Thanks to Mark Wadsworth I have now read an article in the Daily Mail (okay, okay, I’ll get the mind bleach later) by Jeremy Paxman berating the baby boomer generation. Unlike Mark, I do not share his sense of shame and guilt. There is a good reason for this. To treat a whole generation – millions of people – as if they are one homogenised unit working together in cohesion to screw over their successors is so incredibly stupid as to warrant little more than a cursory glance before dismissing it and given that this is a combination of the Daily Mail and the BBC, that is precisely what we should be doing.
A generation – of millions of people – consist of individuals. Individuals are responsible for their own actions and omissions. They are not responsible for those of others. It’s the same logic that has politicians apologising for the slave trade and is equally daft. As someone born in 1958, I am at the tail end of that boom. I went to school, studied and got reasonable O levels. Went to college and got decent City & Guilds, then went to work. I’ve progressed with varying fortunes since then; working, while paying an enormous amount to the state in tax for it to piss up the wall on stuff I neither want nor need. I bought a house – and here is my first evil act, then. For by buying a home, I am, apparently personally responsible for the housing price bubble.
So, let’s burst a myth here. I bought my house to live in. And that is precisely what I have done. Apparently, it has increased in value by about £100,000. However, this £100,000 is entirely irrelevant as it is not real. I cannot spend it and, frankly, unless I sell and make myself homeless, it is meaningless to me. Indeed, it would have mattered not to me if the value had fallen as I still have exactly what I bought, doing exactly what I bought it for. This does not make me greedy, nor does it mean that I am engaging in some imaginary intergenerational war. That the house price bubble is real enough for those who need to find the wherewithal is a fair point and should I decide to move up, the varying rate of price rises means that I will be as much a victim of it as the later generation, as I will have to fund the difference. What I am not doing is depriving anyone of anything, nor do I have any personal responsibility for what happened. Nor, for that matter, is there any kind of social debt involved. Private property is just that; private property.
This rejection of the Georgist ideas of social responsibility when buying property makes me a “home ownerist”. I’ve heard that one so often now, I’ve become desensitized to it. It is nothing more than a pejorative that simply means “disagrees with me and is therefore bad”. I am reminded here of Paulie of “Never Trust a Hippy” a few years back and his pejorative “bloggertarians”, which was intended to cast a negative connotation on libertarian bloggers. Unfortunately for Paulie, the intended targets ran with it and adopted the name for themselves, undermining the idea somewhat. Home Ownerism is applied with such a broad brush, it has no real meaning and can be safely ignored.
Georgism is a flawed ideology. All ideologies are flawed. This is a simple observation of the world going on. Indeed, I was accused of not being a real libertarian a couple of years back because my libertarianism wasn’t sufficiently pure (actually, I’m more of a classical liberal, but that’s by the by) – yet all I was doing at the time was pointing out that the ideas included a fairly broad church and contact with reality involved compromise. Henry George’s ideas sound fine in theory, but their exposure to the reality of the modern state would inevitably lead to penury for those who have no money to pay for his favoured tax on property. While Mark Wadsworth tries gainfully (and I do admire his tenacity) to argue that there would be wriggle room to make it more equitable, we have to remember that Mark will not be the one implementing it. Indeed, it will be the same bastards as those who currently implement and collect tax – and their blatant misanthropy is what we can rely upon. And I do not accept parallels with rent and mortgage payments when falling upon hard times. Such arrangements are contracts freely entered into – and one can usually negotiate some arrangement when difficulties arise. One does not enter into a contract with the state. Indeed, the relationship we have with the state is similar to the one one has with the thug holding a sawn-off shotgun offering protection. That one has no money simply does not wash – and here speaks the voice of bitter experience. A tax on consumption – real consumption as opposed to living in one’s house – can be reduced by reducing spending to the bare minimum essentials. Income tax reduces according to reduced income. A capped LVT still assumes the ability to fork up the readies as does council tax, and council tax is currently my biggest burden after the mortgage, irrespective of my liquid assets. And all of this is before we start to consider the side effect of social manipulation inherent in property taxes.
