21st January 1996

When I was born in 1923, the life expectancy of a British male baby was 56 years. I am now a 72-year-old widower. So I have beaten the grim reaper's original expectations by 16 winters, and can actuarially expect to live about another decade, largely at you younger taxpayers' expense.

You younger taxpayers (let me call a 25-year-old one Simple Simon) will one day turn sick of treating us oldies with unpaid-for pensions, free travel and much else. You'll turn especially sick of our free healthcare. American research shows the average survivor into old age uses 90% of her or his lifetime's consumption of doctors' services in the six months before death. So the healthcare industry devotes 90% of its work to keeping alive us old bats for perhaps an extra month.

Please divert the cost of my extra month to curing breast cancer, which killed my daughter (mother of my two grandkids) at 34. As a big winner in the pensions lottery, my three pensions (mostly from you taxpayers) should in 1996 bring in an amount roughly twice the average Briton's household income. Remind me tomorrow to get my specially cheaper haircut, too.

My biggest pension comes from the weekly viewspaper on which I helped write the economics for 40 years. As circulation soared from 29,000 to 600,000, we fed its fast-rising pension fund with large employers' and smaller employees' contributions, each calculated to catch the changing tax advantages best. My second or "private" pension is a tax dodgers' one. As I wrote or co-wrote eight books, my accountant told me of each penny of proceeds I could withdraw from Labour's marginal 83% income tax rate, to build a separate "self-employed" chap's pension.

I also share with 10m of you the state old-age pension. Even today's fairly miserable state pension was not remotely financed by our insurance contributions from average male wages of £6 a week in the 1940s. The dosh comes from today's taxpayers, such as Simple Simon (born 1970), who assumes he will inherit our free healthcare and other goodies on retirement in 2035.

He won't. We present oldies gain from our short-term scarcity. People reaching 65 in 1996 were born in 1931, when Depression and then war cut birth rates (thus today's new retirees) for 15 years. The whole present generous system will collapse as the pension rolls absorb the huge blip of baby boomers born between 1946 (when Simon's grandpa and I returned from war) and 1970 (when Simon's pregnant mum belatedly discovered there was a contraceptive pill).

Because those baby boomers born in 1946-70 will live far longer than anybody before, were culled by only half the infant mortality of those of us born in or before 1931, and because they have bred fewer families to look after them in dotage, their retirement from 2011 (2006 for women) will smash present boondoggles.

It will be worst in Japan, where 56% are of working age in 1996, but only 20% will be in 2040. Second worst will be continental Europe, where they have failed to devise schemes like my treble pension. If Britain stays in the EC, Simon will pay the pensions of the massed grandkids of the Hitler Youth.

When Tony Blair made his deliberately meaningless stakeholder speech in Singapore, the best Labour MP, Frank Field, said it meant Britain must follow Singapore in making 25-year-old Simple Simons compulsorily save in advance for their own pensions. Simon is already paying for my generation's pension. Whereas Singapore (with a life expectancy of 40-something in colonial days) could absorb its relatively few grandpas into its extended Chinese families at independence, Frank's honest scheme would lose Simon's vote for Labour until about 2035. Little wonder Robin Cook hastily said the speech meant the opposite: that each British business must pay for lots of extra stakeholders (its workers, customers, locality, the environment), so each would presumably go bust and Britain could pay no pensions at all.

My guess is that when Simon retires in 2035, after the bulge of oldies in 2006-35 have eaten the seedcorn, he will be allowed an unfunded state pension and free healthcare only on a very fixed term. He may have to yield both, and life itself, with a hell of a going away party on the eve of his 93rd birthday. When children became too plentiful in 1946-70, we made it legal to abort them. As oldies become too plentiful in 2006 past 2035, we may not allow you (Simon) even to reach 93, unless all of us start, Gingrich-like, to preach the need to check the welfare state for us elderly now.