登陆注册
10458300000002

第2章

Introduction

The baby boomers saw themselves as pioneers of a new world – freer, fresher, fairer and infinitely more fun. But they were wrong. The world they made for their children to live in is a far harsher one than the world they inherited.

The first of the men and women born in the baby boom that followed the Second World War started to come of age in the radical sixties. Not since 1918 had the young talked serious revolutionary politics as they did in the sixties.

But in 1918, the men who came back from the war knew that the world was amiss, and knew what they wanted to do about it. So when at last the generation that fought the First World War came to power, in 1945 under Major Clement Attlee, they changed the world. The 1942 Beveridge Report had called for the abolition of the 'five giants' – Want, Ignorance, Disease, Squalor and Idleness – and between 1945 and 1951, despite a war-ruined economy, the Attlee government set about a systematic and remarkably successful assault on those evils.

Exactly fifty years later, revolutionary talk was heard across the land again. But the generation of 1968 was not at all like the generation of 1918. Sixties radicalism decayed fast. It decayed, not because it was groundless, but because it was not grounded. What began as the most radical-sounding generation for half a century turned into a random collection of youthful style gurus who thought the revolution was about fashion; 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. At last it decayed into New Labour, which had no idea what either revolution or freedom meant, but rather liked the sound of the words.

The sixties really began in 1956 with John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, but few people noticed until the Beatles released 'Love Me Do' in October 1962. By then the oldest of the baby boomers were fully seventeen years old, and within three years they were to know everything there was to know, from the secrets of the universe to the correct way to roll a joint.

The short sixties – from the release of 'Love Me Do' to the student sit-ins and the Paris événements of summer 1968 – was a wonderful time to be young. People took the young seriously for the first time, which was good. But the young took themselves seriously, which was less good. The young thought New Jerusalem was round the corner, its arrival hindered only by the conservatism of Harold Wilson's Labour government. They did not realise that they were living in New Jerusalem; that it would all be downhill from then on; and that their generation, which benefited from this dazzling array of freedoms, would, within twenty years, destroy them.

Nor did they realise – for they had never heard of Tony Blair – how lucky they were to have Wilson to hate. Without Wilson, the baby boomers might well have had to fight and die in Vietnam, for a lesser Prime Minister could have been cowed by President Lyndon Johnson and America's power to cripple Britain's economy.

For the first time since the Second World War, there was money, there was safe sex, there was freedom, and no one bothered to stop and think with what misery these things had been bought by earlier generations, for the baby boomers rather despised the past, a small faraway country of which they knew little. Most of the baby boomers hardly realised the privations of their parents, and the struggle that had taken place to ensure that they were not equally deprived.

Before the First World War, 163 of every 1,000 children died before their first birthday. The figure was twice as high for working-class children. It is 15 per 1,000 today. Of those children that survived, a quarter did not live beyond the age of four. In the early weeks of the National Health Service in 1948, consultants reported shoals of women coming in with internal organs that had been prolapsed for years, and men with long undiagnosed hernias and lung diseases.

In the thirties, my grandmother, widowed by the First World War, kept a tin on a shelf, into which she put every spare coin she could, against the day when one of her children might need the doctor. She was a rather wise old lady, so I felt a sense of shock when, as a teenager, I received a letter from her, and realised she wrote like a five-year-old. Like millions of her generation, she was never taught to write properly.

Working-class children in the thirties seldom had enough to eat and received just enough education to equip them for routine work. A father out of work meant a family near starvation. My parents assumed that a working-class child was smaller than a middle-class child, for want of good food. Most of our parents came out of the Second World War determined to change all that.

And that is why the Attlee settlement of 1945–51 gave working people leisure, healthcare, education and security for the first time. In the fifties, older children, especially those at work, had disposable income. Young people became, for the first time, serious consumers, able to make choices and support those choices with cash.

