Babybooming
There’s a spookie tone about Neil Boorman’s latest spiffy idea. Neil Boorman has ideas, he’s a writer and music promoter, and one of his most celebrated spectacles of anti-consumerism was to torch his designer wardrobe (he could have given the stuff away!) and live without retail therapy for a year.
His new bad idea is promoted on WWW.itsalltheirfault.com. You might be expecting the banks to appear somewhere in this blame blog. But they don’t. Instead he targets the babyboomers – people born after World War 2, the generation that was blessed by the National Heath Service, free universal education and mass public housing. It seems they were blessed by everything, and now they are blame for everything. Boorman has launched a campaign to kick out the baby boomers – not because of their age, oh no, but because of their generation.
He recommends the hypothesis offered in David Willett’s book, the Pinch, (see my Guardian Comment is Free blog, 21 Feb 2010).
Willetts, a rare thinker among Tories, argues that the babyboomers are the selfish generation: among their many social felonies, they are spendthrifts who have priced their children out of the housing market. Willetts is wrong – it wasn’t the babyboomers who created the crazy housing market, it was Thatcherism in the 1980s, and every government since. It wasn’t the babyboomers who introduced student fees; who sold off 1.7 million council houses; who created the pensions crisis and left the infrastructure to rack and ruin while the people making loadsmoney went on making loadsamoney.
By a sleight of hand, a political project has been re-interpreted as a generational mission.
Thatcherism, albeit audacious and surgically successful in our dysfunctional electoral system, never actually secured a majority of votes cast. But it tilted the centre of gravity of English Parliamentary culture to the right. And there – alone in these islands - it has stayed.
Boorman rehearses the Willetts’ rhetoric. But with more bile. ‘In 650 days time the babyboomers will start to retire, they’ll stop feeding money into the system with taxes and start sucking out of it with benefits…we don’t have the money to pay for them.’
He complains that ‘we are going to be slaves to our parents, working longer hours, paying more taxes, getting further into debt, just to pay for their retirement…’
What should we do with them, then? He doesn’t suggest mass euthanasia, just mass contempt and electoral eviction: ‘Kick them out,’ he says.
So, the ghost of Margaret Thatcher lives, inflaming angry young men with nothing to lose but loadsamoney and their labels.
But do not despair, babies of babyboomers: check out the Green New Deal, read the Green Party manifesto, www.onlygreen.org.uk – there is another way, it will put the smile back on your face, and hope in your heart: vote Green.
April 29th, 2010 at 11:07 pm
“this woman knew exactly what was different for the working class between now, and then – when her own generation could enjoy ‘great expectations’ but her grandchildren’s generation seems doomed to hard times.”
Dear Bea,
You may remember me from Marxism Today times. We all seem to have moved in different directions since those heydays in the 1980s and early 90s.
The most disappointing thing for me is that all of you who heralded the new future through a change in direction of Left and Labour in those difficult days, now have turned resoundingly against the Labour Party and what we (because I am one of them) have tried to achieve over the last 18 years.
In particular, I find the quote above from your website particularly challenging for me. I came from a Council estate (scheme we call them in Scotland). It was a decent place in the 1950s and 60s, although the majority of my contemporaries at primary school left without being able to read or write. They were the victims of the 1950s Tory education policies and I was lucky to break free.
In the 1980s and 1990s it turned into a nightmare of place to live for everyone concerned because the then Tory Government created unemployment levels that gave rise to one single local currency – that which came from heroin, crack and cocaine.
In recent years, the estate has been transformed as a result of national and local Labour initiatives which involved investment in a combination of regeneration of existent local social housing, combined with the building of affordable private housing. This new social mix, combined with local community involvement (including my 87 year old Mum) in the design of facilities on the estate for children, young people and the older generation, has completely transformed the place I grew up in and changed it from the nightmare it subsequently became.
This has happened up and down the country and isn’t accidental. It’s happened because we had a government committed to making it happen. And yes, we’ve had to prioritise and it hasn’t always been enough but the will has been there. Don’t pretend it hasn’t.
And that’s why I really do object to the notion that Gillian Duffy “knew exactly what was different for the working class between now, and then – when her own generation could enjoy ‘great expectations’ but her grandchildren’s generation seems doomed to hard times.”
Which generation Bea? What expectations? And what precisely is this doom that you herald if not a Tory Government? Perhaps the election of a public school boy from the Lib Dems who has no real interest in Gillian Duffy or anyone from her community?
One last question. Why are you standing in Hampstead in Kilburn to divide a vote in a marginal constituency when it is a two horse race and you know that a vote for anyone else but Labour is a vote for the Tories?
Regards
Diane Dixon