Ultimately, George’s ideas on land ownership were socialist in that they argue that land bought and paid for belongs to society as a whole. Don’t ask me – ask a contemporary, Karl Marx, who made just that observation. Well, you could if he was still alive, but I guess he would recognise socialism if anyone could. When land is purchased, it does not belong to anyone other than the purchaser – which is why the Intergenerational Foundation’s report met with such well deserved ire; they took the line that housing stock as a whole was a shared resource. It is not. And how it is utilised is none of their concern – all of this is quite besides the point that the taxpayer does not need the burden of yet another fake charity nagging, nannying and lecturing us.
The purchaser of the house is not responsible for subsequent price bubbles and neither are we sitting around in our houses priding ourselves on their value – we are far too busy working and living in them. Nor is my house my pension. I plan to carry on living in it until I die. Indeed, I will probably continue working until I drop as well. As an aside, if I had my time again, I wouldn’t have touched pension plans with a barge pole, but that’s done and in the past, no point worrying about it now. When I do drop off my perch, my house will come onto the market for the next generation.
Anyway, back to Paxman’s polemic;
…just look at the British couple, Lesley Norris and Bruce Scott, who had to be rescued in the Brazilian jungle last month after their camper van ran off the road on a ‘retiree’s’ gap year. In many ways, they stand for all the rest of us.
No. They. Do. Not. Speak for yourself, and yourself alone. Do not presume the effrontery to speak for the rest of us. You certainly do not speak for me.
Those boomers – the ones responsible for the ills of the world who are screwing over the next generation – they wouldn’t be the ones who spent twenty years nurturing that later generation, would they? Oh, yes, so they are. The same ones who helped fund them through university and dibbed in with financial help when they decided to set up home and paid for lavish weddings when they decided to tie the knot? Yes, that generation of selfish greedy bastards, who are now providing free child care. How dare they? The boomers have done more for their offspring than previous generations could ever hope to have done. They have done no more than they expected to do for their progeny – but living in a more prosperous age, have given them material benefits that simply didn’t happen before. Those that could, of course. Which is always the way. There will always be the haves and the have-nots. That is because a generation – of millions of people – is not a homogenised mass, it is a loose collection of individuals and should be regarded as such. Only a socialist would see a whole generation as one single collective entity with a hive mind. The Borg, we are not. But, then, this is Paxman and he is a creature of the BBC. Frankly, if Paxman told me that the sun rises in the east, I’d have to get up at dawn and check it out for myself. Just because some bullying buffoon who made a name for himself haranguing his interviewees says something is so, it doesn’t mean that it is. And it isn’t.
Paxman is using the trick of looking at a whole generation and then using averages to draw a very silly conclusion. I for one will never be as wealthy as he claims the “average” boomer is. Nor do I know anyone else who meets that wonderful “average”. The reality is that some folk have done very well and others not. Exactly the same applies to the generation following and the one after that. Let’s be clear here, “we” did not create the problems we have today (“We” didn’t flog off the gold reserves cheap, “we” didn’t piss taxpayers’ money up the wall during the good times). The worst that “we” did was to vote for a succession of incompetent and self-serving politicians who most certainly are responsible for the state the country is in. But, then, as any fule no, once elected, politicians pursue a path of their own making. The poor sods who cast a vote have no influence even if they like to think they do.
So, yeah, I’m a baby boomer. I won’t say that I am proud of it as I had no say in the matter of my date of birth. It just is and I accept it. I certainly don’t plan to engage in any self-flagellation over it either, as I am not responsible for the actions and omissions of others. If you want to, go right ahead, be my guest, guilt trip to your heart’s desire, but don’t be too surprised if you are doing it largely alone and unnoticed and if we do notice, it is with a sigh and maybe a bit of a giggle. Maybe Paxman would like a hair shirt while he is at it?
I, am Baby Boomer. I feel no guilt, Paxman and Wadsworth are wrong.
You, hsve said all else the needs to be said.
