The poor need the money, the rich may not – but I say hands off the state pension triple lock | Owen Jones

Bad news: it doesn’t, and instead much of the vast riches generated by the graft of millions of workers ends up hoovered into the bank accounts – and offshore tax havens – of a tiny few.

That means more than £100bn is now splashed on the state pension each year, by far the biggest single item of social security spending, while working-age benefits have fallen drastically behind.

Younger citizens largely saw Brexit as an attack on their futures, a rupture only made possible thanks to grey voters, while much of the so-called culture wars boils down to a backlash among older Britons against the increasingly progressive values of millennials and generation Z.

Britain is the sixth-largest economy on Earth, yet even now remains incapable of offering a basic contract: that every Briton should be assured comfort and security in their final years.

That reduces society to a cauldron of often dangerous resentments, variously encouraging many to believe that our lives would be better if the undeserving would stop hogging meagre services and entitlements: often, the demonised foreigner, or supposedly feckless fellow Brits.

For many younger citizens, their worldviews understandably defined by their chronic economic insecurity and inclusive social values, there lurks the spectre of the bigoted, entitled, selfish boomer, whose dreadful electoral choices have robbed them of their futures.