[2 articles]
Baby boomers are not responsible for society's ills
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/29/baby-boomers-generation-gap
It is far too simplistic to describe a whole generation as selfish
Bryn Jones and Mike O'Donnell
29 July 2010
Francis Beckett attempts to tar a whole generation with the sins of
social and economic selfishness (The grasping generation, 6 July)
[see below]. The thrust of his analysis is that "we", the baby boom
generation, "trashed" the "wonderful inheritance" provided after the
second world war in which "pretty well everyone could read and
write fairly fluently" and for the first time there was a welfare
state to fall back on and "created a far harsher world for our
children to grow up in".
He portrays those born between the mid-1940s and mid-1950s as
"stingy" about paying for generalised welfare, and having "formed a
government" under Tony Blair to send the young to die in Middle Eastern wars.
Our book, on the long-term fate of the boomers' initial radicalism,
contradicts this picture in three main respects. Firstly, the
idealism of the boomer generation has by no means been dominated by
individualistic materialism or lifestyle conservatism. Swaths of 60s
radicals became campaigners for sexual, gender and ethnic liberation.
Tens of thousands joined and energised the radical labour movement
campaigns to defend and advance the welfare state during the 70s and
80s. Blair's first cabinet was, of course, largely boomers and did
send young British soldiers to war by deceitful means. Yet their
culpability was probably exceptional. How many boomers were either
anti-war organisers, or participants amongst the millions in the
biggest anti-war demonstration Britain has ever seen?
Secondly, blaming the boomers for corrupting paradise from warping
the NHS to no longer seeing education "as a good in itself" assumes
a fantastical uniformity. In the 1960s, perhaps more than now, age
cohorts were divided by class, gender and race. As minority
"escapees" from male-dominated industrial areas, we can both verify
that the "ladder of opportunity" which Beckett accuses the 60s
generation of "pulling up", was non-existent for most.
Thirdly, even if we reduce the malign group to the educated and
career elites, the characterisation would still be too homogenous.
Political diversity typified the development of the boomers' post-60s
consciousness. Where there is consistency it is in the continuity
between many radical boomers' youthful and more mature values. For
feminists in particular, open, supportive and non-hierarchical
networking has sustained them throughout their lives. Sixties
activists can also claim to have spearheaded, by protest and example,
major changes in race relations.
It was an older generation of politicians in the Thatcher/Major
governments which set the anti-welfare, pro-market political mould
which Beckett associates with the boomers. He does progressive
thinking a disservice by repeating the hackneyed mantra of the
"selfish 60s" generation. By following the Conservative higher
education minister David Willetts in this respect he distracts
attention from the real architects of increasing economic inequality,
and from the more fundamental solutions which many maligned boomers
have consistently advocated.
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Baby boomers: powerful and selfish
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/05/baby-boomers-voting-muscle
We've had the best of times. Now we're using our voting muscle to
ensure our children inherit a far harsher world
Francis Beckett
5 July 2010
The one piece of good news in the budget was that George Osborne
restored the link between state pensions and earnings, which Margaret
Thatcher broke in 1980. Osborne's decision comes just in time for the
baby boomers the children of the 1960s to benefit.
But for the children of the baby boomers, governments offer only
misery. Higher education minister David Willetts has made it clear
that students' fees are going to go up. A lot. Baby boomers, born
between 1945 and 1955, paid no fees at all when they were students in
the free and carefree 60s.
Today, because people are living longer, baby boomers are a much more
powerful political force than 55- to 65-year-olds have ever been
before. And they are exercising their political muscle on their own
behalf. Any government that fails to give the baby boomers what they
want, even at the expense of younger generations, is in for severe
punishment at the ballot box, according to research from the thinktank Demos.
I'm a fully paid up baby boomer. My tonsils rest, no doubt carefully
preserved, in an NHS hospital. When I got polio (from which I made a
complete recovery) my parents did not have to worry about enormous
medical bills, as their parents would have done. Aneurin Bevan's NHS
the greatest civilising measure ever undertaken by a British
government saw me right.
When I went to university, my widowed mother being demonstrably
penniless, I received not only free education, but a student grant
that I could live on in term-time. For the first time, proletarian
and regional accents were heard throughout the British university
system, and their owners were no longer made to feel out of place.
Neil Kinnock, as he famously told the Welsh Labour party conference
in 1987, was "the first Kinnock in a thousand generations" to have a
university education.
We are the first generation in which pretty well everyone can read
and write fairly fluently. We had the freedom that comes from not
having to fear starvation if your employer fires you: there were
other jobs to go to, and a welfare state to fall back on. These
things made possible the freedom of the 60s.
And what did we do with this wonderful inheritance? We trashed it.
We created a far harsher world for our children to grow up in. It was
as though we decided that the freedom and lack of worry which we had
inherited was too good for our children, and we pulled up the ladder
we had climbed.
Six decades after its birth, Britain's welfare state is in the worst
danger it has known. Commentators and politicians sneer at it and
undermine it while legislators chip away at it. The political will in
the Labour party that created it has gone.
More and more bits of the health service cost more and more. The
principle that no one should die of a treatable disease was breached
long ago. For years, no politician could safely criticise the NHS
without courting the severest electoral punishment, but now some top
Conservatives are saying that the NHS isn't "relevant in the 21st century".
The welfare state is starved of money, and struggling under the
weight of great, bullying, bureaucratic initiatives designed to give
it the appearance of a market, because nothing that does not look
like a market is apparently acceptable in the Britain the baby boomers built.
Most capital expenditure for education and health no longer comes
from the present-day taxpayer, but from the next generation, because
the baby boomers have been too stingy to pay for it. This trick is
done by means of the private finance initiative (PFI), a scam for
getting the cost of public buildings such as schools and hospitals
off the present government's books, and placing them on the books of
governments 10 or 20 years hence.
The freedoms the baby boomers fought for, they deny to their
children. "Hoodie" was just a name for a garment in fashion with
children and teenagers, until it was demonised by people who were
young and fashionable in the 60s. Teenagers under legal drinking age
have a dramatically reduced range of options for a good night out.
Pubs and clubs are barred to them, far more effectively and
efficiently than they were ever barred to us. We force our children
into the school uniforms we rejected, partly because they help the
police to recognise those who ought to be at school. It is like
making them wear prison uniform so they will be instantly
recognisable when they scale their prison walls.
Education is no longer seen as a good in itself, but as the
acquisition of the skills required to swell someone else's profits.
New Labour abolished the higher education department, and placed its
responsibilities under the department dealing with business and
industry, a pretty good indication of what ministers now think
education is for. The new higher education minister, David Willetts,
has made several speeches since the election, and has not yet once
mentioned any sort of education that does not provide marketable skills.
Harold Wilson saved the baby boomers from having to fight alongside
young Americans in Vietnam. When the baby boomer generation formed a
government, its prime minister, Tony Blair, told lies to the young so
that he could send them to fight alongside the Americans in Iraq.
Opinion polls show that the now elderly baby boomers will use their
increasing voting power to ensure that when the bad times come, the
young are hit first, even though it is by a chancellor of the
exchequer who was not even born until the 60s were over. When the
baby boomers were young, they believed society could afford student
grants; now they are old, they think it can afford pensions. I say it
can afford both but only if young and old alike learn to care for each other.
.
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