The Baby Boomer Generation (23 page)

The 2010s kicked off with a high level of celebration; first there was the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on 29 April 2011, which was marked by a public holiday. Then the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, which were centred around the first weekend in June 2012 and marked with an additional public holiday tagged onto the spring bank holiday. Bradley Wiggins won the Tour de France and we enjoyed worldwide acclaim when we hosted the prestigious London 2012 Summer Olympics. The last time London hosted the Olympics was in 1948, right in the middle of the post-war baby boom period.

In July 2000, after thirty-two years, the Ford Motor Company ended production of the Ford Escort car. It was one of the top three bestselling cars in Britain for much of that time and was especially popular in the 1980s when it commanded the top position from 1982–89, only missing out to the Ford Cortina for the top spot in 1980–81. It had recently been displaced by new the Ford Fiesta and Ford Focus cars. The Ford Focus was by now well entrenched as the bestselling car in Britain each year and it remained so until the Ford Fiesta took over the mantle in 2009. Most of us never shed a tear at the demise of the Ford Escort in 2000, but I am sure that the majority of us felt a twinge of sadness when production of the iconic Mini ended that same year. The Mini had been part of our lives for forty-one years and it was our dream car when we first started work back in the 1960s. However, production was to start the following year on a newly designed model and the good news was that we might not need to spend as much time under the bonnet of the new Mini because this version was to be made by BMW and it would be called the BMW Mini One. We also shed a tear in 2005 when the last British-owned volume car maker, MG Rover, went into administration and the iconic eighty-year-old British-made MG brand was transferred to a company in China. The one piece of good news for car enthusiasts is that Range Rover is still going strong after forty-two years (est. 1970) and in 2010 the 1 millionth Range Rover came off the production line.

We have enjoyed the benefits of evolution, and we have seen massive improvements in lifestyles but along the way we seem to have given up so much of what was good about the traditional British way of life. Since the Second World War, successive governments have imposed all sorts of new rules and regulations upon us under the guises of necessary progress, world peace, trade, security and defence. They have gradually dismantled our country’s sovereignty and handed over many of the important decision-making responsibilities to an unelected body of overseas-based bureaucrats. To make matters worse, they have committed us to paying huge annual membership fees for the privilege of belonging to this non-exclusive, failing and dysfunctional European club that is run by hordes of political fat cats who seem to grow richer by the day. We seem to have lost control of our country and we have even lost control of who can come and live here, and how we live our lives. Successive post-war governments have overseen the gradual demise of our country’s unique identity that was once recognised the world over. In recent years, our borders have been left ajar to allow all and sundry to come in. Britain has been transformed into an overpopulated and disjointed multicultural nation. Our government no longer knows what the true population of our country is. Many of our politicians relish in the fact that they have been instrumental in changing Britain into a multicultural nation, but we now have a population with a confused mixture of allegiances, and we no longer have a common first language. Our politicians have changed the cultural identity of our nation without asking the indigenous population if they wanted such a fundamental and irreversible change to take place.

At work, the idea of jobs for life disappeared into the mist during the 1970s and 1980s, and it is now generally accepted that there is no longer any such thing as job security. Gone are the days of working for one employer for the whole of your working life. The likelihood is that you will now, at best, have several different jobs and employers in the course of your lifetime, and at worst, you will be out of work for long periods at a time. However, changes to employment laws over the years have given workers more entitlements and rights than ever before. Unlike in the 1970s, workers no longer need unions so much to fight their corner. Employers now have all sorts of record keeping, form filling, procedures and rules to follow before they can sack someone, and employees now have the means to dispute any actions their employers might take to alter their job. Government-imposed red tape makes it very difficult for an employer to get rid of a bad worker and more and more workers are taking legal advice regarding employment issues, and taking action against their employers. By the mid-2000s, the number of employment tribunal cases being heard was more than double the amount there was in the mid-1990s. By 2010, the number had increased further still; there were about 230,000 compared to 90,000 in 1995.