We were the first generation for which university education was not a privilege of wealth. In the sixties, for the first time, proletarian and regional accents were heard throughout the British university system, and (except in a few ancient institutions) their owners were no longer made to feel out of place. We grew up at the time when – as he famously told the Labour Party conference – Neil Kinnock was 'the first Kinnock in a thousand generations' to have a university education. The idea that one might have to pay for education, at any level, seemed to us primitive.

How quickly these things get taken for granted! All previous generations thought of free health care as nothing short of miraculous, but the baby boomers casually assumed that it was the ordained order of things. It was not until the eighties that they started to see how privileged they were, and the National Union of Public Employees produced a T-shirt for them, proudly bearing the slogan 'Born in the NHS'.

Their parents and elder brothers and sisters had battled for health care, for education, for full employment and economic security. These battles having apparently been won, the baby boomers fought for, and won, the right to wear their hair long and to enjoy sex. Proud of having conquered our inherited inhibitions, in our foolishness we thought there was little else to conquer.

Our conviction that everything was easy received repeated boosts when the battlements of the fifties collapsed as the sixties generation approached them, without having to be stormed. National service ended in 1961. The contraceptive pill arrived. There was full employment. People stopped being so frightened of the boss.

So the baby boomers set about destroying the old certainties. These included some reactionary prejudices, but the certainties of the Attlee settlement – that no one should be allowed to die of a treatable illness, that no one should starve, that everyone should get education – were in the firing line at least as much as the certainty that the British class system was the right and natural order of things.

Even the certainties of post-Hitler liberalism – for example, that torture is always, under all circumstances, wrong – even these, if you are questioning everything, have to be questioned. So today, with the sixties certainty that there are no immutable truths about morality, elegant columnists and smartly tieless politicians of the baby boomer generation put up elaborate scenarios in which torture can be justified, and explain how a truly swinging government can be quite relaxed about the fact that Britain is now routinely complicit in torture; and I feel like pulling their fingernails out, very slowly, one by one.

While the philosophy of the sixties seemed progressive at the time, it was really symbolised by the television picture from 1968 of a flower child in a flowing skirt, dancing in a circle and singing, 'Down with police, down with income tax'. It was the direct intellectual predecessor of the Thatcherite view that there is no such thing as society. The children of the sixties were the parents of Thatcherism.

The baby boomers we remember are not the political reformers, but the millionaires. People like Richard Branson, who made his first fortune with Virgin Records; Tony Elliott, who founded Time Out; Felix Dennis, who became a multimillionaire magazine publisher; Greg Dyke, who made a fortune in commercial television before becoming BBC Director General. All these four came straight out of sixties rebellion, and Elliott and Dennis from sixties 'alternative' publishing. Dennis, now a powerful commercial mogul, was a sixties hero who went to prison in 1971 as a co-editor of Oz magazine after the longest conspiracy trial in history. There is no contradiction between his rebellion then and his eminence now. He has not sold out. There was nothing to sell.

The baby boomers destroyed their inheritance, and declined to show the same benevolence to the next generation as was shown to them. They benefited from the victory over Nazism and the Attlee settlement. As teenagers they had spare cash, and fun ways to spend it – things that their parents and grandparents could only dream of. As students they had grants, and the taxpayer picked up the bill for their education. A phrase often heard among their parents was: 'I want him [and increasingly her] to have the opportunities I never had.' Our parents may have grudged us our freedom, but they never grudged us their money, even though most had little enough of it.

Now the children of the sixties are parents, there seems to be a special venom in the loathing they show to their young. A popular car sticker around the turn of the century bore the gloating slogan 'Spending the kids' inheritance'. They sneer about their student children's penury. 'He [or she] has come home for another handout,' they say with theatrical weariness, yet the only reason their children have to come cap in hand for money is that the baby boomers climbed the ladder provided by the welfare state, then pulled it up after them.

At some level we baby boomers know we have squandered the inheritance our parents worked so hard to give us. It is as though the sixties generation decided that the freedom from worry which they had enjoyed was too good for their children, so they kicked away their children's legs, and now they sneer at them for being lame.

