Lest I be accused of denigrating Jon Cruddas, it has to be said that he has emerged as one of the true victors of the Labour deputy leadership contest. To come third, even if not within the membership college, was a real achievement for a candidate who has never had ministerial experience.

Reading Brown’s speech, he has won at least two other victories: firstly, he has got the Labour Party - and everyone else - talking about housing again. For me this is one of the most important issues that must be tackled over the next few years, and a crucial tool in the battle for intergenerational equity and against the extreme right. Of course, the fact that the Housing Minister since before the stone age happens to be married to Gordon Brown’s representative on Earth does suggest that she is not about to be sacked for failing to make progress on this issue, but we can at least hope she will be moved sideways.

Secondly, his pledge to not accept a ministerial post if elected has resulted in Brown pledging that the new deputy leader will do precisely that, making it analagous to the Lib Dems’ Federal President.

I don’t agree with Cruddas on everything, and certainly some of his statements such as his support for raising the basic rate of income tax were too much in Labour’s comfort zone, but the fact that he has done so well in pushing the party’s internal debate forward is to be congratulated by all of us who believe that politics ought to be more about ideas and less about personality.

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In recent months, I’ve noticed a marked increase in media stories about intergenerational equity, pointing out that young people today are up to their eyeballs in debt and struggling to get onto the housing ladder. I suspected there would be a backlash against this, and it would appear that the Observer has started a rearguard action. Apparently we are to believe that Baby Boomers are “broke, ailing and anxious” while Mary Riddell wants us to know that “not everyone can grow old gracefully“. The implication of both these stories is clear: older people need big cash payouts from their kids, and fast.

Some of this stuff stretches credulity. The first story is based around a book called “The Maturing Marketplace: Buying Habits of Baby Boomers and their Parents” by Professor George Moschis. He claims that “boomers are not as financially well-off as their parents; boomers are in worse health than previous generations were at the same age.” This is appears to go against almost everything we know about demographic trends, which indicate that people are increasingly living longer. If Moschis is correct, surely we should have amassed evidence by now to indicate a reversal of this effect, or at least a dramatic levelling off? Or has some new phenomenon emerged that I was previously unaware of, in which poor people in poor health live into their hundreds en masse? Clearly we will have to read the book to find out; the Observer is only interested in the scare story.

Reading between the lines, the pattern that appears to be emerging is that the issue is less that Baby Boomers are deprived compared to their parents, but that they have squandered the opportunities that many of their parents literally died to bring them. They aren’t financially insecure because they lacked opportunities, but because “they have enjoyed spending their money more than saving it” (I still don’t see how this squares with the amount of property owned by Boomers). They eat poorly due to over-indulgence, not malnutrition. They live stressed, vain existences and are terrified about the prospect of old age.

The problem with this story, and Mary Riddell’s piece, is that it doesn’t seem to be telling us anything particularly new, but is nudging us to draw startlingly bad conclusions. We’re supposed to have thought that there is no such thing as geriatric poverty. Has anyone ever said that? The conclusion we are invited to draw is that the young must bail out the young. Mary Riddell smugly points out that “more than 40 per cent of the electorate is over 50,” clearly implying that if the young don’t give it away, the old will simply vote in a government that will take it from us. But the fact of the matter is that while geriatric poverty exists, so, undeniably, does geriatric wealth. Yet Mary Riddell is also quick to point out the so-called scandal that anyone with more than £21,000 in assets is forced to pay for their own social care. Presumably she would prefer it if their wealth could just sit there growing, untouched, while their every whim is cared for by the state.

Dig a little deeper and you often find that the people who shout loudest about pensioner poverty (including, sadly, the Lib Dems in the last General Election), are in fact set on tax breaks and handouts which disproportionately benefit pensioners in a much more stable position. Free nursing care? Of no benefit whatsoever to poor pensioners. Local Income Tax? Ditto. Citizen’s pension? Limited. Yet the cost of such proposals have the effect of making it harder for the next generation to save or to acquire assets, leading to more dependent, asset-poor pensioners in the longer run. Meanwhile the untaxed assets of pensioners that we dare not touch eventually passes down to their children, creating an entrenched them-and-us society of social immobility and an elite able to lord it over an emerging serfdom. We are sliding back into feudalism.

It is precisely this sort of monstrous short-termism that Prof Moschis appears to associate with the Baby Boomers, so don’t expect any great change any time soon. The challenge is for the next generation to develop a wider consciousness. Linked to that is an awareness that our parents appear to lack of the fact that we will get old at some point, and that we need to be prepared - both financially and spiritually.

That spirituality is the key factor. You don’t have to be religious to recognise the limits of materialism (indeed you only have to look around yourself to see that organised religion is riddled with materialism itself). If we are going to survive the 21st century, we are going to need to replace the cult of the individual with a renewed emphasis on co-dependency. It’s anyone’s guess how we do it though.

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I’ve been very good this past month and have managed to keep schtum about the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students’ decision to reject local income tax in preference to land value taxation until after the elections were out of the way. Now I see that the entire motion is up on the ALTER website, I suppose my self denying ordnance can come to an end.

LDYS has a proud history of leading where the party subsequently follows, and I’m hopeful that this will prove to be another example of this. And it is timely, with the National Institute for Economic and Social Research comparing the rise in property prices to the national debt. Aida Edemariam wrote a good summary of how the problem is affecting the whole of the UK in the Guardian on Friday. We have to do something, and a tax on land values is a lot more economically respectable than a crude property tax.

One of the problems the party faced in the latest round of elections was a failure to stand out from amid the crowd. Taking on intergenerational equity would give us a USP. It isn’t simply an old-versus-young issue as older people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time have lost out just as much as the younger generation who are now left with the consequences. The introduction of any new tax could be matched by a cut in other taxes, ranging from existing property taxes such as stamp duty through to income tax. Such a tax shift need not be unpopular.

Fundamentally, we have to tackle this situation whereby people have more incentive to invest in bricks and mortar than in stocks and shares. That is bad for the economy whichever way you look at it. I don’t want to sound all Marxist, but if the political system doesn’t solve this problem, the economic system will do it for us in a way that will be much more painful. I’m amazed that the political class isn’t looking at the emerging picture and isn’t worried. To be fair, some individuals such as Vince Cable and David Willets, have been warning about this for some time, but their views have been falling on deaf ears.

But there is no prospect of Local Income Tax on the horizon. With the combined SNP/Lib Dem seats in the Scottish Parliament 2 short of a majority, it won’t be introduced there. Labour and the Tories have resisted the simple populism of LIT with good reason: they appreciate the danger of scrapping property taxation altogether even if they lack the courage to introduce a proper system that doesn’t have the flaws of council tax. Rather than dismissing this as stupidity, the Lib Dems ought to consider why this is one popular policy our rivals (except for the SNP, which in itself should tell you something) have declined to steal.

I still have high hopes that sooner or later the Lib Dems will realise that this is one issue that we could really make our own. Gordon Brown’s announcement to cut income tax by 2p in the pound has forced us to revisit our taxation policy (it’s amazing how much of the paper we passed last year has been borrowed by the Tories in Labour in such a short space of time). Hopefully, more radical minds will prevail.

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Not much time for blogging at the moment, but I thought I should flag this up now:

The National Institute for Economic and Social Research says in its latest journal that the surge in house prices is one “of the major adverse developments affecting the UK economy over the past 20 years”. The thinktank’s director, Martin Weale, says the rise has a similar effect to rising government debt because it transfers a burden to future generations.

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Critic of Nick Cohen that I tend to be, his contribution this week outlining the problems with the UK housing market is well worth a read.

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