Paxman lives in the BBC bubble and that of the luvvies in the SE. His comments are laughable as he has no idea how hard it was for the baby boomers at the other end of the scale to yourself. In the early 60s girls didn’t go to university. The lucky ones trained as teachers or nurses and the others, whose parents couldn’t afford to help them in any way, worked to pay for their further education – usually through a night school system.
My school pals (we’re all about 65 now) all made something of their lives because it was a sake of sink or swim and we swam. Our childhood formal and informal education had provided is with the skills to survive.
When I was born in 1946 there was no NHS and no benefit system. Our parents were the ones who pushed for their introduction. I know my father, a staunch Labour supporter, would be horrified if he saw the result of his efforts today.
As for property, you’re spot on. I never think about the value of mine because it’s pointless and of no consequence unless I move to a one-bedroomed hutch. That’s not on the cards.
I’m a bit behind you but when I reached school leaving age, very few went to university even then – in the mid nineteen seventies.
As for his comments on technology, the current iPad generation has stuff we never eaven dreamed of.
Excellent post. I’m exactly in between you and subrosa born in ’52 and what with being a selfish boomer and a filthy Homeownerist I’m beginning to think I’d be less despised if I was a paedophile. Subrosa is quite right about the peculiar assumptions of people of Paxman’s background, they seem genuinely unaware that most of us simply didn’t have their advantages, I was at a Secondary Modern where most pupils left at 15, only a lucky few, like me, in the A stream got to stay on to do O levels, the idea that we all had an unjust leg up and have spent the subsequent years abusing our position of privilege seems based on some kind of projection, he’s said himself he feels rather guilty about his life and regrets not facing the sort of challenge that his parents generation did. I feel no such guilt and resent having the personal hang ups of others passed off as some kind of collective failing.
To treat a whole generation – millions of people – as if they are one homogenised unit working together in cohesion to screw over their successors is so incredibly stupid as to warrant little more than a cursory glance before dismissing it and given that this is a combination of the Daily Mail and the BBC, that is precisely what we should be doing.
Exactly – I’m putting this up in my sidebar.
“All ideologies are flawed”
YES!
But then, you are engineering-trained, like me, are you not?
You can see where the nuts’n-bolt’n-wheels don’t QUITE fit together.
Speaking as a peak BB (born 9 months after VE day) I really don’t like this blaming.
I treminds me of the downer that the same lot have got on “Youth” – any youth.
Damn! (excellent piece by the way Longy) I was going to blog this under the title…Get stuffed Paxo! (yeah I know,I’m wasted at this blogging malarky, I should be picking up a six figure salary as a headline writer for the Sun shouldn’t I?) but the Counting cats server is down again (plague of Wallaby’s or sumthin).
I find that I am just 2 years younger than the Sage of Newsnight, and remember the early 70s very well, he apparently does not. I had just graduated Law and was looking for Articles, but couldn’t find a job, there wern’t any, so I joined the Lord Chancellor’s Office eventually. The country had its arse out of its collective trousers. There were three day weeks, power cuts daily, the Unions were holding the country to ransom and we were heading for hell in a handcart. This was not the fault of us baby boomers, we’d barely friggin started our lives by then. No the real villian of the piece was this chap, who seems to be a bit of a hero of the tunnel visioned one…
Our parents had Clement Attlee, perhaps the greatest Prime Minister of the 20th century
Oh bleedin fantastic he was! Nationalised every goddam industry that made the country great and turned them into loss making basket cases, and invented the NHS and the Welfare State that is continuing to bankrupt us as I type. The massive debts that this and every other Western state has is exactly down to well meaning fuckwits like Attlee who grew the bubble of big state so far and so fast, with their idiot ideas of Keynsian economics, that is now poised to burst like a rancid boil and drown all of us in its toxic debts.
I own my own house and like my parents have saved and saved to have a safe and secure retirement. But I am some sort of fool apparently, according to current authordoxy. I should have spent and borrowed and spent and borrowed some more till there was no more left. Then claimed my old age comforts from the state for free. My parents and even my own are now worthless unless we can move them into real assets PDQ. I am about to go on a spending spree. We need a new car, and a whole lot of material stuff, a keyboard for the wife and a couple of good guitars for me. Get the kitchen redone, buy property and Gold if I can, before I need a wheelbarrow of the stuff to get a loaf of bread and a packet of fags.
