If a few dilettantes take their overpriced MBAs to warmer climes with cheaper gadgets, runs the general view, good riddance. But footloose does not always equal feckless. Increasingly, our generation looks at its future in Britain and sees a flashing red pound sign. The Treasury may think it has fooled us with all those accounting tricks to keep its borrowing off the books. But we know who will have to foot the bills for the old, the sick, the trains and hospitals. We may not vote often, we may not “engage” much in the “community” because we work so late. We may be mere blips on the radar screen of public policy. But it would be unwise to take us for granted.

It’s not that we expected an easy ride. When I graduated in the early 1990s, few jobs were for life and most of us would have felt claustrophobic making such a commitment. We didn’t expect the State or the job to provide an adequate pension. Last year’s media haroosh about the demise of final salary pensions was irritating to people of my age whose employers long ago switched younger workers into inferior schemes. We never whinged about that; most of us expected to pay our own way. But otherwise we did expect a level playing field. We are not wild about picking up the tab for older people who have jaunted round the world on fancy tours since they retired at 50, resting on the accidental laurels of exponential house price rises and corporate pensions that our generation can only marvel at as a historical anachronism. As these fiftysomethings discover their pensions are not worth what they expected, that they will live longer than they thought and that they want every health cure the NHS can provide, they are looking just as feckless — living now and paying later — as they accuse their children of being.

The think-tank Reform suggests that those now under 35 are the first generation that will pay for a welfare state from which it will derive comparatively little benefit itself. It has labelled them the IPOD generation: Insecure, Pressured, Over-taxed and Debt-ridden. Younger people are paying twice for pensions because State protection will have receded by the time they are old. Stamp duty has helped to drive the number of first-time buyers to a record low. Ministers are herding too many students into universities to do courses that will not pay off. The NHS naturally benefits the old disporportionately: in 2003 annual NHS spending per head was £350 for those aged 16 to 44, and £2,650 for those over 65. But those who are retiring now stand to benefit enormously from the huge injections of cash from younger taxpayers.

If the “welfare bargain”, the idea that each generation funds the needs of the preceding one, is really over, this generates some frightening ethical questions. A GP I met recently said that she has seen three elderly patients with aortic aneurysms in the past four months. You cannot refuse an 80-year-old who wants surgery, she said, however risky that may be — and sadly only one has survived. But is it sustainable, she asked. In the next few years she thinks that we will have to debate more seriously how we ration spending on the elderly.

It is easy to label such attitudes selfish: typical of an IPOD generation that has downloaded too much self-importance with the latest James Blunt. Baby-boomers — what we might call the hi-fi generation — will argue that the IPODs are merely frustrated by expectations that are ludicrously high. There is certainly some truth in this: there seems to be no shortage of 23-year-olds who will bemoan their inability to afford an Islington flat to personal finance editors who themselves would never have dreamt of getting on to the housing ladder so young.

The IPOD solution to setbacks has often been to take a year off in the jungle, or indulge in retail therapy. But from where did they download their inflated expectations? From the group that fritters around with monogrammed luggage, sensible shoes and perma-tans, who seem bored with materialism but too immature to find fulfillment. The postwar bulge of baby- boomers is coming to an airport near you, waving their divorce papers over the baggage carousel.

Perhaps commentators of that age should stop whingeing about selfish youth and start to worry about the breakdown of the ties that ought to link the generations. Few people would begrudge the elderly, the infirm, the unemployed, a decent life. But the sense of mutual obligation of which Britain has rightly been so proud has been sustained not by mere goodwill but by the implicit bargain of the welfare state. The gradual breakdown of that bargain, combined with an end to trust in public institutions, puts us in trouble.

The fact is that the group now in its thirties is living a cliché it never thought it would. After the dreamlike twenties we are sandwiched between young children and ageing parents, burdened with mortgages and fears about the decline of civilised life. And we cannot trust the institutions that once served our parents well. In my part of London, the local maternity unit is so overstretched that new mothers have been turned away to have their babies, in terror, on the kitchen floor. The neighbouring streets are clubbing together for private security to replace the non-existent police. The pension providers who advised our age group to contract out of the Serps second pension now tell us — oops! — that this was bad advice.

We are, undoubtedly, a generation that must be self-reliant. But if we can’t depend on anyone else for anything, we might just start to ask why anyone should depend on us. Apparently, a growing number of the 2,000 newly qualified doctors who can’t get jobs in Britain are planing to move to Australia. Let’s not make that a habit.

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