They may have been more interested in peace than money in the carefree hippy days of the late Sixties and Seventies but the older generation are steaming ahead of their children

Several months before the 2010 general election a member of the shadow cabinet wrote a startling book.

David Willetts, nicknamed “Two Brains” owing to his high hairline and background in policy research, argued in his tome that something had gone wrong with the distribution of wealth between generations.

The so-called baby boomers, born when the birth rate surged in the post-war period between 1945 and 1965, had become both the biggest and also the richest generation in British history. But they had become so, he asserted, at the expense of the young — their children’s generation — whose earnings and prospects were being relentlessly squeezed.

The book, The Pinch, the first political publication for many decades to look at inequality from an intergenerational perspective, was