The baby boomer generation - my generation - exercised its political muscle last week. We have a Chancellor of the Exchequer who was not even born in 1968, but the one group he felt he had to appease was the now elderly children of the sixties.
So amid all the gloom, he restored the link between state pensions and earnings. It is the one thing that Jack Jones and the National Pensioners Convention have campaigned for ever since Margaret Thatcher broke the link in 1980.
But for our children, there was only misery. Students’ fees are going to go up. A lot. We baby boomers paid no fees at all when we were students in the sixties and seventies.
Because people are living longer, baby boomers are a much more powerful political force than 55-65-year-olds have ever been before. Any government which fails to give the baby boomers what they want, even at the expense of younger generations, is in for severe punishment at the ballot box, according to research from the thinktank Demos.