More Baby Boomer Nonsense

Another article in the Groan that tries to lay the blame for our ills on a whole generation. Francis Beckett is so wrapped up in his guilt for the imagined crimes of his generation, that he has to spread it around.

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.

Clearly Francis has a short memory. I grew up in the sixties and seventies (I’m slightly younger so only just fit in with the boomer generation). I recall that only the few who were capable went to university. The rest of us either took vocational courses at our local college or went out to work. Our childhoods were harsher – and arguably better for it – than those of the recent generation. So the idea that all was milk and honey is laughable nonsense only found among the self haters in the Guardian who think it is okay to blame a whole generation of individuals for the current ills that beset the country.

And what did we do with this wonderful inheritance? We trashed it.

No. We. Did. Not. The vast majority have worked hard and contributed to society by paying taxes and being productive members of that society. How dare you presume to offload your guilt on the rest of us. The current mess is, largely, the fault of politicians over whom we have no control, bar where we put a cross once every five years and that’s bugger all good, frankly.

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.

Er, because, perhaps, it’s an idea that has outlived the ideals that created it?

There’s more of this risible claptrap, but I thought I’d save my opprobrium for this twaddle:

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.

So it’s the baby boomers responsible for Iraq, not the politicians after all. We, this homogeneous mass, are responsible, not the individuals who attended the cabinet meetings cast their votes and made the final decision.

So now you know.