I was invited, along with other spa club members, to take part in a Channel 4 documentary about intergenerational inequality. It’s a horrible sounding phrase – in a nutshell: Richard Branson is entitled to a state pension and a free bus pass.

It’s a subject that exercises me, so I looked into it. It was to be a Current Affairs programme, directed by Fraser Nelson, editor of the Spectator. The Spectator? Really? I looked him up, and was flummoxed that a person who cares about inequality – an advisor for the Centre for Social Justice, no less – could be a supporter of the Conservative party. I wrote in to lodge my concern, and express my own views:

‘It’s extremely clear to me that this inequality exists and that my generation – I think I can just about be included in the term ‘baby boomers’ – have robbed our children. I’m not sure what kind of personal story you’re looking for though, and wonder about the choice of director since Conservative policies have caused or at least grossly exacerbated the problem. Also, by putting the call out to spa members I wonder if you are already hoping to bias the story? I guess most of us are pretty well-heeled (not me!) and there may be even deeper inequalities within each generation than across them.

‘Whereas I had free higher education, my son will have to begin his career with an enormous debt, then do an unpaid internship if he wants to be considered for the best jobs. Whereas I was able to pursue an artistic career because culture used to be valued for its own sake and the welfare state offered a measure of security to those in insecure careers, my son has to think in terms of financial rather than social or spiritual reward. Whereas there used to be plenty of casual work available, my son has to compete even for a low paid job. There were no such things as zero hour contracts when I was his age. There were no young people begging on the street. Tenants had better rights and more affordable rents. You could even squat. Since I was his age the first rung of the ‘property ladder’ has climbed higher and higher out of reach. I wonder at what age he will qualify for a pension? Or a free bus pass?! How much longer will I survive and need looking after than my own parents did? And how much less help will there then be from the NHS?

‘Not only have older generations created an economic nightmare, but we’ve devastated the planet – sucked up finite resources, killed a few species, melted a few ice caps, punctured the ozone layer, and filled the oceans with plastic and nuclear waste. I wonder which generation will have to suffer the consequences and sort it all out?

‘But this isn’t a personal story, so it probably won’t liven up your programme!’

I wound up speaking to the researcher, and tried to explain my hesitation, my view that Thatcherite policies and economics had something to do with the problem, and that my emphasis would be on the greater inequalities across and within generations: there’s a wider gap between rich and poor now than there was fifty years ago. (Britain is one of the most unequal countries in Europe; we follow close on the heels of the USA in all things it seems.)

With great charm the researcher assuaged my concerns, and by the end of the phone call I’d agreed to go and be interviewed. She especially liked the bit where I’d said that there was inequality within the baby boomer generation, because for me the state pension seems to be an ever receding goal; I’d discussed it with an older friend, who thought she was probably born in the perfect year: 1948. The NHS came into being at the same time and paid for the care of mother and baby.

As I rehearsed what I’d like to say about it, I remembered my song ‘Sorry Kid’ which perfectly expresses my feelings on the issue. I shot off an email offering it to them, then got completely carried away. I pictured myself and my piano under the spotlight in a darkened room, flanked by Andy Davis on guitar and Si Fish on kaboodle (assuming they would have agreed to it). The music scene is such an important part of Bristol, why shouldn’t there be an artistic response to the question? I wondered about the fees I could get for Si and Andy, and about making sure I’d done all the paper (screen) work to protect my rights!

Why d’you want to do it? asked my son, ever anxious for my welfare. Because I’m a communicator. I like an audience. This’ll be tens of thousands!

In preparation for meeting Fraser Nelson, I read some of his work. It didn’t seem particularly Tory. He writes of the poverty trap, for example, and understands it. I couldn’t argue against any of the pieces I read.

So what is this outfit the Centre for Social Justice? They have a glossy website, awards dinners, a picture of Saint Bob being Master of Ceremonies. It was instituted by Iain Duncan Smith to put ‘social justice at the heart of politics’. Yes that’s the * Brexiteer Iain Duncan Smith who was Cameron’s secretary of state for work and pensions. The one who tried to force people into working for no pay but was scuppered by the European Convention of Human Rights, and when the case went to appeal he tried to change the law. He has a conscience, then? He did resign over Osborne’s punitive austerity budget, after all.

The CSJ is a charity and it works with other charities. It produces ‘evidence based reports’ – an absolute avalanche of nicely designed print. It has identified five drivers of poverty: Family breakdown, Educational failure, Economic dependency and worklessness, Addiction, and Personal debt. At first glance I saw little criticism of current government policy except in the structure of the welfare system.

Here’s an example:

‘Across the UK the CSJ has found the main reason for hope is the work of the voluntary and community sector… They uniquely achieve what the state and the private sectors cannot.’

Cannot? Will not, rather.

‘Social justice is not achieved by focussing on the poverty line or tweaking the benefits budget.

The benefit budget needs more than a tweak and no, it requires political will.

‘Instead, it requires unleashing the work of change in people’s lives to create in them opportunities and hopes for the future, as well as a level playing field for positive choices.’

I’m sorry but that last sentence doesn’t even mean anything. How can you create an opportunity ‘in’ someone? What the fiddle faddle is ‘a level playing field for positive choices’? It’s hogwash, and an insult to the English language.

That’s a typical Tory approach, I thought: abnegate social responsibility and tell a smartly dressed lie. It reminded me a bit of slaver Colston’s alms houses and schools, and all the churches Bristol traders built as a salve for their guilt; using a proportion of their ill-gotten profits to secure a bit of Heaven.