I see that, without noticing, I have started using 'we' instead of 'they'. I was one of the blessed: born in 1945, four days after VE Day and a month before Clement Attlee became Prime Minister. I recovered from polio in an NHS hospital; my tonsils lie, carefully preserved no doubt, in another one; and my parents did not have to live in terror of the hospital bill, as their parents would have done. I went to a new state grammar school at the age of eleven, and to a new university in the sixties, both of them monuments to the Attlee settlement.

As a student, my grant gave me enough to live on and I did not have to work in termtime, or beg from older relatives, or build up a mountain of debt, as my children have to do. I had small seminar groups, and tutors who encouraged my intellectual curiosity, since they were under no pressure to sell me another 'product' in the form of a useless but expensive further degree. I did not have to deal with the rapacious landlords my children meet today, who have grown to regard students as easy pickings. And I and my friends studied what we enjoyed, instead of doing what our children are told to do, which is to take whatever Gradgrind course will commend itself to employers.

It was the baby boomers who, in the sixties and the seventies, fought for greater intellectual freedom for students, and freedom from financial worry, which meant higher grants. (We took it for granted that we did not have to worry about paying for our tuition.) They were led by baby boomers like Jack Straw, who became president of the National Union of Students in 1969, and Charles Clarke, who got the same job in 1975. It was the baby boomers in government who took away these freedoms; and Clarke, as Education Secretary, who removed all grants and imposed tuition fees. The freedoms the baby boomers fought for, they deny to their children.

Schools, after a quick burst of sixties freedom, are being sent back to the fifties as fast as possible. The sixties generation in government has brought back the school uniforms it once rejected, the religious control of schools it rejected, and the rote learning it rejected, in the form of a rigid national curriculum and a punishing regime of testing.

Schools have been turned into education factories, forcing grounds in which a set of predetermined information is crammed into young heads, and in which there is no place for flights of fantasy or inspirational teaching. And the penalties for truanting are growing, with police now routinely frogmarching truants to their school. One of the arguments used in favour of school uniforms is that they help the police to recognise those who ought to be at school. We are forcing our children into prison uniform so they will be instantly recognisable when they scale their prison walls.

It is as though the children of the sixties decided that the freedom they enjoyed was too good for their children. Unlike the baby boomers, their children leave university burdened with debt. The sixties generation reinstalled the deference it rejected. Now they are in charge, politicians of the sixties generation realise that deference can be helpful to governments. So they are trying to revive it – only they call it 'respect', just as their parents did.

They decline to treat the young with the respect they themselves successfully demanded when they were young. Here's a straw in the wind. In the early days of University Challenge, at the end of the sixties, presenter Bamber Gascoigne gave his young teams respect, kindness and understanding. In the revived University Challenge, Jeremy Paxman sneers at them, bullies them, and holds them up to ridicule. It would not have been accepted when the baby boomer Paxman was a student, but the young are much less powerful now.

There is a generation war emerging. Wealth is being sucked up the age ladder, and the young have to struggle harder than they did before. Opinion polls show that the now elderly baby boomers will use their increasing voting power – for they constitute a growing segment of the electorate – to ensure a comfortable old age for themselves. When the baby boomers were young, they believed society could afford student grants; now they are old, they think it can afford pensions. There is nothing like impending and perhaps impoverished old age to remind a person that there is, after all, such a thing as society. They risk trampling on the impoverished generations that come after, and there is plenty of evidence that those generations resent it.

Almost none of the baby boomers learned to value the extraordinary legacy they had, and today most of them sneer at it. The right say that it was irresponsible of our postwar leaders to put the nation to the expense of educating, housing, employing and feeding the poor, the old and the young, for the nation could not afford it. The left say that Attlee betrayed the working class by not going further. Neither of them care about what was achieved. The right does not want to defend it, and the left cannot be bothered.

