Talkin' 'bout my generation again

How intriguing. In a couple of posts (here and here) in the Guardian, Francis Beckett has been promoting his new book What Did The Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?, in which he comes at his and my generation from a conservative POV diametrically opposite to my own.

That's a small "c" because Beckett is very much a fossil of the old, trade-unionist left. It seems some lefties have protested that Boomers "joined and energised the radical labour movement campaigns to defend and advance the welfare state during the 70s and 80s". Becket's reply is trenchant:

But they didn't. They brought their 60s student politics into the unions in those two decades, and it was their intolerance, sectarianism and self-righteousness that brought the unions to their knees by the mid 80s. The new left then morphed into New Labour and finished the job.

The baby boomers entered the unions with enthusiastic intolerance and a conviction that nothing done in earlier years by grey old men in grey crumpled suits could possibly have any value. They made the unions their playground and their battleground, and they fattened them for slaughter by Margaret Thatcher.

Can he really believe that? Surely a student of the trades union must know that it was old-line communists like the Soviet agent Jack Jones, and deluded would-be Bolsheviks like Jack Dash and Arthur Scargill, who gave battle on ground of their choosing and were routed because the economic activities they represented were no longer vital or even important to the life of the nation.

I cannot disagree with at least the last sentence of Beckett's summary:

Of course, not everyone who was born between 1945 and 1955 wanted the Iraq war, or the NHS turned into a market, or huge proportions of the nation's resources given to greedy bankers, or an increasingly illiberal society, or for the markets to rule. But the baby boomers' chance to change Britain for the better came, and it went.

Indeed - as Beckett says, the majority of the Boomers backed NuLabour and Tony Blair, whose superficiality perfected represented a generation that never knew hardship and never had to struggle for anything meaningful.

That support fell away when it became clear that the party had not really changed in substance and was still the political arm of the trade union movement. Trouble is, trade unionism is now concentrated in occupations fattened for the slaughter by Gordon Brown's unsustainable increase in the size of the state.

It must have crossed Beckett's mind while writing his book that the common denominator in all the defeats his ideology has suffered is that it cannot adjust to changing circumstances and is always demanding subsidies and special consideration from those who have no reason to give either.