How easy it is to blame baby boomers ……. the unhistorical approach to everything

It has become quite the business to attribute heaps of problems to the baby boomer generation.

Only today, a few days after I wrote the piece the Sunday Times came out with an article on the "great wealth divide", which while a bit more balanced that some journalistic explorations still traded shallow examples.*

We, Baby Boomers, were the children born during or just after the last world war who grew up with the Welfare State, which ensured we were healthy, and received a good education and because of an expanding economy we were pretty much guaranteed a job for life with the prospects of a decent pension to see out our twilight years.

No periods of mass unemployment for us, no facing the humiliation of the Means Test to assess suitability for benefits when times were hard and no threat of war.

True there was always the shadow of the H bomb and some very nasty wars in other parts of the world but for most of us life was a breeze.

All of which has not gone unnoticed by a gang of lazy journalists and some ambitious politicians who think it is a wheeze to claim that the current unpredictability of employment, zero hours contracts, and the collapse of the housing market is somehow our fault.

And worse still that our profligate life style sustained by reliance on cheap fossil fuels, selfish use of limited global resources means that the present climate disaster is also our fault.

It is of course unhistorical and is cynical manipulation of facts and perhaps a deliberate attempt to pitch one group of the population against another and thereby hide the deep rooted failure to address these issues which were there long before we were born and are still ignored by “people of influence and power” who were  born before the baby boomers and that up and coming band of  influencers who were born after us and are now taking up the reins of power.

It is often forgotten in the debate over the frightening rise in present interest rates that baby boomers in possession of a mortgage were facing interest rates far in excess of those today.

While rising inflation in the 1970s and the growing unemployment in the following decade caused hardships for many.

These weren’t occasioned by the baby boomers, just as the failure to build enough homes is not their fault .

Ah I hear you say “some of those in power in the 1970s and 80s were born after the war”, but the policies they pursued belonged to an earlier economic orthodoxy, where “getting on yer bike to look for work” was the only answer ….. even though it begged the question of where that work was to be found in the early years of the Depression.

Likewise the move to make Britain less reliant on coal as a fuel and the wholesale closure of the coal mines had nothing to do with baby boomers discovering Green policies but a determined and ruthless move against the workers from an industry which had humbled previous Conservative Governments.

All of which can be set against the determination of our parents and grandparents who had experienced two world wars, multiple trade depressions, cyclical unemployment to create a better world.

A world devoid of the fear of being sick, and retiring with little means of supporting their old age.

And yes there is that caveat that this was mostly confined to the "developed world", and was predicated on an economy which was wasteful of precious resources and fueled by consumerism.

But then I look at my parents and grandparents who had to "make do and mend" in an uncertain world, where illness, unemployment or just bad luck luck, coupled with the caprices of a an economic system could plunge them into the margins of poverty or worse.

So yes we were a golden generation but the roots of present ills of the country are not ours alone.

Pictures; silly pictures

*Boomers v Zoomers: the generational wealth divide, Sunday Times, July 2nd, 2023