In place of the great ideals of the Attlee government, the baby boomers idealised youth and modernity. They created a society where the ultimate good lay in being new, and young, and modern, and new, especially new, which ironically is why there will be no more baby boomer Prime Ministers after Gordon Brown. The two Prime Ministers from the generation of 1918 who changed the world – Clement Attlee, who created the welfare state, and Harold Macmillan, who dismantled the British Empire – were both aged sixty-two when they got the job. The children of the sixties produced just two Prime Ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Blair's predecessor John Major is two years too old to be a baby boomer, and all Prime Ministers after Brown will certainly be too young, for today everyone seems sure that sixty-two is far too old. The fact that the baby boomers are now all too old ever again to be trusted with the nation's affairs is entirely their fault. When they were young, they created a cult of youth, and now they are old they would like to undo it, but they can't.

The baby boomers had everything. We thought the world could only get better. Our parents watched us and shook their heads, saying, 'It will end in tears.' And it has.

同类推荐
  • The Inside Story (Sisters Grimm #8)

    The Inside Story (Sisters Grimm #8)

    After the shocking ending of The Everafter War, this book picks up with Sabrina, Daphne, and Puck stuck in the Book of Everafter, where all the fairy tales are stored and enchanted characters can change their destinies. The girls (and Puck) must chase the Master through a series of stories, where they're willing to change what they need in order to save their baby brother. Soon, however, they are confronted by the Editor—the book's guardian—who, along with an army of tiny monsters known as Revisers, threatens the children with dire consequences if they don't stick to the stories. As they chase their quarry and dodge the Revisers, they meet Alice, Mowgli, Jack the Giant Killer, Hansel and Gretel, the Headless Horseman, and more.
  • Selected Poems, 1930-1988

    Selected Poems, 1930-1988

    It was as a poet that Samuel Beckett launched himself in the little reviews of 1930s Paris, and as a poet that he ended his career. This new selection, from Whoroscope (1930) to 'what is the word' (1988), describes a lifetime's arc of writing. It was as a poet moreover that Beckett made his first breakthrough into writing in French, and the Selected Poems represents work in both languages, including the sequence of brief but highly crafted mirlitonnades, which did so much to usher in the style of his late prose, and come as close as anything he wrote to honouring the ambition to 'bore one hole after another in language, until what lurks behind it - be it something or nothing - begins to seep through.' Also included are several of Beckett's translations from contemporaries - Apollinaire, Eluard, Michaux, Montale - in versions which count among his own poetic achievements. It is edited by David Wheatley.
  • Eleven

    Eleven

    The legendary writer Patricia Highsmith is best remembered today for her chilling psychological thrillers The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train. A critically acclaimed best seller in Europe, Highsmith has for too long been underappreciated in the United States. Starting in 2011, Grove Press will begin to reissue nine of Highsmith's works. Eleven is Highsmith's first collection of short stories, an arresting group of dark masterpieces of obsession and foreboding, violence and instability. Here naturalists meet gruesome ends and unhinged heroes disturb our sympathies. This is a captivating, important collection from one of the truly brilliant short-story writers of the twentieth century (Otto Penzler).
  • Realm of the Pagans

    Realm of the Pagans

    Martine is happily engaged to Kelvin until he unceremoniously dumps her in Greece. When handsome, arrogant Luke Leoros proposes instead, Martine is happy to accept--only to prove to Kelvin that she's over him.But Luke is also no stranger to heartbreak--and after his own painful breakup, he no longer believes in love. Still, Martine finds herself irresistibly drawn to him--and his caresses set her blood on fire. When Kelvin returns and begs her to take him back, will Martine agree or stay with the man who stirs her passion and her heart?
  • Fated (Book #11 in the Vampire Journals)

    Fated (Book #11 in the Vampire Journals)

    TURNED is a book to rival TWILIGHT and VAMPIRE DIARIES, and one that will have you wanting to keep reading until the very last page! If you are into adventure, love and vampires this book is the one for you!
热门推荐
  • 父亲逼我当小偷

