What Did The Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?

Francis Beckett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317365891
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2010, this book explores the legacy of the baby boomers: the generation who, born in the aftermath of the Second World War, came of age in the radical sixties where for the first time since the War, there was freedom, money, and safe sex.

In this book, Francis Beckett argues that what began as the most radical-sounding generation for half a century turned into a random collection of youthful style gurus, sharp-toothed entrepreneurs and management consultants who believed revolution meant new ways of selling things; and Thatcherites, who thought freedom meant free markets, not free people. At last, it found its most complete expression in New Labour.

The author argues that the children of the 1960s betrayed the generations that came before and after, and that the true legacy of the swinging decade is in ashes.

1. How the baby boomers got their freedom: 1945–51

No generation has ever been as free as the baby boomers. They were freer than any of their ancestors, not just from oppression, but from poverty and ignorance, fear and illness. They were free because in 1942 Lord Beveridge called for a serious assault on ‘the five giants’, and in 1945 Clement Attlee’s government launched that assault.

The year of the Beveridge Report also saw the first rise in the birthrate since 1880. Three years earlier, when the Second World War began in 1939, it had gone down to sixteen births per thousand of the population. A small increase in 1942 presaged the real baby boom, which began in 1945 and peaked in 1947 with a birthrate of 20.7 per 1,000.¹ It was an indication of optimism. In 1942 people were daring to hope, and in 1945 were starting to believe, that we were going to create a world fit for our children to live in: a world free, not just of the Nazis, but of the poverty that disfigured thirties Britain.

We have all seen those newsreel shots of wildly optimistic celebrations on Victory in Europe day – VE Day, 8 May 1945: people dancing in the London streets, climbing lamp-posts, singing. They were the parents of the baby boomers. And we know something that Prime Minister Winston Churchill and King George VI, watching benevolently from a balcony high above, did not know: that our parents were not just celebrating the end of Nazism, and of fear of invasion; they were also celebrating what they were about to do with their votes. Churchill’s status as a national hero would not stop them voting him out of office. In the general election that was to follow, they were going to issue the sharpest call for a new and fairer society that Britain had ever heard.

Even Labour leader Clement Attlee was not expecting outright victory, and Winston Churchill never understood what had happened. When Clementine Churchill tried to console him by suggesting his defeat might be a blessing in disguise, he replied that it was ‘a remarkably effective disguise’. Three years later, he wrote bitterly of how, with ‘all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs.’² But they were not dismissing Churchill so much as the Tories who had given them starvation and injustice in the thirties; and they were demanding a better world for their children by giving Attlee a landslide parliamentary majority of 146 seats. Attlee was to deliver their legacy to the baby boomers.

For the first (and last) time, two Communists were elected to Parliament, and Communist leader Harry Pollitt came within 972 votes of winning a third seat in Rhondda East. If Britain had had a system of proportional representation in 1945, the Communist Party’s 100,000 votes would have given it enough seats to be a real power-broker, quite apart from the fact that several of Labour’s new MPs were close to the Communist Party.

The Communist Party’s brief popularity in 1945 was not just the result of Britain fighting the Second World War alongside the Red Army. The Communists had disavowed violent revolution in a new manifesto, The British Road to Socialism, and its popularity was a powerful sign that people had radical hopes of their new government. Great expectations were riding on Attlee’s narrow shoulders.

Such expectations are often disappointed. People had radical expectations of Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, and of Tony Blair in 1997, and learned quickly not to hold their breath. But in 1945 the Labour Party was led by Britain’s quietest and steeliest Prime Minister, and he had around him a small group of remarkable politicians, determined to seize the once-in-a-generation chance to change the world.

On 26 July 1945 Violet Attlee drove her husband to Buckingham Palace in the small family Hillman Minx and waited outside, just as Churchill’s chauffeur had waited outside in the Rolls half an hour before when he resigned his office. Attlee and King George VI were both shy, awkward and understated men. ‘I’ve won the election,’ said Attlee, and the King replied, ‘I know, I heard it on the six o’clock news.’ It did not sound like the tumbrils, but it was.

Attlee came to power at the worst possible time to start spending great sums of money on improving the lives of the people. Britain had a war-devastated economy. Bombing had made thousands of people homeless. Daily life reflected the nation’s poverty, even for those who were relatively well off. ‘I travelled last Sunday to Newcastle upon Tyne,’ wrote a prosperous journalist, J. L. Hodson, in 1945.

The journey which in peacetime took four hours now took eight and a quarter. No food on the train. No cup of tea to be got at the stops because the queues … were impossibly long. At Newcastle … no taxi to be got. My hotel towel is about the size of a pocket handkerchief, the soap tablet is worn to the thinness of paper, my bed sheets are torn.³

Things we take for granted were very hard to obtain. ‘Her mother used to cut up newspapers into squares to hang on a piece of string in the outside privy,’ reports the writer Julie Summers of a woman who was young in 1945. ‘Her aunt, however, who was a little grander, used to use pinking shears to give her squares a more pleasing outline.’⁴

And in August 1945, just one week after Japan surrendered, the Americans dealt a final, crippling economic blow. They ended Lend-lease, the arrangement under which the USA supplied materials to Britain for which Britain was unable to pay. No one had imagined that it would be withdrawn so abruptly. Without Lend-lease Britain could not feed its people or pay its debts. It would, eventually, starve.