It was the socialist utopian dreamers like Clemmie, Wilson and the Traitor Heath, the War generation that fucked this country, not the baby boomers!
RAB, ah the early seventies, how well I recall the gentle hiss and fragrant aroma of the paraffin hurricane lamp as we sat round the table with the power off, it’s like the scent of Madeleine cakes.
As much a pain in the arse those power cuts were Thornvais, at least they were manageable back then. When they happen next, and they will very soon, the sky will fall in within a week.
Anyone for one of my infamous anecdotes?
It’s 1973, or thereabouts, I’m a student at Nottingham and we have a house in Trent Boulevard next door to the chip shop and just up the road from the Lady Bay pub (student shangri-la or what!) It’s mid winter and bloody freezing, three jumpers and a donkey jacket scarf hat and gloves freezing.And it’s snowing heavily outside. Well I’m playing Stephen Stills first solo album, a track where he takes the first lead and Eric Clapton takes the second break and pisses all over him. Well as it always did, that was the cue for a power cut, chang ching wooorrrr. It’s only 7.30 pm so we students said fuck this, let’s go down the pub.
Well we hit the street and it seems the whole neighbourhood has had the same idea. Everybody is out there playing snowballs and having a bloody marvelous time.
We eventually fight our way into the pub and yes there’s the hurricane lamps and the candles, games of darts and dominos going on by torchlight, but business is still possible. The beer pumps are gravity not electric and the economy is cash not credit or computerised. It was a wonderful and memorable night.
But the next time the lights go out, we will be completely fucked because every damn thing is computerised now, even down to the till in your corner shop. The supply chain will fracture within a week.
Well said, LR, I’m also getting tired of being blamed for ‘ruining’ the future for our grandchildren (not that I’ve got any yet).
Oh yes, we really had it easy in the housing market. I went on an unaccompanied overseas tour of 12 months (without my wife of only a few weeks) to save money for a house deposit. By the time I had returned, the first big house price boom had occurred and we were no better off than when I left. A few years later, after being moved by my employer, we came out of the solicitor’s office having just signed the contracts on a new house to read the headlines on the Evening Standard “Mortgage Rates Go Up To 12.25%”. Oh how we laughed.
Great story RAB, I wish I had a memory like that to recall, most of the early seventies was rather darker for me and not just because the lights had gone out, not a time I remember with any fondness. I do have one magic day like that in 1970 to fall back on, when I worked as a bus conductor ( brilliant job ) and on Christmas Eve I worked one of the last buses back to the depot. We struggled out of Brighton in the snow up the steep hill by the station on our ten mile journey home, buses in convoy and sliding all over the place. When we got back to the garage it had stopped snowing and I walked the two miles home through a silent moonlit snowscape, the only white Christmas of my adult life. It doesn’t sound much but it’s those sort of memories that stay with you, as you say simpler times and I’m not looking forward to the tail end of my life in the greenies powerless utopia.
Very well put LR, i am one of those war babies,so i dont know where i fit in here,what i do know is i was bought up in my grandparents house in the eastend of London during the war ,moved to a prefab after the war and then to council flat in the same area,when i went to work evryone went to work ,everyone (with a few exceptions) wanted to better themselves ,to eventually get out of there and almost all did ,nearly all strived to get on in what ever way they could .
So when the time came and my to be wife and decided to get married ,we wanted our own house away from the eastend,we both saved for over three years ,you had to show the Building Society then that you could save by putting in sufficient on a monthly basis over a two year period and then put down a minimum 10% deposit ,we did that ,got married moved in,and lived two rooms whilst we saved and and improved the rest,and so like so many of that era we become eventually home owners,no 110% mortgages then and a bit extra so you can have the BMW outside.
And now every bastard wants a bit of it ,to many rooms for you,downsize,everybody else to be helped without ever putting ther hand in their pocket ,my generation have had their pensions mugged (worse than anywhere in europe) our state pensions are the worst in the euro zone ,bar one ,and still everybody wants more because we have the cheek to have earned something.
