Francis Beckett: Britain Will Never Have It So Good Again
The year 1956 was when the old Britain died and a new one was born. It was the year that so many of the old assumptions were shattered: that Britain was a great power; that being British was something special; that politics and political dogmas and doctrines such as socialism could make the world a better place; that the British Empire was strong and benevolent and forever; that British theatre mirrored the unchanging values of the upper and middle classes; that British music was gentle and tuneful, unlike the raucous rock ’n’ roll which seemed to have gripped the US. It was the point at which a single generation combined the instinctive radicalism of the young with the freedom to express it that had been denied its predecessors – but had no particular idea what to do with it. The Attlee revolution in welfare, the National Health Service, universal unemployment pay and sickness benefit, things that Britons have taken for granted ever since, these made the bridge across which Britain walked from the end of the Second World War to the 1968 demonstrations against the conflict in Vietnam. The first flourish of all that was good and all that was bad in the sixties is to be found in 1956....
The sixties ended earlier than scheduled, on December 31st, 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. The idea of socialism as a great humanising, egalitarian project, already damaged by Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s rule and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, was mortally wounded by the crushing of the Prague Spring. That year, 15-year-old Tony Blair was kept busy trying to preserve his long locks from the attentions of schoolmasters. He and Gordon Brown, though neither had heard of the other, were geographically very close that year. Just a couple of miles separate the portentous old pile that is Fettes public school from the centre of Edinburgh, where first-year university student Brown lodged. Blair, just starting on his A-Levels, frequented the student pubs, dodging Fettes masters. It is perfectly possible that they had been in the same pub at the same time and a startling contrast they would have made: 15-yearold Blair and a few like-minded friends, raucous, wealthy, anglicised, apolitical, public school ersatz rebels, full of the spirit of the sixties; 17-year-old Brown, with drinking companions a year or two older than himself, tweed-jacketed, serious-minded, left wing, clever, a Scottish ‘lad o’pairts’, obviously a young man with gravitas and a future....
Fettes, with the reputation of an English public school that just happened to be in Scotland, provided exactly the sort of education that Blair’s hero Mick Jagger thought was ideal. Jagger, the supposed rebel from a Kent grammar school, had said two years earlier: ‘It takes a conventional upbringing in the English style to produce a normal human being. It gives you an equilibrium, a balanced view.’ Blair admired the Rolling Stones musically and modelled himself on Mick Jagger.
The generation of 1968 emerged from its universities with the intolerance and sectarianism of a generation that thought everything was easy. They cheered on Tony Benn as he turned leftwards during the 1970s and jeered at the reformism of Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan and even Michael Foot. The spirit of 1968 was one in which the old and middleaged had nothing to offer and political radicalism was a matter of outflanking your opponents on the left. That is how the generation of 1968 made the left unelectable – by splitting it into warring factions, each trying to make noises more radical than the others.
In 1997 Tony Blair took the spirit of the sixties into government. He and Gordon Brown are the only representatives of the baby boomer generation who have occupied, or will ever occupy, 10 Downing Street. John Major was too old by a year or two to be a baby boomer and the next prime minister is likely to be too young. The baby boomers had preached that youth is everything and old things are worthless and by doing so they destroyed their own chance of carrying on at the top. They put an end to the days when Churchill, Attlee and Macmillan could start successful governments in their sixties. In the world the baby boomers made, Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell was hounded out of office for the crime of being too old. They made the cult of youth about which they now complain, in which you have only to speak the word ‘new’ or ‘modern’ or ‘modernise’ in order to be automatically right; hence ‘New’ Labour.
So it is by the Blair and Brown administrations that we have to judge the contribution of the baby boomers to life in Britain. Six decades after its birth, Britain’s welfare state is endangered. The baby boomers were the first generation to benefit fully from it. They could easily be the last. A trip to a British hospital is still free, but it is expensive to park a car there. In more and more parts of the health service – prescriptions, dentists – costs are increasing. The principle that no one should die of a treatable disease was breached long ago. In a 1999 survey conducted by Doctor magazine, one in five general practitioners said they knew of patients who had suffered harm as a result of rationing of treatment. The solution now being proposed by sleek commentators of the baby boomer generation is that wealthy patients should be enabled to ‘top up’ their NHS treatment. Topping up may soon become the rule not the exception and the NHS will be no more....
Harold Wilson protected the baby boomers from having to fight in Vietnam. It was not easy – President Lyndon Johnson, as Britain’s principal creditor, had at his disposal several ways of bringing errant British prime ministers to heel – but Wilson stuck to it. He got precious little thanks from the baby boomers, who despised him for not going further and condemning the war. Half a century later, Labour’s baby boomer Blair flew round the world as bag-carrier and messenger for the most reactionary US president since Warren G.Harding in the 1920s and sent British soldiers to fight in unwinnable American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with what now seems to have been alarming casualness.
The baby boomer generation has taken away the student grants and the access to employment that gave them independence when they were young. At some level we baby boomers know we have squandered the remarkable inheritance our parents worked so hard to give us. It is as though the sixties generation decided that the freedom from humiliation and worry which they had enjoyed was too good for their own children. The baby boomers kicked away their children’s legs, then sneered at them for being lame.
The baby boomers had everything.We misbehaved joyfully, rejected everything and thought the world could only get better. Our parents watched us and shook their heads, saying: ‘It will end in tears.’ And it has.