Lord Maynard Keynes, Britain’s leading economist, was sent to Washington to negotiate a loan, and returned, not with the £5 billion loan he had hoped for, but £3.75 billion, on very harsh terms indeed. Britain had to agree to make sterling convertible to dollars on demand, which was likely to lead to a run on the pound and a financial crisis – as it did, three years later.

A lesser government would have taken the withdrawal of Lend-lease as an excuse to postpone or water down the great reforms that Labour had been elected to carry out, but Attlee knew that he had to seize the mood and slay the five giants, and he set himself a deadline of 5 July 1948.

He gave the task of slaying Want to Social Security Minister Jim Griffiths. Before 1945 there was an element of punishment about such relief as was available. If a father was out of work, his children might be saved from absolute starvation, but not from the many diseases, like rickets, resulting from undernourishment; and not from misery and humiliation. Griffiths’s task was to ensure that benefits were universal, and that when people fell on hard times, they should not be driven to despair. His 1946 National Insurance Act for the first time insured every person in the land against sickness, unemployment and retirement, as well as providing widows’ benefits, maternity benefits and death grants, with allowances for dependants. It embraced every person in the country who was over school age, but under pensionable age. A further piece of legislation, the National Assistance Act, was designed to catch those who, for whatever reason, fell through the system. The intention was that no one would ever again fall below a basic subsistence level, and it removed the fear of starvation from most of the baby boomer generation for the whole of their lives.

Ellen Wilkinson, Minister of Education, was given the task of slaying Ignorance. Wilkinson set to work to implement the 1944 Education Act, ignoring all the many voices that counselled delay in the light of the economic circumstances. The Act specified that education should be free and universal, and she raised the school leaving age to fifteen. It all required a huge school building programme and the training of 35,000 new teachers in a hurry. She also needed a rapid expansion of university places, which increased from 50,246 in 1938/9 to 76,764 in 1947/8.

She introduced free school milk. By October 1946 more than 90 per cent of all school children were getting their third of a pint of free milk, in those funny little bottles that became a part of the childhood memories of all baby boomers. ‘Free milk will be provided in Hoxton and Shoreditch, in Eton and Harrow. What more social equality can you have than that?’ she told the 1946 Labour Party conference, but of course free school milk undeniably made more difference in Hoxton and Shoreditch than it did in Eton and Harrow. In places where children did not get an adequate diet, or left home without breakfast, it contributed greatly to the defeat of childhood illnesses. Generations of poor children grew up stronger and healthier because of this one small and not very expensive measure. Before the war, private-school children were noticeably taller, healthier and stronger than the poorest state-school children, because they were properly fed. In the fifties this was so no longer, and the reason was free school meals and school milk.

Wilkinson’s principle that everyone, rich and poor, should have it was what underlay the welfare state as the Attlee government envisaged it. The millionaire is entitled to his state old age pension, because he is a citizen. The only alternative to universal benefits was the means test, which caused great hardship and bitterness. This principle of universality was the first to be abandoned by the baby boomer generation in government, half a century later. And free school milk was the first of the Attlee government’s measures to be clawed back by Margaret Thatcher, who abolished it when she was Education Secretary in Edward Heath’s 1970–74 government.

Ellen Wilkinson avoided the extra battle necessary to implement the 1942 Labour Party conference resolution in favour of what we now call comprehensive schools. Instead the government created a three-tier system of grammar schools, technical schools and secondary modern schools, and the Eleven plus examination would decide which of the three each child should attend.

Wilkinson didn’t like the system she created, but calculated that a comprehensive system was a political battle too far. She was appalled by the idea of dividing children at eleven into successes and failures, saying privately, ‘The stigma of lower IQs should not attach itself to any particular institution.’ She worried that history might not be taught outside grammar schools, caricaturing it as: ‘Don’t worry how we got India, let’s go and do some nice work at the forge.’⁵ But she saw the three-tier system as a necessary compromise if she was to get the rest of her package through.

Disease was to be confronted by Nye Bevan. Bevan nationalised hospitals, saying that if the nation did not own them, the Minister could not provide a National Health Service – he could only exhort others to do so – and he could not guarantee the right of a sick person to a hospital bed. Already between 80 and 90 per cent of voluntary sector hospitals’ money came from public funds, so why should they not be accountable? In the teeth of furious opposition from the Conservatives and the British Medical Association, and despite its massive expense, his Bill received the Royal Assent on 6 November 1946, to come into operation on 5 July 1948.

The NHS was instantly so popular that both the BMA and the Conservative Party were soon claiming that they had been in favour of it all along. The infant baby boomers were taken to the doctor for cuts and bruises, coughs and colds, and were treated. Very quickly, people old enough to remember the thirties knew they would never permit a government to take them back to a time before the National Health Service.

