Twenty years ago, I wrote a piece saying that I was confident that I would, in my lifetime, see the position of women in the labour market transformed. I believed that as we aged the demand for caring would increase, and as women dominated this market, the relative costs of caring would rise as the demand went up, and we would see their wages increase. But what we've tragically seen is those wages kept down, and many of us ending our time in granny farms — which is what these terrible homes are — looked after by people who may care for us enormously, but who don't even speak our language. So one's losing one's marbles, and the person talking to you can't even speak English. 

Another area where, in a sense, I don't think your rational politics theory quite works, David, is that although as a group the baby boomers have been so well placed, within the group there are those who have not had the benefits showered on them. And they have more in common with the poor of other generations than they do with their own baby boom generation. 

I asked the Commons Library at the last election to calculate the number of pensioners who voted, and, if we assumed that the parliament would last for five years — and it has — to add into that group those who would become pensioners in this five-year term. The majority of "pensioners", under that definition, determined the last election. But they didn't vote on grey issues. They still voted, to some extent, on old class lines, because the pull of their unprivileged position brought them more in line and in sympathy with poorer people in other generations than it did with this dominating cohort that has moved through our population.

DW: Yes, but there have been dozens, probably hundreds, of accounts of post-war Britain and British politics written from the prospective of social class. And of course you can't ignore it, it is a factor. But I'm not aware of a single book on post-war Britain that approaches it from this generational perspective. And whilst, of course, class matters, and there are intra-generational injustices, I just think that this other framework, I'm finding already, strikes a chord with people. People do think it helps to make sense of things, and it does generate a policy agenda that Frank, quite rightly, wants to go further on. And I've just been so frustrated that so much of the analysis is horizontal, and so little of it has been vertical.

FF: I now for the first time see the advantages of publishing a book that doesn't have the policy conclusions in it. Had David felt able to put in what he felt the policy should be, he might have found it much more difficult to get the argument running. Politicians of other parties, without any threat to themselves, can embrace the argument.  

My original review of the book, which I tore up, said that there really were two books here: the one David published, and the other one he hasn't published.  The other one, which is hinted at the whole way through the book, has the policy conclusions that one would draw from this. But there's a very important political lesson there, which ought to encourage other leading politicians to write and possibly separate the analysis from the conclusion. There's no one else in the House of Commons with the intellectual ability to write a book like this. David is at the centre of a big feedback.  Here is a genuine Green Paper.

DW: It's very good of you to see it like that. There is an assumption in politics that you must have a ten-point plan, otherwise you will not get coverage — so I endorse what Frank said.

DJ: Looking forward, do we think there is a new politics that can be built, and which isn't necessarily in the old Left-Right categories, which will help to address the younger generation's problems? There they are, having to inherit these problems, and this is going inevitably to mean shaking up the political kaleidoscope. We've already seen this with the expenses scandal and other things, but will it perhaps create new alignments, force us to rethink our politics?

FF: What I would like to see resulting from this book is that the next government, whoever it is, starts a discussion with the baby boomers, saying we think there is a case for redistributing — how might you best achieve this yourself, and how might we help you achieve it, rather than us come after you with a club and take money from you. This approach strengthens another great theme of David's, which is of little platoons: you'll actually be increasing their standing, their wealth, their muscle in the economic and political debate, which I don't think governments can do.

DW: Frank has just launched the next stage of the debate. After this kind of foundation, where I think we've got an agreement that there is an issue, though a disagreement about whether it's just been as a result of a series of misfortunes or it's been deliberate, the next thing is indeed lots of ideas. And as always Frank is going to be more fertile in ideas about what kind of policies follow from this than just about anyone else in the House of Commons. So I'd like to return the compliment. 

DJ: It will encourage a lot of readers that the intelligent elements in both parties agree about quite a lot — though not everything.

FF: Might I just add one more comment, which is a compliment to David? When I read this I thought, when did I last read another book that made me think differently? And I shamefully have to say that I had to go back to 1961 in my second year of university when I was told to read Seymour Martin Lipset's Political Man. Of course it's now a common or garden idea — the sociology of politics. But nobody had written anything like it, as far as I'd read. And The Pinch is another big jump in the debate, although I still can't understand the title.

DW: It was the publisher who came up with it. It's partly a contrast to Nudge last year, it's partly an implicit suggestion that the baby boomers pinch things from their kids, and it's also a sense that we're feeling the pinch.