National Insurance: The bitter age divide just got deeper – thanks to Tories' National Insurance grab

Underlying all this division is a deeper faultline: age. Age is as important to politics today as class once was. In Scotland, demographics played a part in the failure of the SNP’s independence bid in 2014, with a clear majority of over-50s voting against. The SNP has grown in popularity among young voters since.

On the UK stage, the younger someone is, the more likely they are to vote Labour, the older, the more likely they’ll split for the Tories. While this has always happened to some degree, the weakening of class-based party allegiances has made the divide more dramatic, as older working class voters go blue and people start voting Tory younger. YouGov reckons that in 2019, the chance of someone voting Tory increased by around nine points with every 10 years of age.

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Older people are much more likely than the young to be homeowners, but it’s not just about cash and assets. It’s also about values. Attitudes to immigration and race are different between young and old. Not only did Brexit succeed due to the grey vote, but 60 per cent of white British adults aged under 24 support the Black Lives Matter protests compared with 28 per cent of those aged over 65, according to a study released in March by the think tank British Future.

Perhaps the older and younger generations have never really got each other, but the bonds of mutual respect and affection are being put under strain. And now the government’s National Insurance hike to pay for social care in England – revenues from which may well be deployed for the same purpose in Scotland – is pouring more petrol on the flames of intergenerational resentment.

The UK Government has put the health and social care levy on workers who pay National Insurance, it would appear, solely to avoid the tax falling on Tory-voting pensioners, as would happen with an income tax hike.

It comes just a month before Universal Credit is cut by £20 a week, hitting working people once again.

The new 1.25 per cent tax will “hammer working people”, says Sir Keir Starmer, criticising the government for asking wealthy landlords to pay nothing. The SNP’s Ian Blackford has accused the Prime Minister of “balancing the books on the backs of the poor and the young”.

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Even the Archbishop of Canterbury has had a go at the intergenerational unfairness, which is frankly glaring.

Critics like the Resolution Foundation think tank aren’t mollified by the fact working pensioners will also pay, and that share dividend taxation will be raised, pointing out that only one sixth of pensioner households has earnings. They argue that a typical 25 year old will pay £12,600 in their working lives on this tax “compared to nothing for most pensioners”.

Sixty eight per cent of over 65s in a YouGov poll support the policy, while only 26 per cent of 18-24-year olds do. Fifty nine per cent of Tory voters favour it, while 55 per cent of Labour voters are opposed. Quelle surprise.

The Tory Party shielding its wealthy supporters from tax rises is about as newsworthy as Gavin Williamson making a fool of himself. It’s wrong in itself, but also damages the already strained social contract between the generations, as brokered by the state.

The greater challenges younger people face compared to their parents are stark. Millennials (who came of age in the early 21st century) are much more likely to be in insecure, low paid, part-time roles than their parents and grandparents at the same age. They are half as likely to own their own homes at 30 as the post-war baby-boomers were.

Older folk are understandably envied for having had free university education and generous maintenance grants, decent career prospects and wage progression, gold-plated pensions and the chance to buy houses.

Some scorn is reserved for their children Generation X, born in the 1960s and 70s, who are perceived as having been apathetic about global injustice, while avoiding huge student debts and benefitting from the house price rises that so vex younger people.

This is broad-brush stuff and of course older people haven’t had it all their own way. The stereotype of silver surfers gaily flicking through cruise brochures while their impoverished grandchildren huddle in chilly bedsits, is not entirely aligned with reality. Yes, they exist, but Scotland also has 120,000 pensioners living in persistent poverty, which Age Scotland calls “a national scandal”. Before the triple lock came along, pensioner poverty was rife.

But overall, young adults face bigger burdens and poorer economic opportunities that their parents and grandparents did. We need to do much better than this. And we need to adapt to the 100-year-life anticipated for many children born this century.

An equitable transfer of wealth is required from an older generation who more easily acquired it, to a younger generation that can only dream of it.

The Resolution Foundation’s Intergenerational Commission proposed in 2018 levying a limited national insurance levy on occupational pension income. Wouldn’t that be fairer than this? Meanwhile, the Scottish Government has put off reforming council tax to make it fairer and more targeted at wealth. It’s past time to stop kicking that can down the road.

There have been moments in the last decade when politics in Britain has felt like an arm wrestle, about imposing the interests of one group on another, as if unity and fairness don’t matter provided you have the numbers. For the Tories, those numbers have traditionally come from the grey vote.

But if the young are overburdened and cannot buy homes, then the Tories’ support base will start to shrink.

Then they will find that fairness does matter.

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