DW: That is a very interesting idea and certainly anything that ensures that you try to pass on something and spread it for future generations is very important.

FF: But what's missing from the book is that there's a real concern on the part of the baby boomers who are grandparents and who realise that somehow they were on the escalator at the right point in time. They feel passionately about their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren and they are taking measures within our wretched tax system to benefit them.

DW: That's why our inheritance tax proposal touches a chord. People say that that money, the spare equity in our house, is what we hope is going to help our children, quite possibly our grandchildren, to get started, and the final chapter of the book is a kind of homage to grandparents and their role. It was influenced partly by Michael Young but I think the notion of grandparents as custodians of these traditions is deep in the Tory tradition. As I worked, for example, on our family Green Paper, one of the things that I became keen on is improving the rights of grandparents. It is shocking that when the parents break up, the grandparents can lose contact with a grandchild, which may deprive that child of two people who are really committed to his or her development. It is even more shocking that if, sadly, both parents die, or are incapable of raising the kids, local authorities don't first go to the grandparents. 

But my judgment in writing the book was to create an account of the kind of country we are, going deep into history: why, for a Conservative, you can accept the idea of a social contract, and welcome it once you think of it as an inter-generational contract, and the importance of each generation thinking about what we're doing for future generations. I hope in the future we will see absolutely what it means for grandparents' rights, what kind of laws and tax on inheritance you should have, exactly how you reform pensions, exactly what we do on family policy — all those things follow. 

FF: My last comment on it is, how fertile that area is. For every one bungee-jumper in New Zealand, cited by David, there are a thousand trying not to destroy their wealth, not consuming it themselves, and trying to find out, through the maze that we have of a tax system, how they can allow their grandchildren to benefit.

DW: There are interesting statistics about the number of houses being left in wills, and we don't know why this number is lower than was forecast. There are various possibilities. One is that people are actually passing their wealth earlier on to their kids. The other possibility is that they are indeed being used to boost people's living standards now. 

One thing that struck me while trying to assemble this data is that because we're so preoccupied in this country with these horizontal comparisons of different classes and incomes and backgrounds, reliable information on how different generations do is lacking. It is hard to work out who owns the money in our pension schemes divided between different generations or to calculate the net value of our housing wealth. The lack of that kind of analysis was, to me, evidence that we've been blind to these inter-generational issues.

FF: One way to make sure that the data and the information is available for the next government, whoever it is, is to have inter-generational impact statements on the major measures. So one would be specifically looking at how we, I would argue, build up that contract, and you would say, protect it.

DJ: We've touched on the question of, "If there is a problem, who is to blame?" One of the problems I think with your thesis, David, is that for much of the period since the 1960s, the people running the country were not actually the baby boomers. The baby boomers had enormous influence through their votes, through their culture, and through their role in the economy, but actually it was an older generation that was taking most of the decisions, until we get to the 1990s. It's really only in the last 15-20 years that the baby boomers — us, as it were — have taken over. It is, above all, in the Blair and Brown governments that that has been the case. And it may well be over already. There is a new generation emerging, the Camerons and Milibands, who are about to elbow the baby boomers out of the way. Is it really fair to attribute such an enormous influence to them?