The Baby Boomer Generation

by Paul Feeney

  Two weeks later, at around midday on 21 July, there were a further four attempted bomb attacks in London, at Shepherd’s Bush, Warren Street and Oval stations on London’s Underground, and on a bus in Shoreditch. A fifth homemade bomb was later found in bushes in West London and it was suspected that there had been a fifth bomber who had dumped it there and fled. Fortunately, nobody was killed or injured because only the detonators of the bombs exploded and not the bombs that had been intended to kill a large number of innocent people.

  If all of this killing, maiming and destruction wasn’t enough for us to endure, our country was involved in on-going conflicts overseas and we regularly witnessed scenes of soldiers arriving home in flag-draped coffins. There was the war in Afghanistan (2001 onwards), the Iraq War (2003–2009) and what is now called the Libyan Intervention (2011). So far, the early years of the twenty-first century have been filled with terrorism, war and general unrest. However, there was at least some good and long-awaited news on terrorism in July 2005, when we heard that the IRA had ordered an end to its armed campaign and two months later General John de Chastelain, head of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning that was set up as part of the Northern Ireland peace process, announced that the Provisional IRA had put their arsenal of weapons ‘beyond use’. That didn’t signal a complete end to Northern Ireland-related troubles because there were different factions of the IRA and also loyalist paramilitary groups that disagreed with the terms of the peace agreements, but it did bring to an end to most of the violence.

  With all of these sorry events going on in our lives, you would think that we had little time to worry about anything else, but since 2007 our lives have in fact been dominated by the Global Financial Crisis and, more importantly, the UK financial crisis, which has greatly affected all of our lives, still is, and will do for years to come. This financial crisis took us into a prolonged period of austerity and it almost bankrupted our country. It stirred up tremendous resentment among the British public who saw the government’s bank rescue package as simply a bailout for rich bankers. It seemed as though innocent, hardworking, tax-paying people were bailing out rich bankers while at the same time paying the cost of the bailout in cutbacks and job losses. Some of the blameless casualties of the financial crisis would never be able to find work again. It was a terrible state of affairs and it would take years to solve. Just to crown all of the serious issues of the early years of the twenty-first century, here in Britain we actually had a couple of earthquakes, big enough to be felt across most of the country. The first of these was in Dudley in 2002, and the other one was in Lincolnshire in 2008. Each and every year we think that we get a lot of rain in the UK but in 2009 we got an awful lot in one day; well at least one place did – Seathwaite in the Lake District in Cumbria had a total rainfall of 314.4 mm in twenty-four hours, which is a UK record for the amount of rainfall in a single location in any twenty-four-hour period. Mind you, Seathwaite is considered to be the wettest inhabited place in England.

  In each passing decade, we baby boomers have witnessed much change, mostly to our benefit but some less so. We look back fondly on things that have completely disappeared from our lives and we question some of the changing rules and regulations that have influenced the way we live our lives. In the early years of the twenty-first century we have seen and lost even more things from our past – some we miss greatly and others not at all – but they all stir up memories of bygone days; each event is part of a chapter in our lives. In 2000, the old Wembley Stadium closed down and the bulldozers moved in to demolish the famous twin towers that had stood proudly for seventy-seven years as millions of football supporters passed beneath. To add to our woes, in the last ever game to be played at the old Wembley Stadium, the England football team lost 1–0 to Germany and the England manager, Kevin Keegan, resigned after the game. Three weeks later, on 30 October 2000, the Football Association appointed the England team’s first ever foreign manager, the Swedish coach Sven-Goran Eriksson. In 2002, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, died at the age of 101. Her daughter, Princess Margaret, the Queen’s younger sister, also died that year at the age of 71. We had watched news coverage of them both throughout our entire lives and we knew a lot about them; they seemed so much a part of our lives right from childhood and now they were gone. In 2003, after gracing our skies for twenty-seven years with its stunning streamline looks, Concorde, the supersonic aircraft, made its final commercial flight. In that same year, we saw Britain’s first toll motorway open when the M6 Toll came into service in the West Midlands. And, who would have thought that old hell raiser Mick Jagger of Rolling Stones fame would ever be offered, accept and receive a knighthood for his services to music, and to be knighted by the Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, who is himself a vintage 1948 post-war baby boomer?

  In 2004, the Football League of England and Wales was rebranded, causing great confusion to all but the most educated football fans. The old Division One became the Football League Championship, the old Division Two became League One, and the old Division Three became League Two. It seemed as though every team had suddenly moved up a league, but it was in name only. The following year, in November 2005, the football world said goodbye to George Best who died at the age of 59. Everyone knew who George Best was: an iconic sporting and playboy figure of the 1960s and 1970s; probably the first football superstar; always in the headlines. A couple of years down the line, in 2007, we saw the final edition of BBC’s Grandstand sports programme. It had been on our television screens and in our lives for forty-nine years when it ended. In that same year, the Labour Party politician Jacqui Smith made history when she became the first ever female home secretary. She made headlines again in 2009 when she stood down as home secretary following an investigation into the MPs’ expenses scandal when she was found to have broken the rules on second-home expenses. She subsequently lost her seat as Member of Parliament for Redditch. The misuse of expenses by MPs became a huge political scandal fuelled by information leaked to the Telegraph Group of newspapers; many MPs were found to be at fault, some apologised and/or resigned while others faced criminal charges and a few even went to prison. In 2009, we also saw the 35-year-old ITV Teletext service discontinued, and in 2011 we found we could no longer use our cheque guarantee cards; some shops and garages even stopped accepting cheques as a form of payment – a massive milestone. And, in July that year we waved goodbye to the News of the World newspaper following a phone-hacking scandal. The final edition, after having been in circulation for 168 years, was on Sunday 10 July 2011. On 26 February 2012, the first edition of The Sun on Sunday newspaper went on sale, replacing the defunct News of the World (both owned by the NI Group). We had long since grown used to seeing long-established shop names disappearing from the high streets and shopping malls and now we had even more names to add to our list: Littlewoods stores disappeared in 2005 after sixty-eight years on our high streets, many of them converted into Primark stores; and then there were the Woolworths stores that for so long were the mainstay of our high streets; we all shopped in our local Woolworths store and we came to rely on them for all sorts of bits and pieces. They were all closed down over Christmas 2008/09 when the firm went out of business. We all probably knew someone who worked in a Woolworths store at some time or another – 27,450 jobs were lost when they ceased trading. MFI also went out of business in 2008; many of us still have their furniture in our homes – all of that self-assembled occasional furniture and the white and magnolia bedroom suites. In 2005, for the first time, pubs in England and Wales were permitted to open for twenty-four hours, and in 2007 a ban was imposed on smoking in public places (2006 in Scotland). In 2005 we all got issued with new ‘chip and pin’ smart credit, debit and ATM cards, so we no longer had to sign credit card slips. In 2005, we saw the first gay weddings when civil partnerships became legal. And, that same year, more ground-breaking history was made when fox hunting and other types of hunting with dogs was made unlawful in England and Wales (
2002 in Scotland). However, the most important and welcome change in recent years, as far as anyone who is fast approaching retirement age is concerned, relates to age and it directly affects all post-war baby boomers; there is now no longer a mandatory retirement age in the UK and employers cannot force workers to leave when they reach 65 unless it can be objectively justified. And, for the first time, age is now part of the UK equal rights rules. Employers must now give equal treatment in access to employment as well as private and public services regardless of someone’s age. We could have done with that rule when we were 45 and we were already considered to be over the hill.

  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.