Orphan Jack has grown up knowing only the strict but kindly guardianship of Father Anthony, the devout head of the Westminster County Home for Lost Boys. By careful budgeting, Jack’s dour Uncle Gordon has managed to pay for Jack’s care during the eight years since his father disappeared. But now Jack is coming of age and confides in his friend Steve that the ways of the increasingly authoritarian priest are becoming to much for him. Jack and Steve have broken Brother David’s curfew at the home to go drinking at Kennedy’s, the local bar, run by jovial, ginger Charlie K. This time they ignore the mysterious stranger they meet on the way who wants them to follow him to Old Woman Thatcher’s house, where it’s said that at night you can hear her sherry decanter and glass clink as she wanders the corridors like a wraith, but by the last reel you know something very nasty indeed is going to happen to our protagonists…
If someone asked me to play Peter York or Douglas Coupland and do a street caricature of Jack’s cohort, I’d probably come up with something like this:
They were born between ’85 and ’95. They take a completely unembarrassed delight in everything about that decade that makes us, Generation X, wince: the music, the mullets, the celebrities, and—even more puzzlingly—the celebridee charidee. But there was something about the tape-cutting, bullshit-squishing energy of Live Aid that was bigger than the hair, the stars, and the gestures; big enough to cast a shadow over those too young to have experienced it directly. Bob is their spiritual father. Peaches is their fantasy bolshie little sister. They are Generation Geldof.
They take no delight at all in politics, but their experiences have pumped up their opinions. They are gap-year internationalists, broken-family social conservatives, single-issue sulks. Their instinctive (or inherited) dislike of Margaret Thatcher is strong, even as they un-self-consciously recite the slogans of her reign, even as they take Thatcher’s agenda for granted. When they bother to vote at all, they mostly vote Liberal Democrat.
Why?
In a democracy (especially this post-Thatcherite one) the answer that explains most powerfully happens to be the simplest: self-interest. The LibDems offer them free post-18 “uni” education. It’s an effective bribe, and one that will never cost the LibDems or their voters a penny. They know we couldn’t afford it. Even at 90s levels of participation, returning grants to a reasonable subsistence level would cost more than the UK health and defence budgets combined. This would be a disgustingly huge subsidy to the middle-classes. When they demand their cut, the middle-classes pretend they’re standing up for the poor. When you point out the consequences, they stick their fingers in their ears and chant “Access! Access!”—even as our broken educational system makes it ever harder for the disadvantaged to “access” their own intellectual heritage—never mind the government handouts the BMW-driving classes fetishize.
Despite its general unwillingness to engage with party politics, Generation G still fancies itself idealistic. Sadly, other middle-class cynics, bitter Old Leftists, want to twist the punk-pragmatic idealism of the children of Live Aid into the misread-Marx idealism of the footstamping infant. A teenager carrying a “Blood For Oil” banner on behalf of a Socialist Worker front organisation thinks she has seen the puppetmasters for what they really are, when she is, in fact, a puppet of people who have been playing posture politics since before she was born.
These are the people the Labour Party will need to persuade to vote for them, stuff envelopes for them, devise policies for them, become MPs for them.
I live in a seat where one of Blair’s “comrades” fell. Like Manchester Withington and Cardiff Central it’s a seat in a constituency with a swing-wielding body of students and academics. Such seats can’t be dismissed as demographic niches; their populations are the future. Soon, everyone will be a student. That doesn’t, of course, mean everyone will be clever. We are talking about people who identify with rather than pity Bridget Jones, Homer Simpson, and Beavis and Butthead. Some dream of World peace; I dream of a world where it’s uncool to be an idiot.
That‘s the challenge. How do you explain to someone who thinks Diana Spencer was a great humanitarian of our time that their “peace” means the dead quiet outside a sound-proofed slaughterhouse? How do you explain that overseas aid is what their African classmate’s father siphons off to pay her international-rate student tuition fees? How do you explain why their grandparents lived in an England where a poor bright boy had a better chance of escaping poverty by his own efforts than he does now?
If someone can do that then the next Conservative government will be but a blip before another age of Labour dominance.
“How do you explain why their grandparents lived in an England where a poor bright boy had a better chance of escaping poverty by his own efforts than he does now?” You explain that it was courtesy of the Education Act of that (hiss!) Tory, Butler, abolished by that Labour Education Secretary, Crosland. And you explain that the Pootergeek himself had been campaigning for the odious Labourite Campbell, who tried, 20 odd years ago, to stop Cambridge from having its two Sixth Form Colleges, because they would be “divisive”. And then, when she lost that battle, where did Campbell sprogs finish their schooling? Here’s a clue, Damian: she’s New Labour.
