prince William summoned like a dynastic understudy; the inevitable cries of treason. The palace, one imagines, reads them with the expression of a man who has just discovered a dead mouse in the corgi biscuits. Yet the question refuses to dissolve: what, precisely, is the purpose of a Defender of the Faith who prefers not to defend it when the cameras are rolling? The role was never meant to be theological—monarchs have long been spared the indignity of genuine belief—but symbolic. Symbols, unlike Easter messages, are rather harder to cancel without someone noticing.

And so we return to the image of Charles at the Maundy Service: robes impeccable, smile dutiful, alms duly distributed. Everything is performed to perfection. The absence is quieter, more damning. It is the sound of a man who has concluded that, in modern Britain, the safest course is to say nothing, do the bare liturgical minimum, and trust that the faithful will supply their own commentary. Happy Easter, one is tempted to add. Or not, as the case may be. The choice, it seems, has already been made—elsewhere.

THE CLAPHAM RIFLES

One of the quieter ironies of our digital age is how a device no larger than a packet of fags can deliver more existential dread before breakfast than the entire collected works of Schopenhauer. I speak, of course, of scrolling through what used to be Twitter—now X, though the rebranding has done nothing to improve the view—and encountering the latest instalment in the long-running British documentary series High Street Blues. This week’s episode was filmed on Clapham High Street, that once-genteel stretch of South London where, not so very long ago, a man could purchase a decent flat white and a copy of the Guardian without fear of either being trampled underfoot by what the more optimistic among us still insist on calling “youths”.

The footage, helpfully compiled by a chap with the air of a man who has seen one too many Friday afternoons, shows packs of hooded figures swarming the road like starlings that have discovered Red Bull. Traffic is at a standstill. Shopkeepers, displaying the sort of survival instinct one usually associates with gazelles on the Serengeti, are slamming down shutters faster than you can say “diversity is our strength”. The locals—those pale, beleaguered remnants who still remember when Clapham was merely “a bit lively”—scatter with the quiet resignation of extras in a disaster movie who know their lines but have given up on the plot. It is not, the commentator notes with the weary precision of a man reading the small print on his own death warrant, a one-off “youth event”. It is the predictable Friday night special, the sort of thing that happens when you have spent decades importing large numbers of people who appear to regard the civilisation they have colonised with all the affection of a fox in a henhouse.

I am not, I should say at once, a man given to nostalgia. The Britain of my youth had its own share of inconveniences, but we did not, as a rule, require the police to stand around looking helpless while the streets were repurposed as an impromptu adventure playground for the disaffected. In the current production, the boys in blue—or what remains of them—practise a form of community policing that might best be described as “tactical non-intervention”. One suspects the phrase “fear of getting shanked up, init blud” has not yet made it into the official training manual, but it has clearly been absorbed at street level. The constabulary, once famed for their measured truncheons and even more measured tempers, now resemble those Roman legionaries who, in the later days of the Empire, decided that discretion was the better part of valour when the barbarians started looking a bit peckish.

And here, of course, is where the real comedy begins. For the patterns, as they say in the more euphemistic corners of the Home Office, are “disproportionate”. Gangs of one particular hue cause carnage on the streets with the cheerful regularity of a bus timetable. Another group, we are told, has developed a novel approach to traffic management involving high-speed vehicles and pedestrians who had the temerity to be in the way. A third demographic—never named, naturally, for fear of causing offence—appears to have mistaken the country for a particularly poorly supervised dating agency. The excuses arrive with the punctuality of a London bus: “socio-economics”, “boredom”, “the legacy of colonialism”, or that evergreen favourite, “a tiny minority”. One begins to wonder whether the tiny minority in question might not be the one still paying taxes and expecting the rule of law.

It is all terribly depressing, as the original poster observed, and one feels a certain kinship with him. Waking up to this sort of thing day after day is enough to make a man reach for the Horlicks—or, if he is feeling particularly masochistic, the Today programme. The broadcasters, bless their cotton socks, maintain the party line with the serene determination of Victorian missionaries confronted by cannibals. “Integration takes time,” they intone, as though the problem were a soufflé that had merely been taken out of the oven too soon. “We must not generalise.” Quite so. One must never generalise about the fact that certain generalisations keep proving stubbornly accurate. It would be rude.

The great unmentionable, of course, is the one that dare not speak its name in polite society: replacement. Not the sort of replacement one sees in a game of musical chairs, but the slower, more methodical variety whereby entire neighbourhoods are quietly recolonised, street by street, until the original inhabitants find themselves cast in the role of bewildered extras in someone else’s epic. Clapham used to be a decent patch. Now it is another exhibit in the great British enrichment experiment, and the bill, as the man said, keeps coming due. One wonders how many more high streets will have to go the same way before the adults in the room—assuming any are left—admit that the experiment has not so much failed as spectacularly succeeded in producing the exact opposite of what was promised.

The indoctrination, naturally, has been thorough. A good portion of the population has been trained to disbelieve their lying eyes with the fervour of medieval scholastics debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Point out the obvious and you are a “racist”. Suggest that perhaps importing large numbers of people from cultures with rather different ideas about knives, cars, and young women might have unforeseen consequences, and you are “far right”. The rest of us, meanwhile, are invited to celebrate our vibrant new reality while quietly moving the children’s bedrooms to the back of the house and investing in better locks. It is the sort of progressive triumph that would have had Orwell reaching for the gin.

And yet, for all the gloom, there is a certain black comedy to it all. The same people who once lectured us about the evils of empire now watch, with mounting bafflement, as the empire strikes back—in tracksuits. The multiculturalists, having spent decades insisting that all cultures are equal, are discovering that some cultures are rather more equal than others when it comes to public disorder. The politicians, ever eager to triangulate, speak of “tough new measures” while the measures in question consist largely of asking nicely. One almost admires the consistency. It is as though the entire political class has decided that the best way to deal with a house fire is to stand in the garden praising the flames for their diversity.

Will enough ever be enough? The replies to the original post were not encouraging. Some spoke of indoctrination so complete that even the evidence of one’s senses is dismissed as hate speech. Others predicted a slow retreat behind high walls and barbed wire until the final pogrom. A few pinned their hopes on this or that politician who has dared to utter the word “remigration”. I have no great faith in saviours from any quarter. History suggests that civilisations do not collapse with a bang but with a series of embarrassed coughs and a polite request not to make a fuss.

Still, one clings to the small consolations. The shutters on Clapham High Street may be coming down, but the wit of the British people—such as it survives—remains stubbornly aloft. We have, after all, survived worse: the Blitz, the winter of discontent, and several seasons of Love Island. Perhaps the enrichment experiment will one day be remembered as the most expensive practical joke in history. Or perhaps not. In the meantime, I shall continue to scroll, with the grim relish of a man watching his own funeral arrangements being made by committee. It is, as they say, the only show in town. And the tickets, alas, are non-refundable.