In the last decade, constant headlines have made reference to the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’. This phrase is now synonymous with the fact that millennials and younger generations depend on their parents for financial support when buying their first home.

These conversations tend to come in two flavours. The first tastes of avocado toast and takeaway coffee. It relies on conservative constructions of young people as ill-disciplined and work-shy, more interested in spending their money on little luxuries than on saving for a more concrete investment.

The second is both harsher on the palate and harsher to digest. It explores the bleak economic landscape that millennials now face, where home ownership is understood as impossible without parental support. Focus is drawn on the generationally unfair conditions in which first-time buyers now find themselves and the hostility of the current economy to young workers. Billions, maybe trillions, of pounds are expected to be handed down to the adult children of baby boomer parents over the next few decades, either as gifts or inheritance.

According to asset management company Schroders, the average UK home costs around nine times the average earnings. The continued creeping-up of these prices, coupled with the stagnation of wages since the global financial crisis of 2008, means house prices haven’t been this out-of-step with earnings since 1876.

Narratives around the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ often assume parental support is widely available, even a ubiquitous practice, especially in London and the South East, which still dominates these conversations. It is, of course, right to highlight the unfairness of young people needing to rely on handouts from their parents and that it is near – if not actually – impossible for them to earn enough money without that help.

Less attention, however, is paid to the fact that many do not have access to this kind of gifted wealth. Far from ubiquitous, inherited wealth is a huge driver of inequality, and the distance between the haves and have-nots is growing wider by the year. As David Swift has noted in Tribune, this focus on generational inequalities obscures far more important class inequalities.

That said, it’s fair to say that successive governments have also prioritised the preservation of wealth among older voters over the inequalities faced by younger generations. Preserving house prices, along with their current level of growth, is also politically expedient; one can only imagine the media storm against a government which presided over falling property values.

Media hysteria over the recent budget’s modest levy on wealthy farmers transferring property to their children illustrates the challenges in tackling these inequalities. The conversation was dominated by voices concerned that property owners could be ‘stung’ when it comes time to pass on their wealth. The measure was framed as anti-meritocratic; as David Alexander of The Scotsman saw it, ‘Inheritance tax is already a tax on thrift, on hard work, and on saving, yet politicians have consistently seen it as an easy cash grab.’ The status quo assumption here is that older generations have worked hard for their property, wealth, and the stability these bring, and that such taxation policies punish that behaviour.

This makes for an interesting comparison to how social inequalities are challenged in policies aimed at younger people. For decades, politicians of all stripes have championed ‘social mobility’, with education and educational opportunities positioned as key. Indeed, the overarching theme in both policy and, increasingly, the cultural imagination is that education is the factor that influences whether a person is socially mobile; that through access to a good quality education, working-class people can surpass the boundaries of their working-class backgrounds.

As with the inheritance tax discussion, there is an underlying assumption here that these pathways are meritocratic, and that success can be understood in these individualised terms. But even in cases where an individual does manage to knuckle down, work hard, and raise their class status, the extent to which this can achieve genuine social mobility is capped by the huge rise in gifted and inherited wealth we are currently witnessing, and can see coming ten-fold on the horizon.

In reality, we are sitting on an inheritance timebomb. It means that even upwardly mobile working-class millennials — who came of age under the New Labour government and have constantly been fed a policy diet of social mobility, meritocracy, and ‘education, education, education’ — can never catch up with their middle-class peers if they aren’t set to inherit wealth or property. This is the case even if their earnings or job status far exceeds that of their parents. Very few jobs can compensate for the huge transfer of wealth looming in the next couple of decades as boomer parents pass on their property.

The received wisdom on categorising someone’s class background at present is to ask what their parents did for a living. Though this framing eschews some of the complex cultural elements of class systems and classifications, it does provide a fundamental foundation for understanding class background: if your mum worked in a supermarket, you are probably safe to identify as working-class. If your mum worked as a university lecturer, you’re probably middle class. If your mum worked as an investment banker, or is a minor royal, you may even be upper class.

But things are changing, and these traditional ways of defining class membership are becoming less applicable today. With the vast sums of money involved in wealth and property transfer over the next few decades, this pattern looks likely to continue and intensify. For future generations, the more useful questions might be: did your (great-)grandparents own property?