ANOTHER VOICE

Forget the Yuppies and Dinks: let's all make Whoopie

AUBERON WAUGH

Last week Rover launched a new sports car, the MG F:1.8i, with mid-engined and rear-wheel drive like a Ferrari, two seats, an open top, and capable of speeds up to 120 mph in however many seconds. It looks pretty boring and fatuous to me, but might be thought just the thing to appeal to these Yuppie Dinks (double-income-no-kids) we read so much about.

In fact, Rover has discovered that of the 1,700 people who have ordered the car, the average age is 57. It was designed for the thrusting 'thirty-something professionals', but this figure means that for every 39- year-old who has bought it there must be a mature 75-year-old, trembling on the brink of middle age, and for every 30-year-old buyer a ripe old wrinklie of 84 sitting behind the wheel.

'They are semi-retired or retired people like surgeons, doctors and lecturers who probably already have a Porsche, an old MGB or a Lancia Delta Integrale,' explains MG's general manager, Mr Guy Pigounakis. 'The MGFs will go into their collections for ever.'

I must admit that in the range of my acquaintance I do not know any semi- retired lecturers with a Porsche or Lancia Delta Integrale in their collections, and that may go to show how one cannot rely on one's own observation to guide one through the maze of modern life. But it is equally possible that Mr Pigounakis, know- ing one or two such, has allowed himself to be misled into believing that it is a common thing for retired surgeons to have a collec- tion of sports cars. Perhaps we should all be diffident about advancing our own observa- tion of life as being generally applicable, but there is solid evidence building up for my long-held theory that the Yuppie is very largely myth, an advertiser's concoction, at any rate so far as marketing is concerned.

We all know someone whose grown-up child has caught the disease, sitting hunched and whey-faced 18 hours a day over a Video Display Unit, mesmerised by the flickering green digits which may or may not represent huge numbers of bor- rowed dollars in Tokyo or yen in Toronto. But these are social and emotional cripples who emerge only for brief, indigestible meals or perfunctory, joyless encounters with the opposite sex. They may spend vast sums on their flats, but otherwise they do not spend money at all — least of all on sports cars and foreign holidays. There are probably no more than a couple of thou- sand of them in the country, and the fact that billions of pounds' worth of advertising is directed towards them is one of the great absurdities of our age. As for the Dinks, the childless young couples, both employed, it is my observation that they are nearly all crippled by their mortgage repay- ments and considerably poorer than I am at 55, married for 34 years with four grown-up children and five grand-daughters.

I would not be repeating my familiar plaint that all money spent appealing to the young is money wasted, unless it advertises jeans and trainers, because that is all they will ever buy, if my case had not received massive support this week from a most unlikely source. Demos, the independent think-tank, has invested huge resources in surveys, interviews and other research to produce a 160-page report called Freedom's Children: work, relationships and politics for 18-34-year-olds in Britain today. It is tediously written and unacceptably statist in its conclusions — 'Action is needed to reduce conflict as the old get richer and the young poorer' — but some of the evidence it produces is impressive:

Grey power looks set to increasingly domi- nate [sic] leisure and consumer spending.(58). Well Off Older People, the 'Whoopie gener- ation', are enjoying a prosperous old age(59) while people in their 40s and 50s have enjoyed the good luck of sustained growth and rising house prices and are likely to fur- ther redefine old age as an opportunity to travel and experiment.(60).

This is the sort of thing I have been say- ing in The Spectator for 28 years — I hope more elegantly than the authors of Free- dom's Children — but I have never been able to supply the source references 58, 59, 60. These are variously market reports and maps, Working Paper no. WSP/55 from the

Welfare State Programme 1991, and the Henley Centre for Forecasting Vol. 2 2-3. I have always had to rely on my own observa- tion, and nobody need attach any credence to that. The Henley Centre's Planning for Social Change programme points out that the 'twenty-something generation are financially worse off than preceding gener- ations and face the prospect of declining real incomes':

If the plight of the new generation, relative to that of its parents, becomes more widely understood, it is quite conceivable that pres- sure on the older generation to make its share of sacrifices — and to sustain the mid- dle-class ideal of its children — will intensify.

So stuck in the mud are the authors that they see a reduction in the state old age pension as a means of redressing the bal- ance, as if the state old age pension had anything to do with the Whoopie genera- tion. They dismiss the idea of abolishing inheritance tax as an irrelevance, and seem pained that British youth directs its resent- ment at government rather than older generations.

The truth is that there is already enor- mous pressure to ensure that in 20 years' time British pensioners will be begging in the street or trying to sell toothbrushes as Russian pensioners do in Moscow. The pressure does not come from the young, who are much too goofy to identify their own interests, but from Mr Clarke's disas- trous inability to control public expendi- ture. We will have no savings left because the Government will have spent them all. Next year we will see a £300 billion public expenditure bill and most probably a £65 billion deficit.

The only way our inefficient work force has been able to compete in world markets since the war has been by devaluing the pound. British determination to remain outside the common European currency shows that we do not have the slightest will to put our house in order, just as the Gov- ernment's terrified refusal to reduce public expenditure shows that it lacks the courage to govern.

The best calculation must be that the present system will last out our time. Per- haps it will, perhaps it won't. The only sen- sible thing to do with money is to lay down a large cellar of good French wine while you can still buy it and make whoopie as soon as you can't.