    父亲逼我当小偷

    我从十岁开始,就一心想当一名享誉世界的作家,到三十岁的时候,拿几个诺贝尔文学奖意思意思。然而,我大学毕业正准备将理想付诸行动之时,与我相依为命的老父亲郑重地对我说,从明天起我就是一个小偷了。这就跟一粒色子突然掷出了七点一样,让我瞠目结舌。我父亲是个小偷,今年七十三岁,我想你一定会非常惊讶,我也曾为此费解:一个七十三岁的老头儿,怎么会有一个二十三岁的儿子?收养的?还是在大街上拣的弃婴?诸多的猜测在我对着镜子的时候都荡然无存。我可以看到,五十年后,我父亲的那张脸会毫无保留地转移到我的脸上。
  • 狮子吼

    狮子吼

    本书为公版书,为不受著作权法限制的作家、艺术家及其它人士发布的作品,供广大读者阅读交流。汇聚授权电子版权。
  • 鸾栖何兮

    鸾栖何兮

    鸾飞于九天,徘于灵岐,为寻一有缘人,自甘堕入人世红尘,倾负此生。朝暮春寒,两两若无情,何以相守?孑然一身,踏尽尘寰。繁花落尽,鸾欲归远,何枝可栖……
  • 倾世兵团

    倾世兵团

    一个空怀大志的少年,受尽官兵欺压。一把王者之剑改变了他的命运,招兵买马,聚贤纳才,绝世妖孽尽皆追随左右。他们强大,他们冷血,他们忠诚,他们残忍!一支足以让世人恐惧的兵团就此现世。千年兵团被兵团屠灭,后人皆称这支可怕的兵团为--死神兵团!
  • 灭世妖颜

    灭世妖颜

    新文《极品女魔厨》嬉闹开坑,为了答谢各位读者,这几日将会大赠送,有二更哟!还望大家多多支持!文风以轻松为主,加大了爱情成分,打斗也会有,但是会变得更加精细,女主角是现代厨师,还请大家多多支持!一场妖风邪雨,一阵九天玄雷,谁会想到埋雪世家的“废柴九公子”埋雪云琰竟然引来了当世高手双面罗刹的争夺。原来“他”竟然是阴年阴月阴时出生的玄阴女,她的血是祭炼无上法宝的最佳利器!好在上天有眼,一位隐世不出的高手无意间救了她。回到家族中,谁曾想到终日用头发盖住“陋颜”,每日受人欺凌的废柴九公子躯体早已易主,现在的她是来自异世上海滩的一缕英魂!废柴九公子撩起了长发,露出了倾世妖颜,然而一出手便震惊了五大世家。那些欺凌她们“母子”的人,那些背叛她的人,统统要死!风云突变,消失万古的封神台突然出现。太虚万剑道、梵天寺、荼花宫、九幽魔教等正邪门派纷纷出击,还有苗疆巫门、暗河听雨楼敌友不明!更有玉真山人--梦渔樵、闲鹭散人--玉忘机、乱世孤灯--顾影怜、问情剑客--莫轻雷、无情刀王--朔暝愁等隐世高手各怀鬼胎!埋雪云琰从容地踏上江湖,然而身怀绝密的她却无意间卷入了更深的漩涡!“这次,看我埋雪云琰如何玩转江湖!”精彩花絮(一):“你想出来,就说啊!你不说,我又怎知你想不想出来?”云琰奸诈地笑道。“臭小子!快放我出来!休玩这等下流把戏,否则本将军将你碎尸万段!”鬼将军恨得牙痒痒地。“哟?你凶什么凶?你现在可是我的阶下囚,想清楚再说话!你越是这么凶,我越是铁了心把你锁住!”云琰笑着说。闻言,鬼将军鬼脸一红,被气地憋红了脸。“喂喂!你脸红什么啊?我还从没听说鬼都会脸红?”云琰讥讽地说。“你!”鬼将军本想破口大骂,但是又不得不生生忍了下去。“我什么我?快说!你都把你的宝贝藏在哪儿了?说出来,我还能留你一条活路!否则的话,就让地藏菩萨收了你!”云琰恶狠狠地说道,然后摇了摇自己手中的转经筒。“你敢打劫我?”鬼将军何曾收过这等侮辱?他生前可是战无不胜攻无不克的大将军,受万人敬仰!就是死了,也住在这等豪华的墓地里!此番被云琰侮辱,是决计不肯松口的!“就是打劫你,怎样?”精彩花絮(二):一时间漫天雷鸣,震得在场的群雄胆颤心惊。天空中一只彩凤浴火而来,一个绝世的佳人从凤凰背上踩莲而下,一张轻纱挡住了她那惑世的容颜,空留一丝笑意在风中。
  • 燕石集