When i read this rubbish about replacing (as if it would ever be “replaced”) council tax ,which by the way only about 37% in this area of householders actually pay anyway all i see is more grubby hands in the till ,we had a fairer system the poll tax ,needed revising yes,defeated by the poll tax riots,and who were these protestors,the usual those who had never paid anything in the way of rates as it was,poll tax unfair ,not nearly as unfair as the current system,i to am not looking forward with much pleasure,but leave whats mine alone sod off.
To treat a whole generation – millions of people – as if they are one homogenised unit working together in cohesion to screw over their successors is so incredibly stupid as to warrant little more than a cursory glance before dismissing it
Indeed. A bit like condemning every Muslim for the actions of a small minority of nutters.
I don’t. I condemn the ideology, which, frankly, is repugnant.
Paxman has point. The ‘baby boomer’ generation were happy to take all the benefits of the post-war settlement – the welfare state and free at the point of demand higher education. But have shown by their voting choices to be most reluctant to pay for it through their taxes. We have the nauseating spectacle of British politicians, of all parties, who benefitted from accessible and free higher education, denying it to the present generation. The baby boomer generation were happy to vote for lower taxes during the Thatcher utopia, which was based on the lie that good public services could be delivered on lower and lower taxes. But woe betide if anyone cuts their free bus passes. If only our younger generation would start voting they could send the baby boomer class a message they won’t forget in a month of self-righteous whining.
I don’t. I condemn the ideology, which, frankly, is repugnant
Which is what, precisely? There is no central authority in Islam and any fruitcake can declare himself a religious authority. It’s not like the Catholic Church with the Pope, where you can talk about the official ideology of the church.
Paxman doesn’t have a point. As I mentioned, our votes count for nothing. They are meaningless. At various times I have voted for all three major parties. Most of the time, they were tactical votes against a candidate rather than for one. You really cannot read anything into voting patterns.
As for tax, the state needs to reign in its largesse. Less tax for them to spend is a good thing. They will then be forced to concentrate on the important stuff that they exist for, not nagging us and nannying us about smoking, drinking and diet, for example.
I didn’t go to university, but I’ve paid multiple times over towards those who did. Just as I paid towards the pensions of those who went before me and still do.
There is no such thing as the baby boomer generation – just ordinary people, much like the ordinary people whom they gave birth to. There is no intergenerational war. That’s another myth. Paxman speaks for himself and himself alone. The man is a complete arse, frankly.
Stephen, many of the people who benefited most from the post war settlement as you call it were from my parents’ generation, for the first time they got free medical treatment and full employment ( this had as much to do with booming capitalism as social democracy ). As RAB has already pointed out by the time many boomers came of age things were already starting to change, I don’t know how old you are but when I was 18 ( 1970 ) a minority of people my age went to university, free or not it was still very class based unless you were lucky enough to go to a grammar school and if you think that public services were better before the eighties than after I’m afraid you’re sadly mistaken. As for bus passes, personally I’m against anyone under state retirement age getting them but once having introduced a perk yes of course people will moan if you threaten to do away with it, it’s human nature and not something unique to boomers.
On the subject of Islam, the fact that there is no central authority is neither here nor there, there isn’t in Hinduism or Buddhism either, I don’t recall many firebombings from that quarter. Come to that there’s no central authority in Christianity either, the RC church is not the whole of the religion.
Quite so. The ideology stems from the writings of Mohammed. I object to any ideology that seeks to impose itself on others – quite apart from all that gumph about supernatural beings. When we can openly ridicule Islam in the same way that we can ridicule other religions, I’ll be a little more tolerant. As it is, the reaction was entirely predictable. My comments didn’t talk about Muslims, it talked about Islam. Islam is a pretty nasty prozelitysing belief system and political ideology that will, given the opportunity, impose itself using any means at its disposal – inclding the use of violence.
All that said, this post isn’t about Islam, it’s about that twat Paxman and his arrogant assumption that the speaks for anyone other than himself. He does not. The attempt to draw a comparison doesn’t wash.