Well, I’ve identified a few more than five drivers of poverty. There are dozens, ushered in by a succession of right wing governments (I include Blair’s, because he did so little to reverse the damage begun by Thatcher). Many of the policies that have degraded the fabric of society, and ruined other social contracts than the one between the generations, were indeed decided by people who grew up in the glory of post-war socialism – that golden age which produced the NHS we will probably soon lose. But Thatcher wasn’t a baby boomer. Labour wasn’t working, so she tripled unemployment in her first year. That was two million people. Unemployment was quite useful because it kept inflation down, for a while.

Deregulation, that’s the big one. Since Thatcher’s financial reforms, banks can invest in whatever rubbish will make them a short-term profit, while remaining coupled to the high street banking needs of the general population so that their survival is a political necessity. That’s not even a free market. Individual bankers carry on creaming off their outrageous bonuses while doing nothing whatever for society as a whole. For society the result is economic instability. In times of bust, the poor come off worse. It’s Biblical – even that which they have shall be taken away.

Here are a few other poverty drivers:

Financialisation of the economy, the selling off – at a loss! – of public assets (including housing), the knobbling of trade unions, house price inflation (caused by unrestricted bank lending), tax cuts, public spending cuts, abolishment of tenancy rights, lottery funding to replace government funding, over emphasis on defence, – all these were bound (designed) to transfer wealth from poor to rich – and to keep it there! None of this was inevitable.

Other culprits – globalisation, multinational corporate power, technological advance – have simply not been accommodated or responded to with any concern for negative outcomes, including Biblical environmental ones.

For family breakdown read ‘communities destroyed by de-industrialisation’. For educational failure read ‘underfunded schools’. For addiction read ‘the existential despair of the powerless consumer’. For economic dependency read ‘needing money for absolutely everything including water’. For worklessness read ‘robots even take jobs away from immigrants’. For gross personal debt read ‘exploitation’.

I gathered that the general CSJ idea is that people should ‘work their way out of poverty’. Here’s my question: how the fuck are you going to work your way out of poverty if there aren’t enough jobs, and if the jobs there are don’t pay proper wages or give you regular hours? We can’t all be entrepreneurs.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Perhaps the CSJ’s ouptut requires closer study?

Let’s take personal debt, as most of us do. Not everyone realises that about 97% of money in circulation is created by banks and based on debt. Debt makes the world go round; people are encouraged to get into debt – it’s become a normal fact of life for what politicians like to call ‘ordinary’ people.

Instead of thinking about redesigning the way money is created, regulating the banking system, regulating money lending practices, criminalising extortionate interest rates, restricting the advertising of credit, increasing people’s ability to pay by creating jobs, or reducing the need for credit by designing a benefit system which ensures that people’s basic needs are met regardless of whether or not they work, the CSJ suggests countering the problem of personal debt by ‘Investment in Alternative Financial Institutions’, helpfully dubbing them: ‘AFIs’.

Hey, that word alternative sounds great! – Credit Unions? Local Exchange Trading Mechanisms? Time Banks? That’s what we need, I thought – to decouple local economies from the mainstream and the global.

Not a chance!

What the CSJ suggests here is investment in banking that takes account of the poverty of consumers in its provision of financial products and services. It means to replace one form of debt with another. That simply accepts poverty and makes a profit from it, as Wango does, only on more humane terms.

In the latest report I found comments like this:

‘… there is not a set list of products and services people on low incomes need, but rather things that they want to be able to do, such as pay for food and clothes or have enough money to repair their boiler no matter when it breaks.’

Well, yes, they seem to have grasped something there (though is ‘having enough money’ something you ‘do’?). In other words, the sorts of products needed by people on low incomes are food and clothes; the sort of service is fixing the boiler. Forget your financial bollocks, they need higher incomes – adequately paid jobs, or adequate welfare, or a bit of both.

The ‘Centre for Social Justice’ was beginning to sound like Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Peace’ – Newspeak. I’d read enough, because it dawned on me, finally, that my own message about inequality was unlikely to survive the directorial cut of a guy who advises this lot, regardless of his eloquence or sincerity. He won’t see what I see.

I’d already decided to withdraw my participation before discovering the email saying thanks but no thanks for the song. No comment about it. And after I’d written to say that I wouldn’t be taking part after all and apologising for wasting her time, the charming researcher didn’t even reply to say: ‘Thanks for letting us know’. Ah, she’s only charming as a means to an end, whereas I spent quite a bit of time on this for nothing but a say, because I care about the subject. Perhaps that’s an example of intergenerational inequality – the corrosive effect of policies put through by a party which encourages competitive ambition and the pursuit of profit above all other considerations, and whose only generosity is to take tax off charitable donations, giving businesses an extra way of avoiding it in return for free PR. Don’t these people get it? Inequality makes life worse for everyone, rich and poor alike. Lack of money causes misery, but money doesn’t make you happy, especially if you have no time left in the day for simple courtesies. Love makes people happy. Kindness, caring, generosity, togetherness, contribution, community.

Government should work for everybody. But over three quarters of the electorate didn’t vote for the latest shower, which proves that democracy is in tatters – and democracy, proper democracy, is the only force which can counter inequality, bringing in government which represents and serves the poor as well as the rest.

I might have managed to say some of this but it wouldn’t have got into Fraser Nelson’s programme. Out of a population of 64 million you can always get a few people to say what you want. Other people’s words are material, then it’s a case of decontextualising, cutting, pasting and reconstructing. If I want a voice, I’ll have to make my own programme. In the meantime, all I’ve got is this, and here’s a link to my song. (The top one. Only a rehearsal. A proper recording is pending.)

* I was going to write ‘millionaire’ but the word has lost its ring. To be a billionaire is now the thing.