Out of Time (8 page)

On my birthday in 2010, I logged on to the internet only to find the BBC homepage adorned with a denunciation of ‘my generation’. Headline space had been given over this time to Neil Boorman, the author of
It’s All Their Fault
, indicting those of us who have reached our sixties for … well, for what, exactly? We have been blamed for every social and moral blight, from housing and fiscal crises to environmental pollution, while also being held responsible for all the insecurities, moral laxities and any other imputed fears, anxieties or vices of the generation we reared.
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I couldn’t clear my head of the refrain of one particular song, containing the trite rhyme ‘Every generation, blames the one before, and all of their frustrations, come beating on your door.’ Mike Rutherford wrote the words for Paul Carrack’s best-selling single, ‘The Living Years’, at the close of the 1980s, when he was mourning his own father’s
recent death, before the silence over their disagreements had been broken.

By 2010, however, it had become increasingly clear that it was not just the younger generation individually echoing Larkin’s famous filial lament about the ways in which ‘man hands on misery to man’.
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Accompanying any Oedipal drama and personal grievance, there is nowadays a fully orchestrated mainstream media festival designed to direct the resentment of younger generations towards the older. All the quality papers in the UK picked up the same theme. The business pages of the
Guardian
ran with the alliterative headline ‘The inadvertent burden baby boomers have bequeathed the young is sending Britain broke’, while the
Telegraph
proclaimed that ‘Baby boomers made sacrifice a dirty word – but the young are fighting back’.
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It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the manipulation of generational conflict reveals the obvious role of shifting economic forces in the portrayal of different age groups. They have been positioned as competing directly against each other for cherished resources. The chief target of assault at any particular moment moves with the impact of job markets, unemployment, social tensions and, especially, calls upon whatever state funding remains available. With life expectancy increasing in most parts of the world, it is obvious that the issue of pensions is indeed one in need of serious attention. However, as the British left historian Robin Blackburn argues, there are many ways of tackling the needs of the elderly and creating a fairer pension system without resulting in any crisis. He points out that, on current trends, by the mid twenty-first century over a billion of the world’s ageing population will be living in poverty. However, Blackburn adds that there are ways of funding a
global pension for the elderly. He names three in particular that he sees as highly suited to the task: ‘a small tax on international currency transactions, a levy on the fuel used on international flights and a mild tax on corporate wealth’. The first source is similar to the much-disputed Tobin Tax, which places a small levy on the sale or purchase of currencies, and which Blackburn estimates could yield at least $150 billion annually.
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The idea that the ‘politics’ of an entire population of the new elderly could be declared ‘selfish’ might seem obviously rather dim-witted, nevertheless the Minister of State for Universities and Science, David Willetts, regarded as one of the key thinkers of the Tory Party, put his authority behind such attacks in his book
The Pinch
. Ignoring altogether the role of the banks, whose reckless gambling and gigantic accumulation of personal wealth resulted in the UK government taking on a massive burden of debt to bail them out, Willetts blamed the current crisis on ‘the self-interest and electoral dominance of the huge generation of baby-boomers’, summed up in his provocative subtitle: ‘How the baby-boomers took their children’s future – and why they should give it back’.
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Repeating this divisive mantra, iconoclastic journalist Neil Boorman claimed to have found a new myth to trash – it is not the young but the old who are selfish: ‘The richest, most powerful generation that ever lived is embarking on a comfortable retirement. But why does it feel like they’ve pulled up the ladder with them?’

