There is one type of pension reform that has proved possible, though. There are clear lessons from this, too, which reinforce much of what has already been said. A number of countries have tried to keep pension costs under control by increasing the age at which state pensions are paid. These reforms are important and can prevent the bills from increasing as rapidly as they otherwise would have done. Reforms along these lines are even progressing in countries with an entrenched public spending mentality, such as France, Italy and Germany. In Sweden, increases in state pension age have been combined with more radical reform. However, each of these reforms has an important common feature. The bill has been planted fairly and squarely on the younger generation.

This has happened in the UK. Former Conservative ministers Peter Lilley and David Willetts often still marvel at how the rise in the retirement age for women to 65, passed in 1988, raised barely a whimper among the electorate. But no wonder. The reform would not be fully implemented until 2020, so that only women below the age of 33 in 1988 were fully affected. They represented a very small proportion of the electorate. In the pension reforms that have been adopted in some South American countries and the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe, the young have often had an enormous burden placed upon them. In many countries there has been a move from pensions paid out of the social insurance taxes of the working generation to pensions pre-funded by saving. When the system has been reformed, the young have simultaneously had to save for their own pensions in the reformed system, while still paying the taxes to fund the pensions of older people in the old system. Young voters are often so pleased to get rid of the old-style social insurance systems that they will willingly make this sacrifice. However, it is notable that in the case of nearly all pension reforms, older voters have been completely exempted from the costs of reform.

The young are being systematically plundered by the old exercising their power through the ballot box. Contrary to the traditions of early British democracy, our current democratic process, mature in both senses of the word, knows virtually no constraint on the power of one group of voters to dispossess another.