The kind of work we do has also been changing with each passing decade and as we move through the 2010s, if you have a job then it is very likely that you work in retailing or in finance or in one of the business-service sectors. Forty years ago one-third of us worked in manufacturing, whereas today it’s only one in five, and reducing all the time. Today, if you work in a large, open-plan office then the chances are you work in one of the thousands of call centres that have been created since the 1970s. These are the factories of the twenty-first century but the only things they make are telephone calls. In recent years, even call centre jobs have become insecure as big employers found ways of reducing costs, often by moving call centre jobs to countries offering cheap, well-educated labour, such as India. Each year increasing numbers of us work from home, often hot-desking (sharing one desk) when we need to be at the office. The improving efficiency of communication technology now makes this so easy; with email and the Internet, smart phones and web-cams, we can work anywhere just as long as we have access to broadband. The down side of this is that we are now never off duty; we are contactable twenty-four hours a day and we can be expected to do even more work from home than ever before. It is now very difficult to separate work from our home life. The experience of travelling to a workplace is so different to how it used to be; few people read newspapers on public transport, everyone is either doing something on their smart phones and iPads or reading ebooks on ereaders, such as the Kindle or Kobo; nobody carries a briefcase anymore, it’s all laptop cases, wheeled flight-bags and backpacks. When we get to work, everyone now talks in a strange jargon that has been developing since the 1990s. Anyone returning to work after years away from it and expecting to find clipboards and flipcharts are in for a shock; they will need a jargon translator. For example, this ‘desk-jockey’ needs to find ‘solutions’ to the ‘elephant in the room’. It’s a ‘big ask’ but not ‘rocket science’. Afterwards we’ll do some ‘blamestorming’. For the uninitiated, what this jargon actually means is: this desk-bound office worker who is dealing with lots of phone calls, text messages and emails all at once and dare not leave his/her desk needs to find answers to a big problem that is obvious to all but everyone is trying to ignore. It’s a lot to expect from him/her but it’s not that difficult. After he/she has dealt with it we will have a meeting to establish whose fault it was … simple! We won’t delve into any of the other mysteries of today’s workplace jargon and practices, like ‘lean manufacturing’, ‘key performance indicators’, ‘mission statements’, and ‘team-building away-days’. Goodness knows what they are about.

People wonder why we post-war baby boomers look back on the 1950s and 1960s with such affection when we enjoy such rich lives today. It’s not that we long to return to the austere lifestyle of the 1950s and the youthful heady days of the 1960s. We don’t miss living in cold and damp conditions and having to go without things. It’s more the camaraderie of people and the way of life that we remember with such great fondness. Yes, we were young and we saw life through young eyes, but life was much more relaxed, friendly and peaceful than it is today. We remember the quiet and traffic-free streets of the 1950s, and the busy high streets full of friendly shopkeepers, proper bus queues with people standing in line and bus conductors who waited for you when you were rushing for a bus. Those were the days when fast food meant a doorstep of bread and butter, and central heating meant a warm glow from an open fire. We lived among neighbours rather than in communities and we didn’t need such things as community leaders because everyone pulled together in times of crisis. Britain had a national identity that was recognised the world over; we knew and trusted our neighbours and felt we had a common purpose in life; we felt safe and unthreatened; we didn’t know what terrorism was; we lived much simpler lives and children retained their innocence through to their teenage years. There was a lot of humility, pride and dignity, and people were very trusting and tended to take other people at face value, and in austere times people were generous with what they had.