Those things don’t need explaining. They need CHANGING. And there’s no chance of any Labour government ever doing so.
dearieme wrote:
Actually, it’s worse than that. Anne and I piloted a modified gullwing DeLorean back to the 40s where we snuck into Crosland’s teenage bedroom and dictated large chunks of The Future of Socialism into his subconscious.
You’re obviously a regular here, dearieme, but your contributions don’t show much evidence of your paying attention to the (I thought) tediously repetitive PooterGeek line. At the risk of boring everyone else who does, let me clear some things up (again) for your benefit: I don’t agree with every Labour Party policy; I don’t agree with Anne Campbell; and, even though it outperforms the comprehensive school system, I don’t want a return to the simple grammar/secondary divide in this country. These are not, respectively, inconsistent with my membership card, my campaigning (such as it is), or my criticism of the state of education in England and Wales.
Labour under Tony Blair has been a considerable force for good in the World in a way that neither of the opposition parties under their respective leaders show any sign of being. Their manifestos at this general election were disgraceful patchworks of vote-grubbing fantasy.
I realise it might be a bit much to ask you to address one of my arguments next time you make one of your sparkling “It was the socialists wot done it!” snarks at PooterGeek, but if you must go off on one again about the Labour Party (which comes in from plenty of stick from me here already), could you at least criticise people who still have some power, or are alive—and perhaps for something they have actually done with their power rather than because you happen to dislike them. Whatever you feel about her politics, it’s difficult to imagine any way Anne Campbell could be described as “odious”. Did she steal your favourite pencil when you were at school? Or perhaps your dictionary?
Andrew Duffin wrote:
Damn! I’d always had this nagging feeling there was a reason I should have voted for one of the other two.
Great post, thanks for sharing.
Also, great blog. Nice to see there are a few other people fighting idiotarianism in all its forms.
I realise that a natural conservative like yourself might be somewhat conflicted at aspects of Labour: it’s the bombing that you like, is it?
The bombing and the close-quarters combat.
MEH
“If someone can do that then the next Conservative government will be but a blip before another age of Labour dominance.”
OK, the first age of Labour dominance was 1918-1988, and it can appear, looking back, to have sprung from nowhere as a result of WWI. But the basis of that dominance had been cultivated since the 1880s. It took about forty years of organisation, participation, activism, resistance and battle, for the labour movement to claw itself into that position of dominance (and about six months for Neil Kinnock to piss it away, leaving us in the current, Tory-dominanted mire). For the next seventy years Labour did dominate the political agenda, as the Tories do now and the Liberals did for most of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. It is certainly possible for that to happen again. But it cannot materialise out of nowhere, no matter how angry young people get.
There are none of the necessary developments at the moment, nothing brewing that could create future Labour dominance – in fact, everything that contribute to such dominance is still in retreat. Blair has pretty much made sure of this, unnecessarily given how the public mood has changed since the mid-90s, which puts the lie to the notion that he’s a Thatcherite out of pragmatism rather than ideology. Where the hell is this dominance going to come from? Blair has cemented the regression of the Thatcher era, and the working class is now as far from power as it was during the Victorian era. Where are the seeds of the movement or party or parties that will change this? Where are the roots of the future Labour party?
Read Gregg!
I am posting a comment solely to draw attention to Gregg disagreeing with me in an interesting way above. (Gregg’s comment had to be rescued from the PooterGeek spam box.)
“A teenager carrying a “Blood For Oil” banner on behalf of a Socialist Worker front organisation thinks she has seen the puppetmasters for what they really are, when she is, in fact, a puppet of people who have been playing posture politics since before she was born.”
That’s *exactly* it, that sums up why as a politically interested member of Generation G, I find the majority of my politically interested peers so fucking depressing; it’s the anti-intellectual, toeing-the-party-line fake socialism. It might make them feel superior, but it sure as hell won’t change anything. Thank you.
It might make them feel superior, but it sure as hell won’t change anything.
Heaven forbid! What would they do for a crust after their radical chic phase?
“Damn! I’d always had this nagging feeling there was a reason I should have voted for one of the other two. ”
You could always vote for a smaller party or campaign for electoral reform…