Neil Boorman – How To Save The Country By Accepting Your Parents Have Fucked You Over

We had a chat with Neil Boorman about his new book, It’s All Their Fault: A Manifesto. It's a call to arms in generational warfare and a last ditch effort to reverse the nation's headlong dive towards poverty. In case you think killing mum is bit OTT, here are some depressing figures for you to mull over: Every baby in the UK is born owing £22,500, a share of the £1.4 trillion credit crunch bail out. The average student graduates £20,000 in debt. And it's going to get worse. There are roughly 650 days left until the boomer time-bomb goes off and they reach retirement, cease to pay taxes and start drawing pensions. Then it will get really grim.

It’s All Their Fault: A Manifesto, is to be serialised on Viceland in the weeks leading to the election.

VICE: Hi Neil. When did you start work on the new book then?
Neil Boorman: Well, I actually started thinking about it a few years ago after reading an issue of Vice called How to Kill Your Parents. I remember reading it at the time, and it kind of blew my head off. It’s not very often that you ever really think about why you should rebel against your parents other than for the sake of being a surly teenager. Everyone grows up to love their parents and can’t really believe they did anything wrong. But I read that issue and a couple of other books that came out at the time, like Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, and realised that my folks' generation have shit loads of stuff, and we haven’t got very much. So the last six months I have been thinking, we could sit around and bitch about it for ages, but the best bet is to make a change by trying to kick them out of power.

With this election being quite tight, this is actually the best time possible to do it. If we all get off our arses and seize a bit of control. It took a long time to get all the figures together. If you are asking people to start some sort of generational warfare, then you really need the facts to back it up. People do need a lot of convincing, but usually when you do tell them the facts they are pretty familiar with them. Things like student loans and so on.

So what are the big issues that pushed you to do this, over the last few years?
Obviously the whole banking crisis is a major one. Time Magazine did a big piece about those responsible for the crisis, 80% of them were boomers. Then you look at most of the people who were caught with their hands in the till over the expenses scandal, most of them are boomers. How are people able to be so massively selfish? Every single time. You ask yourself: "How old are these people?" And guess what? Surprise, surprise; they are boomers. I can no longer give any time to the notion that we are meant to give responsibility to those a bit older than us. That's gone out of the window. I am surprised it hasn’t kicked off already. It definitely will in a few years time when the pensions things come into play. Tell me more about that.
Well pensions are really boring, and no one the right side of 35 wants to talk about them, but when all the baby boomers retire then that’s when its really going to go very wrong for us. I remember getting told even at school that the aging population was going to be a big problem.
Yeah, you would have to have been chained to the wall of a cave for a decade not to know that this was around the corner. All of the people in power or in places of influence, they have known about these growing problems for ages and done nothing about it. Every time there is an election, they get to decide, "would you like to pay some more taxes for the future of the kids and their educations?", and every time they say, nah sort it out later when we're retired or dead. That sounds a bit simplistic, but that’s what it boils down to.

Don’t you worry that our generation would do the exact same thing when it’s our money? Do you really think today’s young adults will agree to pay higher taxes in 20 years to support future generations?
The really worrying thing is that I am not sure that we will actually have any money to put aside anyway. At the moment four people are paying to support one pensioner, but by 2030 it will be two of us paying to support one of them.. So we will have to either double income tax or halve the amount of money we put into the NHS. If things carry on as they are, on top of the national debt and all these taxes, we won't have anything. We'll be working day and night to pay to keep people alive in retirement homes. Which, if you consider that they are the richest generation that has ever lived, is ridiculous. 70 percent of parliament is made up of boomers. We need that to change. These things won’t be resolved unless we get a decent load of people of a different generation in there. So how do you suggest we go about getting this change to happen?
For starters, nothing will change until we get people in government who are at least familiar with what we are going through. At the moment there is not one single MP who has paid tuition fees or top-up fees, they can't possibly understand what it's like. When I started thinking about this campaign six or so months ago, I thought the major problem would be not having enough people of that age to vote for, but unbelievably, there are loads and loads of young candidates standing. The problem is that our generation is pretty rubbish at going out and voting.

So you are saying that it is more important to vote for people on the basis of their age than their political party?
Absolutely. About a year ago the Lib Dems were talking about sacking off tuition fees and had some interesting policies about the use of houses that were unoccupied for a year, but when the economy nose-dived they ditched them all. It's not age discrimination, it’s a generational discrimination. Anybody under the age of 46, generation X or Y, or people over 65 who have some understanding of thrift, vote for them. Vote for anyone but baby boomers. I think if we had more people either side of that demographic in government we would see a lot of changes, anyone other than these people who constantly work to line their own pockets.

BRUCE LA VRAI