“It would be foolish to think of arguing that there is no problem looming for coming generations; what I would argue is that somehow the baby – boomers (of which I am one) are somehow at fault.”
                – Radiowonk, @13

This comment was submitted to the discussion on Stephanie Flanders’ most recent analysis of Osbourne’s budget policies. It’s an interesting article on generational economics, following one in which she examined the relative benefits of the boom to the relative costs of the bust from a gender perspective.

Addressing the main argument, briefly; about the only thing I would quibble with is the unqualified use of the term ‘baby-boomers’. The Baby Boomers were born between ’46 and ’64 in America and are defined economically and culturally by their hugely increased access to college education across class, gender and (ultimately) race. They are also marked, one might say scarred, as a generation by something else; Vietnam.

The picture is a bit less clearly demarcated over here. To begin with, access to a middle-class education becomes a national reality in the 80s rather than in the 60s. The same statement applies to the Falklands. But there definitely is a group of cohorts which have, like the ‘classic’ American Baby Boomers, benefited disproportionately in both economic and political power. The analysis of economic imbalance that Stephanie lays out here applies to the cohorts born between ’46 and ’74, a generation and a half, the ‘half’ of which would absolutely reject the idea that an article criticising the Baby Boomers was about them.

Younger and angrier writers than me tend to sound very critical of an entire generation when they talk about these injustices. Blaming people has some emotional utility but it’s not good politics, or joined-up thinking. One cannot accuse our predecessors of having stolen the world deliberately; they were children when adults took the decisions which handed them the keys to the kingdom.

They just got lucky. That really is it. And it’s worth remembering how many of them didn’t get lucky at all. The first two cohorts of this generation were trying to feed children through the Winter of Discontent. For black men in this generation, the whites are the enemy and the police are their enforcers. Women in this generation are the most likely to accept domestic violence as normal, because of how violent their fathers were. For children of this generation, when they were teenagers, they were 75% more likely to die by violence before they were 20 than their own children are. They were more than twice as likely to commit serious violence and more than three times as likely to commit arson as teenagers, than the hoodies of today. They lived in a rough world where information was hard to come by and money didn’t stretch well.

And yet. And yet; while local economic factors such as the pits mining out change the picture, mostly in the north, for the country as a whole these were the first generation who could legitimately expect to own property. That was brand new; until after WWII most Britons were born and died knowing they would never own land. While there have been four staggering recessions during the lives of this generation, they were only in the workforce for two of them, and constitute the most financially secure generation and a half ever due to their massively disproportionate ownership of British housing. This is the generation who were at the height of their career potential when the rise of the Tiger economies coupled with the long-awaited arrival of North Sea oil and gas blew open the doors of upward mobility in the 80s. These cohorts were the ones that received, and still own, the huge redistribution of wealth that Thatcher’s sale of council property created.

“What you have omitted from this discussion is the massive transfer of wealth which takes place as younger generations either live at home for much longer, subsidized by their parents, or when they inherit assets, such as houses.”
                – terrypaineismyhero, @8

A lot of the responses in the comment thread focus on this idea. I’m not surprised; it’s one of the better propaganda coups of the last 60 years. Anyone who wasn’t in a position to be on the property ladder during Thatcher’s redistribution of social housing got screwed. The 90s buy-to-let boom combined with the remarkable lack of new council houses built since 1986 compared with the number built per year during the previous thirty years meant that we will never again see house ownership being the norm; not without an equally radical (enforced!) redistribution of assets.

The argument put forward by terrypaineismyhero lies in the assumption that the majority of these houses will be inherited. They won’t.

If you’re an old woman whose husband has died and you’re living in a 5 bedroom house, what do you typically do? Sell it, move to a smaller house, live comfortably till you die. Many old couples will do this together well before either die. How often since 1995 have their children been able to afford to buy the house? These houses aren’t inherited, the assets are realised to provide the thirty-year retirement that is now expected as by right.

Some people are inheriting houses, I have no doubt of that. But it’s no-one I know, and since the collapse of pension schemes that made so many news stories in the 90s, and since the huge shift in the market due to buy-to-let from owner-occupier to professional landlords, most of the housing assets that were redistributed to the six cohorts we’re discussing are staying with them.

And to finish, I will return to Radiowonk.

“The vast majority of us lived and worked in the world as it was, neither having nor seeking any influence about the rules by which we had to live beyond putting a cross on a bit of paper every now and then.”

Yes, this generation got lucky in several ways, but the most significant was being born in a stable and functional democracy.

The social attitudes of these six cohorts were ossified prior to the Internet opening up the mental terrain of the West. As a result, they are a generation inclined to think and talk like Gillian Duffy or like Jeremy Clarkson, depending on class and education level. They have identical economic interests, and identical economic and social expectations. They grew up in the brief era when the NHS was big enough and the population small enough. And every election for the last forty years has been dominated by the narrative constructs of these six cohorts.

The single greatest fortune of the baby boomers is that they outnumber everyone else and always have. They got to the point where they could out-vote their parents’ generation very young, because there was lots of them and because their parents’ generation had been winnowed by WWII. As a result, the agenda of British politics became driven by their opinions, desires and aspirations some time between 1965 and 1970 and continues to be owned by them to this day. That’s more or less exactly the period of autocratic, majority government discussed in my last series.