Baby boomers still expect treatment when we feel we need it. We were the first generation to expect this; and if it is left to us, we might be the last. Most of the baby boomers were born in the NHS, so you would expect it to be safe in their hands. Yet since 1979 it has been tinkered with in ways that would horrify Bevan; and recently an influential thinktank, the Social Market Foundation, proposed a £20 fee for each visit to the doctor.

Bevan was also responsible for the assault on Squalor, providing housing in a country where thousands of homes had been destroyed in all major cities; where thousands of people still lived in slums; where a market-led housing boom in the thirties had produced hundreds of thousands of middle-class homes for sale, but nowhere for slumdwellers to move to; where there was a chronic shortage of building materials; and where the baby boom was just starting. He made local authorities the engine of his housing policy. The postwar council estates are still the best social housing Britain ever produced, because Bevan insisted on higher standards than his successors thought affordable. The mean little houses and flats in tower blocks which now often pass for social housing were a long way in the future.

Squalor, like Ignorance, was not slain, but it was wounded. Many of the baby boomers grew up on Bevan’s council estates. If they had been born a generation earlier, they would have been children in grim urban slums; and if a generation later, in terrifying tower blocks. They were indeed a blessed generation.

On 5 July 1948, five new acts became operational: Bevan’s NHS Act and Town and Country Planning Act, Griffiths’s National Insurance and National Assistance Acts, and the Children Act, providing for children cared for by the state. Clement Attlee broadcast to the nation on the radio:

Tomorrow there will come into operation the most comprehensive system of social security ever introduced into any country … When I first went to work in East London, apart from what was done by voluntary organisations and by private charities … the only provision for the citizen unable to work through sickness, unemployment or old age was that given by the Poor Law … The Poor Law was designed to be, and indeed it was, the last refuge of the destitute.

The new Acts were based, he said, on a new principle: that we must combine together to meet contingencies with which we cannot cope as individual citizens.’ They were ‘part of a general plan and they fit in with each other … They are comprehensive and available to every citizen. They give security to all members of the family.’ The NHS ‘gives a complete cover for health by pooling the nation’s resources and paying the bill collectively.’ The words read strangely today, because we do not remember what life was like when the only relief available was provided by voluntary organisations and private charities.

The fifth giant, Idleness, or unemployment as it is more commonly known, had been slain for the duration of the war, but would demobilisation bring it back? After the First World War the streets had been full of former soldiers who had given their health for their country, and whose country could not even offer them the chance to work and feed their families. It did not happen after the Second World War. The government got about ten million people out of wartime jobs without unemployment ever going above 3 per cent.

In October 1945 Chancellor Hugh Dalton’s first budget reduced the very high wartime level of taxation, but the tax cuts were strongly in favour of the worst off. Dalton took two and a half million people in the lower income groups out of tax altogether, and substantially increased tax for the wealthiest – at its highest level, income tax reached 19s 6d (97½p) in the pound. He introduced a profits tax and raised death duties. A second budget, in April 1946, increased substantially the sum spent on education, began the payment of family allowances and put £10 million into Development Areas that suffered from high levels of unemployment. Under Attlee and Dalton, the state played Robin Hood, robbing the rich to give to the poor. It had never done so before. It has never done so since.

*

Part of the reason it has never done so since is the relationship with the USA after the withdrawal of Lend-lease and the American loan. American disapproval of Britain’s welfare state mattered from the start. In the 1945 postwar settlement, the USA, the Soviet Union and Britain were referred to as ‘the big three’ but it was mere politeness: ‘the big two and a quarter’ would be more accurate.

The decision to withdraw Lend-lease and force Britain to pay on the nail for everything supplied by the USA was taken so quickly and unexpectedly that two ships about to leave New York had to turn round and go home. During the loan negotiations, senators grumbled that Washington might be subsidising socialism in Britain, while American newspapers jeered at the threadbare Brits and their begging bowl, presenting them as sponging socialists crawling to Uncle Sam so that they could feather-bed their people. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had to stifle his fury at headlines in the American press calling Britain a nation of ‘cry-babies’, while Attlee told Parliament with characteristic understatement but uncharacteristic bitterness: ‘If the role assigned to us [during the war] had been to expand our exports, we should, of course, be in an immeasurably stronger position than we are today.’ The USA, he reminded MPs, had expanded its exports during the war.

The Americans made clear to the British negotiators that a nation deeply in debt to the USA should not oppose Washington in important foreign policy matters. The US Secretary of State, James Byrnes, presented Ernest Bevin with a list of plac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Author’s note and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. How the baby boomers got their freedom: 1945–51
• 2. When we were very young: 1950–56
• 3. The cradle of the sixties: 1956
• 4. The baby boomers go to school
• 5. What if Mr Macmillan’s out? 1957–63
• 6. The very model of a modern fluent technocrat: 1964–67
• 7. The end of the adventure: 1968
• 8. How the baby boomers destroyed the trade unions and made Thatcherism: 1969–79
• 9. The radical conservatives: 1979–97
• 10. The baby boomer Prime Ministers: 1994–2010
• 11. The children of the baby boomers
• Notes
• Index