National Service for Pensioners

I sometimes wonder if this is a problem of semantics and people think a "baby-boomer" is someone whose life has boomed (instead of bust?). Maybe they don't know it means the immediate post-war generation, the eldest of whom are only 65/66 and haven't had that much time for cruises yet?
Nick Hurd (Wiki again) graduated from Eton, Oxford and the Bullingdon and is Douglas Hurd's son. So he won't have a distorted view of the world then?

Well, I guess that lets me out as I pre-date the baby-boomers by a few years. However, at the CAB where I volunteer, several of us are 70+ and the majority are retirees, willingly giving up time to undergo quite rigorous training and then at least one day a week helping people to claim benefits, deal with debt, sort out housing problems...and so on. Every charity shop in town is also staffed largely by over 60s. So how dare this whipper snapper suggest that we do voluntary work. We already do our bit - and more. I wonder what he does that's socially useful.

Isn't easy to tell others what to do? How can anyone of inteligence gereralise about a group of people they know nothing about?

We are the ones who took it for granted that we would have to save (is that now a dirty word) in order to buy a house. We waited (another dirty word) until we could afford it to have children and it never occurred to us that we were entitled to everything we wanted/needed and that the state whould pay.

We were happy to have hand-me-downs to furnish our homes and pass-ons for our children. No carpets, no central heating in my first house, had to wait to afford them. No washing machine, not even a fridge when we first got married, all had to be saved for before we could have them. Now how would such advice be received by the young who think they should have everthing NOW!

Well said Alison!

Ah, Alison, don't tar all the younger generation with the same brush. My DS and his wife have recently moved to a larger house. They have decided to furnish it 'in period' - Edwardian - and have used Ebay and charity shops to buy old but good furniture whereas their first two homes were largely Ikea, most of which has been disposed of by way of Ebay! They are far from extravagant. Must be their upbringing! Even my student GD is very cautious to buy sensibly.

I'll be glad when mine start to accept that old can be even better. They grew up surrounded by antiques and only want super-modern now.

If he wants to increase volunteering, then give some more money to the local organisations that act as clearing houses for local opportunities and are getting by on a shoestring.
And who does he think has been running U3As all these years I wonder.
It is just Big Society (Big Flop) being re-invented. Policitians are desperate for a "new idea" for a press release.

My senior GD has her eye on my ancestral antique chest of drawers! I may have to add a codicil to my will. The other GD has her eye on my jewellery such as it is. Don't think I have anything that the boys fancy!

My DD wants my long case clock which I inherited from my GF.
She is not interested in my jewellry, so I think I'll leave it to DGD.

These people are cretins! Many of us have been practising C's "Big Society" before he'd even learned to speak.

These precious little public school know alls know nothing.

As Bags says, who has been keeping events and groups running all these years, and who's been raising money for every good cause you could think of?

Bangs head against wall.

Oh dear Oh dear - what is the matter with Cameron's generation they all seem so immature, and say the most idiotic things. I blame the parents - oh could that be us!!??

Oh Annoble do please re-read my post, I wasn't 'tarring' anyone! I was just saying what our generation did.

On the subject of taking housing benefit away from the under 25s the other day I heard 2 young women who were really put out about it because they felt it was their right to have children when they wanted to and at whatever cost to the rest of us.

On another programme I heard that youngsters of today can't save for a mortgage because they expect to eat out twice a week and have all the other things we didn't have so don't have anything left to save.

We can't and I don't generalise about any age group but I do think that there is far too much demonising of the baby-boomers at the moment.

This thread disappeared, and I'd only just finished reading the last post! I am so fed up with that happening!

This brings a whole new meaning to the phrase, 'granny bashing'. It seems that whatever is going wrong with the country IT'S ALL OUR FAULT

OK Alison. Understood. I didn't have kids until I was in my 30s. Nor did they.

My experience is similar to most of my close friends of similar age! DH recently tried to volunteer at local CAB but they had no more funding to train him due to government cuts!
I am a governor at a school, do volunteer reading support in a school, care for DGC so DDs can work. I started work in state sector teaching June 1972 and was made redundant due to government cuts to public sector in March 2011. I did not work for 3 yrs when kids were small but did do volunteering with playgroups/ youth clubs and shopping for the housebound in the time I was not in paid employment.
I have saved & paid extra into pension funds when I could and have moved house specifically to support my family to be able to go to work! So F-off lord Wei don't target me & my friends!

DD reminded me of this: (from a Guardian article in March 2011)

"It could become the allegory of the "big society" age. The man appointed by the prime minister to kickstart a revolution in citizen activism is to scale back his hours after discovering that working for free three days a week is incompatible with "having a life".
Lord Wei of Shoreditch, who was given a Tory peerage last year and a desk in the Cabinet Office as the "big society tsar", is to reduce his hours on the project from three days a week to two, to allow him to see his family more and to take on other jobs to pay the bills."

No sense of duty?

And to play golf, probably....

and who is Lord wei-at 35 he is too young to deserve a lordship and an annuity in the House of Lords-he should be earning a living and paying taxes. I suspect he has been shoved upstairs because he is not much good at his job as an MP?
I loathe these career MPs-I heard Tony Benn's granddaughter say she was intending to stand for Parliament-she was 16 or 17 at the time and planning to switch from one grammar school to another totally forgetting her grandfather had done his best to close down opportunities for the rest of the populcae

Ah, yes.
Totally forgot about Tony Benn.
The archetypal drawing room socialist.
Yuk.

I think you could accuse him of a lot of things Stansgran, but he wasn't an MP. The Wikepedia page is quite interesting in terms of what he has done.

But seriously, you couldn't make this stuff up, could you? Do you think he would like to come on Gransnet to hear our views?

How much has he given to the Tory party? I assume it was substantial given that "call me Dave" saw fit to give him a Lordship

johanna I would challenge your description of Tony Benn..he has done a mass of 'grass roots' work. you may not agree with his politics but he has worked hard.

Yes nana , he has worked incredibly hard.
But I will always think of him as a drawing room socialist.

johanna what's a drawing room socialist?