SUNDAY, 4 MAY 2025

I’ve become a cultural dinosaur. I’ve switched off from contemporary music, film and TV and I know almost nothing about them. I realise that many will see this as a surrender, a sad retreat into the past and a checking out from current social and cultural reality. But I’d counter that there comes a time when we are no longer in the loop and it’s better to accept this and be ready to pass on the baton to those who are much younger. I’m happy to live in the past, at least culturally, and to take only those features of the contemporary world which I can use, such as the internet, and pay little attention to the others.

I was part of the Baby Boomer generation in post-war Britain. Born too late to be sent to fight in a war or have memories of rationing, and also lucky enough to avoid conscription, our youthful years were charmed compared to those of our parents, especially those of us who were born into the working class. This was the era when the poor had free healthcare, welfare and education, including in my own case seven years of grants to study at university with all the tutoring fees paid by the government. And we also faced a job market with almost zero unemployment so we could pick and choose what we wanted to do and companies had to compete to hire us by offering things like sports and social clubs with subsidised food and beer. Happy days.

We could also choose not to work, as I did for long stretches, because there was a benefits system which allowed me to ‘sign on’ once a fortnight and pick up my social security giro, which I could exchange for cash at the local post office. (My friend Nelly and I used to go and play bingo with this, among an army of little old ladies who were unbelievable bingo demons able to work ten cards at the same time.) If ever there’s a good time to be young and poor, surely this was it. I was effectively financed by the government to play bingo and then further my personal education by lazing around on the dole, staying in my home, reading books and listening to music.

Plus the counter-culture was happening all around us. I was born a little too late to be a bona-fide hippie and was then a fraction too early to be a fully-fledged punk (these tiny differences in age matter a lot when we’re young), but the rebellious ideas were swirling around in the air, aided by the music we loved. Looking back, how hugely I must have disappointed my working-class parents, who had been told by my teachers when I was five years old that one day I would be a professor (as my mother loved to recall), and there I was, throwing it all away. My father died just before I finished the sixth form (the UK equivalent of high school) but it must have been especially difficult for him, who had been forced to leave school at the age of fourteen to go out and earn money for his family, so I’m glad he never saw me ‘dropping out’.

How pampered and privileged we were, how little we realised it, and how ungrateful we seem in retrospect. With the arrogance of youth, we thought we knew it all, dismissing the blood, toil, tears and sweat that our parents had gone through to give us all they could, things which had not been available to them. But we were above this day-to-day struggle, or so some of us thought; we didn’t want to become ‘breadheads’ or part of the corporate machine. We liked to think we rejected the grind of the nine-to-five as part of a noble anti-materialism, and we were going to live our lives to higher standards and worthier ambitions than the benighted generation which brought us up.

Far from everyone saw things this way, though, even if documentaries about ‘the sixties’ suggest a mass movement among the young. For most of my classmates at school, the future was going to be a lifetime in the factories (or that was how it seemed, until Thatcherism led to them all closing as manufacturing was outsourced to Asia). The group to which I felt I belonged was a small tranche of young people who saw ourselves as an intellectual, political and even spiritual avant-garde which imagined it could transform this fallen world. We believed we were the cause of the social changes happening around us when essentially they were the effect of post-war reconstruction and a brief economic moment when the ruling classes desperately needed labour, perhaps similar in nature to the weakening of feudalism following the Black Death. It was naive of us to overestimate our own agency, of course, and we were riding on the back of our parents’ sacrifices, but there was also a genuine idealism in there somewhere.

But if we compare life now for young people and life as it was for us then, we have to say that we failed and the system survived us, and even thrived. In my own case, for example, faced with a lifetime of tedious office work once it got harder to game the system and get my dole cheque, I soon opted to go to university as a ‘mature student’ (although I was only twenty-five), all expenses paid. Practicality, and probably boredom, pushed us towards this move to drop back in, and the heady hippie dreams were soon a disappearing sight in our rear-view mirror. I guess we helped along some significant trends in terms of changing the general culture, changes which are now the target of right-wing ideologues intent on igniting culture wars to push gay people back into the closet, women back into the kitchen, and trans people to the J.K.Rowling Internment Camp for detransitioning. But if our aim was to take down capitalism and set up a more caring system, we didn’t merely fail but we accelerated the car down the cul-de-sac of mass consumerism.

My generation was effectively bought off. The most important part of this revolved around housing policy. When I was born, many of the working class lived in what was called council housing, which meant it was owned by the local authority which rented it out to people at a relatively low price. This more or less guaranteed that everyone had a roof over their head (although the famous drama, Cathy Come Home, showed that this was not always the case). But council housing – and particularly council estates – soon gained a stigma, while owning your own property was mostly just a dream for the poor. Then legislation was introduced which enabled and encouraged working class people to take out a mortgage and buy their council property at way below the market value and, unsurprisingly, many tenants rushed to do so.

I don’t like to put forward ‘human nature’ as part of an argument because often this is just a veil for lazy thinking – who can confidently say what ‘human nature’ is? – but those of us against this sell-off of public housing never really understood why people in their millions jumped at this chance and we lost both the argument and the political struggle. The ruling classes had realised that one way of making people resistant to change and conservative in general outlook, and also in party allegiance, was to offer them something which would raise them one small step above their neighbours; most importantly, however, this was a higher status they could lose if they didn’t stay on the treadmill and do the nine-to-five (a treadmill which has now turned for many into three zero-hour contracts in order to merely survive).

So in the end, in my opinion, the working class lost much more than they gained: many of the benefits which my generation took for granted, since we never realised how much could be taken away and how easily this could happen. Homelessness, for example, has rocketed now that a rump is all that exists of council housing. But the biggest long-term loss to social mobility is possibly free tertiary education, because unless they do a degree like medicine or law which is eventually going to pay them back and truly be an investment in their future, teenagers from poorer families with parents who cannot subsidise their education are going to leave university burdened with enormous debt and in possession of a degree which might not even help them to do more than land a job flipping burgers. Not surprisingly, all the data suggests that social mobility has gone backwards since I were a lad. Social resentment, on the other hand, seems to be positively thriving, stoked by a malevolent right-wing.

So I understand young people today if they curse my g-g-generation. We were given so much and took it and kept on taking, with little concern for those who followed us. Far from being anti-materialistic, we embraced consumer capitalism with gusto, abandoning the ashrams and the retreats for the shopping malls. Meanwhile, the leading lights of hippiedom turned into entrepreneurs heading the kind of greedy corporations they had once castigated and threatened to smash. So the generations after us Boomers are left in a world on the brink of ecological collapse and menaced by the return of neo-fascism, and all that is left of our legacy is some pretty good music and a heap of sanctimonious bullshit.

My only defence of my post-war generation is that people often do things which result in long-term harm to themselves, not because they are wicked and not necessarily because they are stupid, but because intelligent collective action is very hard to plan and manage. We like to imagine that we are generally in charge of our destinies, on both a personal and societal level, but the reality is usually the opposite. And things were ripe for change after the economic failures of the 70s. Plus the right-wing politicians who emerged in the UK at that time were not the demented James-Bond villains of today’s crop of neo-fascists: half melodrama monsters twirling their moustaches, half vicious trolls motivated by malice and greed, and dreaming of a goose-step future. The Thatcherites were smart and knew what they were doing: they knew exactly which buttons to push to get people to buy into their agenda even at an ultimate cost to themselves.

So I guess I’m making a plea not to judge my generation too harshly, even if we sold you down the river. Although as I pick up my state pension while you contemplate a future where there will be no such thing and you’ll be left to die on the street if your bank account is empty, I understand completely if you thrust your middle finger in my face.