Boorman was promoting his own polemical manifesto inciting generational battle,
It’s All Their Fault
, as a call to arms for the young to line up against the older generation:

This is a terrible time to be young. Graduates are joining the dole queue as soon as they leave university, while their parents retire on cosy nest eggs … Young families are struggling to provide the basics as their grandparents embark on another cruise. The prospect of paying off that debt and saving for a deposit for a one-bedroom flat is remote, and it is all the fault of our parents. Anyone under the age of thirty-five is living in the shadow of the Baby Boomer Generation who grew up in an era of rapidly growing prosperity, drew wages from jobs for life, got their education for free, and bought multiple cars and TVs that they didn’t need. The enormous financial debt we’ve been handed comes from both their megalomania of overspending and their reckless economic and political decision-making.
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Mea Culpa

For many young people this is indeed a very hard and depressing time. However, what is perhaps most startling about the careless and pejorative dismissal of the Baby Boomers is that much of it comes not just from the right, eager to divert us from the depredations of deregulation and neo-liberalism, but from public figures who have been associated more with the left, the Labour Party, and trade unions as well. On top of this, the critique is espoused as much by the old themselves, as by the young. Following Boorman’s call to arms, inciting the young against the old, the life-long Labour supporter and journalist Francis Beckett, launched his own very similar critique:
What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do for Us?
, with its now familiar subtitle,
How the Children of the Sixties Lived the Dream and Failed the Future
.
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It is the legacy of the’60s generation itself they love to trash, with its counter-culture and alternative media committed to
sexual permissiveness, anti-war activities, notions of participatory democracy and redistributive and egalitarian politics.
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However, for many of these mea culpa boomers, the ’60s call for change is bizarrely inverted. Dissident voices are held responsible for the subsequent victory of those whose whole political outlook was precisely geared to condemning, and soon enough successfully reversing, that ’60s heritage. Somehow, the moral conservatism and reification of unregulated markets that Margaret Thatcher managed to install at the heart of British government at the close of the 1970s can be rolled into a
single
heritage, with the losers in this political confrontation simply swallowed up and spat out as if we had all raced to embrace the victors. In Beckett’s obtuse summary:

What began as the most radical-sounding generation for half a century turned into a random collection of youthful style gurus, sharp-toothed entrepreneurs and management consultants who believed revolution meant new ways of selling things; and Thatcherites, who thought freedom meant free markets, not free people … While the philosophy of the sixties seemed progressive at the time, the Baby Boomers we remember are not the political reformers, but the millionaires.
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The Baby Boomers ‘we’ remember arrive absent of all the ’60s radicals I recall, from Stuart Hall, Tariq Ali, Adrian Mitchell, Harold Pinter, Tom McGrath and David Widgery, not all of whom are still with us, to the few women whose voices were heard in that decade, and which would grow ever louder in the following one: Margaret Drabble, Angela Carter, Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, to name only a handful of those notable in the UK.

Deluged by this flood of denunciations of our generation, some of the scapegoats have joined the chorus. ‘Mea culpa’ has become a favourite position for ageing media pundits to occupy. Will Hutton, Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, and a prestigious economics journalist, has been pursuing the same theme and himself fanning the flames of resentment: ‘A sixty-year-old in 2010 is a very privileged and lucky human being – an object of resentment as much as admiration.’ ‘I’m at the heart of it – guilty as charged’, Hutton continues, ‘I have some sympathy with the resentment, marshalled in a cluster of recent anti-boomer books. Individually, we may not have been the authors of today’s flux, uncertainty and lack of social and cultural anchors, but we were at the scene of the crime.’ I guess we can only hope that this ‘judge’ is not placed on any actual judiciary. Hutton is wrong when he attempts to amalgamate the different strands of union politics and the counter-culture of the iconic ’60s: ‘the shop steward movement of the 1960s and its wildcat strikes were inextricably linked to hippies, smoking dope, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the rapidly growing women’s movement’. As any study of their publications would reveal, these strands were usually considerably at odds with each other. He is even less convincing in his claim that ‘paradoxically the same liberal culture fed the desire to dismantle the regulation of banks and the constraints of the postwar fixed exchange rate system’. Summing up this slippery causal nexus, where those defeated in the battles of recent history are held equally responsible for all they fought against, Hutton concludes:

Looking back you can see how 1968 led to the futile confusion of the 1970s, the certainties of Thatcherism and the great mindless credit-induced boom of the 1990s and 2000s – credit rolling out of the great deregulated banks and building societies … Privatisation and the curbing of the union movement had grown seamlessly out of our revolts of the 1960s – even using our language of freedom.
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Seamlessly? Only for those who determinedly avert their eyes from the crooked stitching.