When we were children in the 1950s, we saw patched-up ex-soldiers on crutches, forced to scrape a living selling boxes of matches from a tray on street corners. It was a time when the word poor really meant poor – potless, starving, clothed in rags – and there was much evidence of this in all of our towns and cities, particularly in run-down and slum areas. In Britain today, poverty has taken on a whole new meaning. We now live in a materialistic throw-away society in which there are people who consider themselves poor if they can’t afford the latest widescreen television. In the 1950s, a classy pair of shoes was a pair without holes in them. Many a child passed their 11-plus exams but never went to grammar school because their parents couldn’t afford to buy the school uniform. There were no cheap school uniform deals from the likes of Tesco and Asda back then; you had to buy the complete outfit from one of the designated school uniform shops and everything was expensive, as were the leather satchels and bags for your school books, not to mention the gym-kits, football boots, hockey sticks and all the other paraphernalia. The best you could do as far as a bargain was concerned was to buy your shirts, blouses and socks from your local Woolworths on the high street. You also had to be able to afford travelling costs because grammar schools were few and far between. Some people did two or three jobs just so they could earn enough to pay the rent on nothing more than a slum property, often owned by an unscrupulous Rachman-type landlord. We don’t want to go back to those days of hardship but along the way something has gone wrong with the way Britain’s welfare system has evolved.

I loved the whole atmosphere of the 1950s country I grew up in. I could have done without all of those brutal and overzealous canings I got at school, but it was the fear of those beatings that kept us young chancers in check. Times were hard but as youngsters we knew no better and we just got on with life. The nearest thing we had to a mobile phone was two tin cans joined together by a long piece of string and then stretched across the road and pulled tightly. We shouted into those tin cans and we thought that we could hear what each other was saying from several yards apart, but we were just kidding ourselves; we were usually shouting so loudly into the tin cans that everyone in the next street could hear us. It is incredible how far things have advanced since we were children in the 1950s. Kids don’t use old tin cans to communicate with each other anymore; they now use mobile phones, iPads and computers to keep in touch with one another through the Internet. They have hundreds of what they call ‘virtual friends’ whom they meet over the Internet using social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and MySpace. Many have never met each other face to face and they don’t actually know all of their virtual friends personally. They just consider themselves to be like-minded with the same kind of interests and they use the social networking websites to link up with each other to chat and exchange information. Having never met doesn’t seem to matter when it comes to disclosing personal information and photographs. It’s a very strange cyber-world that many of us baby boomers find hard to understand. It’s a sort of modern-day version of pen pals, except you don’t have to pay for postage and wait for a reply, and with this modern version you can have hundreds of pen pals all sharing the same information at the same time. If you want to be really sharing you can open a Twitter account and you can leave short messages for the whole world to see. You can tweet about everything and nothing, and you can tell everyone what you are doing and where you are going for every minute of the day. All of this is posted on the Internet for all to see, but who really cares? Well, it seems that the 900 million worldwide registered users of Facebook care, and so do the 500 million worldwide Twitter users. About 46% of Facebook users are aged 13–25, which is not surprising, but 5% of Facebook users are in the 55–65 age group and that number is growing. I would imagine that most of the older users of Facebook only use it to communicate with known friends and family. Any of us who do use it to communicate with virtual friends probably need to get out more. In this modern age, friends and family are often spread far and wide apart and the Internet makes it easy to communicate instantly with them to exchange information and pictures, and even talk to them and do one-to-one video calling for free.

No child will ever again experience the joys of a 1950s childhood with all of the freedom and innocence we once knew. In the 1960s, we had the best teenage years you could ever wish for and we will go on to become the most youthful older generation there has ever been. We have certainly come a very long way since the days of shouting into tin cans and playing hopscotch on the pavements. There has been a whole lifetime of change and we have adapted to it well and embraced much of it, but we post-war baby boomers will never forget how it all started for us: the tin baths, outside lavatories and doorsteps of bread and dripping. Our 1960s slogan, ‘Turn on, Tune in and Drop out,’ has now for us become, ‘Turn on, Tune in and Drop off.’ Who would ever have thought our journey through life would be so eventful? We have seen and done it all and along the way we bought most of the T-shirts. We are lucky to have so many memories to reflect upon.