Boom and Bust

Francis Beckett writes:

A lot of cross baby boomers out there are harrumphing at my betrayal of my own generation in my new book, What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? The Guardian's Catherine Bennett feels I've cynically crawled to the generation who will ultimately control my (and her) old age. "Will his personal contribution be enough to stop a future young carer lashing him to a commode or similar?" she asks cynically. I didn't write the book so that, when she and I are old and helpless, I will get preferential treatment. I promise to intervene should I see anyone lashing her to a commode.

Nonetheless, she's right to point out that not all baby boomers personally raised tuition fees, or speculated in property. She didn't. Neither did I. To be fair, I did make that point myself in my book: "Of course, not everyone who was born between 1945 and 1955 wanted the Iraq war, or the NHS turned into a market, or huge proportions of the nation's resources given to greedy bankers, or an increasingly illiberal society, or for the markets to rule. But the baby boomers' chance to change Britain for the better came, and it went."

So we can agree that you can't ascribe bad qualities to a whole generation. Oddly, my critics then go on to try to ascribe good qualities to the whole baby boomer generation. Bryn Jones and Mike O'Donnell write about how swaths of 60s radicals "joined and energised the radical labour movement campaigns to defend and advance the welfare state during the 70s and 80s". But they didn't. They brought their 60s student politics into the unions in those two decades, and it was their intolerance, sectarianism and self-righteousness that brought the unions to their knees by the mid 80s. The new left then morphed into New Labour and finished the job.

In those decades, fierce, divisive campaigns were waged for even minor union positions, and for the soul of each union. I recall watching with horror as my own union, the National Union of Journalists, was torn apart over the issue of abortion. The campaign changed nothing in the real world, but it left the NUJ devastated, as all battlegrounds are. The unions rendered themselves vulnerable in the 70s, and never quite knew what hit them in the 80s. In 1979, 5 million people were in closed shops; by 1993 the closed shop had been outlawed. In 1979, 13.3 million people were in unions; by 1993 it was under 9 million, and only a third of employed workers belonged to a union – the lowest percentage since 1946. In 1979, nearly three quarters of the workforce were covered by collective bargaining agreements; by 1993 it was fewer than half. A series of acts of parliament reduced the unions' bargaining strength dramatically. Unions now have a fraction of the ability they had in the 70s to protect workers.

The baby boomers entered the unions with enthusiastic intolerance and a conviction that nothing done in earlier years by grey old men in grey crumpled suits could possibly have any value. They made the unions their playground and their battleground, and they fattened them for slaughter by Margaret Thatcher. That mattered most to exactly the people Bennett, Jones and O'Donnell are most concerned about: those who didn't get the benefits of the 60s, though they were the right age. Bennett talks of "a redundant miner who never went abroad, or a grammar school reject forced to leave school at 15, or a subservient housewife". Jones and O'Donnell describe themselves as "escapees from male-dominated industrial areas". But those who did get the benefits of the 60s destroyed the trade unions which were the only defence of those who missed out on them.

Neither Bennett nor Jones and O'Donnell give me credit for trying to explain why the baby boomers were as they were. It is because, though we were children of the 60s, we were children IN the 50s, and the 50s were awful. Fifties schools prepared us for a rigid, class-dominated world. There were fee-charging schools for those who were to run the country, grammar schools for middle managers and professionals, and secondary moderns for working class children destined to remain at the bottom of the heap. Not the least of the crimes of the baby boomer generation in government is that Straw, Blunkett, Blair and Adonis have done all they can to take us back to this system.

We had the freedoms of the 60s and the Attlee settlement, but we were not educated for freedom. We were educated for a closed-up, deferential, class-ridden society where everything that was not forbidden was compulsory, and vice-versa. No wonder we did not know what to do with our freedom.

Even the most sheltered intellectuals are now waking up to the true relationship between the Sixties, the Eighties and the Blair Era. What took them so long?