No doubt it is the pervasiveness of this climate of rhetorical chastisement, so expedient in cost-cutting times, that leads even a few of those who have been dissenters to accept Hutton’s smug declaration of collective guilt on ‘our’ behalf. When a sample of well-known ageing politicians and cultural figures were asked to respond to Hutton’s ‘guilty’ verdict on them all as a group, they accepted at least part of his argument. Being themselves all highly successful professionally, these public figures were perhaps more easily prone to feeling reprimanded: ‘I know how lucky my generation has been and how weirdly we have kept riding the wave of our times and are still out there … My generation is guilty of heedlessness, I can see that now’, Marina Warner comments; ‘We have left this country bankrupt’, film-maker Nick Bloomfield concurs; ‘We have failed dismally’, Labour MP Ken Livingstone agrees, though going on to add that ‘what ordinary people did during that time was fine. The failure has been at the political level.’ More usefully, the writer Lisa Appignanesi offers just a pinch of historical complexity: ‘Reality is ever recalcitrant to our hopes. We failed to bring social justice to all or distribute the benefits of periods of affluence. But many of us still try … Milton Friedman and Maggie Thatcher were not baby boomers … and I don’t think we can be held responsible for all the excesses of an economic liberalism they brought in their train.’
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Nor do I.

Without doubt, all sorts of mistakes were made by militant trade unionists, liberation movements, as well as by the organized far left and Labour Party activists. There were, however, very clear dividing lines. Thatcher and her kind were always the harshest critics of each and all the radical movement of the 1960s, while those shop-stewards, anti-war activists, dope-smokers and budding women’s liberationists, if they agreed on anything at all, it would be on the need to curtail the power of banks. Of course, they were not in agreement about exactly how to do this, whether by nationalizing the banks or by creating alternative cooperative ventures. Feminists in particular were hardly in favour of dismantling state regulation. On the contrary, we were calling for government legislation on equal pay, anti-discrimination and a strengthening of the interventionist policies of the state to create greater gender equality and more democratically run community resources, as part of a broader promotion of social justice, environmental harmony and an end to all forms of violence, nationally and internationally.

Entering old age, almost all those leftists and feminists I knew forty years ago hold much the same political views now as then. There is no shortage of older radicals who continue to support struggles for justice, equality and a safer, greener, more peaceful world. Where possible, we often contribute to or even help organize resistance – even if we are nowadays banging our frailer heads against far thicker walls, alongside an emerging array of youthful rebels and militants. From what I read, as well as hear at meetings and on demonstrations I attend, it is clear that it is as often as not those over sixty, the supposedly ‘selfish’ boomer generation, who still worry most about the rising inequalities and other social hazards of our time. Here
is the prominent writer and critic Marina Warner again, recalling the passionate days of women’s liberation and left politics in the early ’70s: ‘I’m heartbroken that we were defeated, politically, culturally. I’m also sad for the next generation. The kind of hopefulness, the energy that buoyed one up in those days, is something nobody with any kind of sophistication can really entertain now. You can’t believe there is something to be done that can be done by you’ – as she explained to that creative chronicler of the ‘psychogeography’ of contemporary London life, Ian Sinclair.
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Today, she speaks out loudly and often against the rising inequality and injustices of the present, far more than she did forty-odd years ago. As Sinclair notes in a series of interviews with these activists, all now, like him, in their sixties: ‘Women, I felt, carried the memory-burden of their cultural heritage more effectively than men: less ego, less noise, intimate details of ordinary life lightly held.’ There may be something in what he says, though perhaps it is a little too generalized, especially when that cultural heritage is one of social and political engagement. Nevertheless, he adds: ‘So many men of the 1960s had creased and crumpled, waiting for the tide to turn. Incubating disaffection. Nourishing unpublished memoirs, boxes of dead photographs. Unrequired confessions.’
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