A deal with the DUP

My parents are in their mid to late seventies - always been relatively poor, never had the benefits of many of their contemporaries - and they have come to realise that they too have benefitted. My twentieth century history can be traced back through them, and back to my cotton millworking great grandparents from the 'Lost Generatiom' (first world war veterans, suffering from rickets through deprivation etc.), we are the product of those generations and carry their stories with us.

All these generations desperately needed, and benefitted from, the introduction of the state pension. Before that was truly Dickensian but the system wasn't built to cope with this massive increase in pensioners and something needed to give long before it did. Now we have, for the first time, generations who will have a worse standard of living than their elders. 

To my parents, when they initially said that they personally weren't better off than those younger, I pointed out two things, job security and housing, They could buy a house, even with their low wages, and they paid off that mortgage by time they were fifty, they could walk out of a job one afternoon and into another the next day (and did!). They suffered somewhat during the Thatcher years but, even so, found jobs throughout periods of unstable employment. They just didn't realise how tough both those things now are for those at the same age as they were.

It is nobody's fault that they were born in a population boom but it is their subsequent responsibility.

(For what it is worth I am also a baby boomer albeit at the tale end, glancing Janus-like both at the older boomers on one side and the rest of the Generation Xers, Millenials and so on on the other).