    燕石集

    本书为公版书,为不受著作权法限制的作家、艺术家及其它人士发布的作品,供广大读者阅读交流。汇聚授权电子版权。
  • 神话版三国

    神话版三国

    陈曦看着将一块数百斤巨石撇出去的士卒,无语望苍天,这真的是东汉末年?吕布单枪匹马凿穿万人部队,这怎么看都不科学。赵子龙真心龙魂附体了,一剑断山,这真的是人?典韦单人护着曹操杀出敌营,顺手宰了对面数千步骑,这战斗力爆表了吧!这是不是哪里有些不对啊,陈曦顺手摸了一把鹅毛扇挥了一下,狂风大作,叹了一口气,“这是神话吧,我自己都不正常了。”ps:其实这是一篇正经的种田文……QQ群:95010223(满了)全订QQ群:375380021(最好这个)酱油群:397441818(快满了)二群:418928396(快满了)三群:371034966五群:1093767940
  • 变脸

    变脸

    瓦庄的人记得很清楚,咧脸第一次到瓦庄来是一个春末的黄昏。我也记得很清楚,那天放了学后,我和葛金狗没有直接回家,而是在满畈的油菜地里奔跑,虽然油菜花开得有些败落了,但因为满畈都是这种植物,所以映入眼里的仍是金黄黄的一大片,随着微风吹起,油菜花粉直往我们的鼻子里、喉咙里和胸腔里钻,我和葛金狗不停地打喷嚏,打得鼻翼两边都微微地酸痛。我们奔跑着,往河边的堤坝上跑去,堤坝边靠河水的地方长着一种叫溜溜儿的果实,熟了的时候,颜色是鲜红的,小小的如人的小手指头,充满了蜜汁,一咬一口糖水,我们赶去看看它们熟了没有。
  • 史上最强丫鬟

    史上最强丫鬟

    她,是从天而降的女婴,药王族的圣女。他,是离歌王府世子,朝中混吃等死的御史大人。一场阴谋,她变成了他的妻子,她不愿,但谁知他早就已经深陷其中。她毒舌,他腹黑,她高傲渴望自由,他隐忍负重只盼大仇得报。只是一场婚礼下去,离歌王府不复存在。他于她终于也开始了新的旅程。“丫头,我爱你,这片江山你可愿意与我一同坐拥?”“少爷还是如当初那般肉麻无比。”终于,他成了皇,但他的后宫却只有她一人。
  • 不拖延的心理学

    不拖延的心理学

    拖延是可怕的敌人,是时间的窃贼。它会损坏人的性格,消磨人的意志,使人对自己越来越失去信心,怀疑自己的毅力,怀疑自己的目标,怀疑自己的能力,从而让人变得一事无成。《不拖延的心理学》从众多心理咨询领域中汲取的丰富理论和经验,对拖延问题进行了一次仔细、详尽、有时也颇为幽默的探索。从科学里汲取力量,终结掉拖延对你的干扰,你可以活得更精彩,再不用承受那些常与无必要的、自寻烦恼的拖沓相伴而来的痛苦。这样,你就会在需要的时候尽快地爆发出潜力。你也会有更多的时间来娱乐,同时,从拖延中抢回更多的时间,也会让你的工作完成得更出色。