You can’t blame the Boomers for their luck in when they were born. But the reins of power passed into their hands long enough ago that you can blame them for their actions since. Contrary to Radiowonk’s later comments, they did engineer our current level of debt; they have been the cabinet since the mid-80s. They did retire early with the expectation that they’d paid enough taxes, thank you, and deserved to retire from an office job at the age set for mill-workers in 19th century England. They could afford it. No-one in my generation even thinks they’re going to own their own home, let alone their parents’.

Further details forthcoming soonest.

It was very obvious that neither Tories nor Labour knew how to run a campaign which might end in a coalition, let alone what to do when neither of them won a clear majority. Cameron and Brown, to give them due, both rose to the occasion with a level of dignity and competence I had not been led to expect. But neither the Labour Party nor the Tories had any idea what to do; what you do after elections is either crow or viciously attack your opponent for doing just what you did to the constituency boundaries last time you were in.

The Liberal Democrat campaign, as led by Nick Clegg, shut no doors at all. The conduct of both the leadership and the parliamentary party during the negotiation process has been exemplary, and I don’t believe I’ve ever said that about politicians on this blog. They acted like the guys in the room who knew what they were doing, and they got a much better deal than I could have expected. I say ‘better deal’ and I mean for me, as a non-member who is both personally quite poor and a small-business entrepreneur (these two are integrally related). I also mean for the nation, for several different reasons. I thought they were going to get screwed with their pants on by a vindictive Tory party who have been waiting thirteen years for a chance to savage the ‘liberal elite’. But that’s not what happened.

What happens next is a different matter. It is difficult to see what the LDs will do if the Tories renege on aspects of the coalition agreement; far too many of those who make the front benches will be subject to very intense incentives not to revolt, let alone bring down the government. Are Cameron and co. honest parties here? I don’t know. A similar question could be directed at Clegg and Huhne; will the Orange Book faction of the LDs push the party to the right in power? I don’t know.

Mark has reckoned and provided handy graphs for exactly how closely corruption and hubris in our halls of power correlate to the perceived job security of the official. Politicians who know they won’t lose take the piss; this is not exactly a subtle political insight, but we somehow failed to do anything about it for 30 years. What I suspect is that this represents a microcosm of the larger political reality of Britain in the 20th century.

I’m not the only person to see this general shape to what’s happening this year. Anthony Barnett’s analysis is much broader in scope, and examines wider categoric questions within British, and particularly Conservative, ideology and praxis. But he charts the same transition into a different view of government and administration, as well as of electoral politics, which followed Thatcher into power. Only three times in the 20th century did one party hold power for more than a decade. The Tories won two elections and governed under four Prime Ministers in the 50s and early 60s, but only the second electoral term had a significant majority, and then they lost power.

Thatcher, as I discussed yesterday, changed all that. She came to power at a nexus point, executed her agenda brilliantly and then dumped the consequences on John Major. During the decade of excess, the culture we have all come to know and loathe of Murdochian smears, casual insults to her own senior ministers delivered via the TV camera, governance by fiat rather than by cabinet, and all of the other trappings became entrenched in Westminster and Wapping. British politics has historically been polite and mature, as you’d expect from a sovereign nation who’ve been doing this about as long as anyone else in the West. In the 20th Century alone we saw no less than 8 coalition governments, one of which famously managed World War II. It is only in the 1980s that our politicians became hysterically, rather than ideologically, tribal.

Until recently on both sides of the pond, politicians could fight a friend on the floor of the house and drink gin [1] with him after. That is long gone and the older combatants, Lord Steel and Tony Benn, could be heard welcoming the return of conciliatory politics and reminiscing about the Good Old Days. One part of this urge is simple, old-boys-club wistful thinking; a nostalgia for the days when the politics was run like, and by, the Oxford Union.

But it also speaks to some truth. Two generations ago our politicians could oppose one another on rational grounds with intellectual honesty and passion, without having to believe each other evil. Misguided, frequently; selfish and dishonest, typically, but very rarely evil. Until Nixon there, and Thatcher here, the moderates in each wing held more ground than the violently divisive. What the Southern Strategy did for American politics, the breaking of organised labour and the sale without replacement of council properties did to Thatcher’s Britain. This was then replicated in the civil liberties and immigration discourse under New Labour.

Ianucci’s screaming gibbons have been permitted to debase our public debate to a red-top common denominator of insults, trite lines, scaremongering, sound bites, Alisdair Campbell, corruption prosecutions and bitterly personal acrimony. Its ultimate expression comes in the rush by New Labour power brokers to ruin any chance they might retain to establish amicable relations with a party that could easily offer them a return to power through coalition at the next election. That kind of rumpus is what the floor of the House is for. That’s the debating playground, set apart by law as a free forum where members can let themselves get carried away and throw tantrums if it’ll help. But administration, the process of governing, has to be grown-up politics; it is a persistent negotiation not a prize-fight.

Grown-up politics is pragmatic rather than ideological. Both Cameron and Brown made their political bones as foot-soldiers in the neo-liberal revolution. They helped the nation declare war on moderation and rationalism in the name of religious intolerance and class privilege. Thatcher pioneered in Britain the rather Stalinist attitude that government policy is more real than the facts in the case. God help you if the facts change over time. It is this hubris which brought Thatcher down over the poll tax: it is this willingness to willfully distort the truth in pursuit of ideology which led to the Dodgy Dossier and the sacking of Professor Nutt.

The last forty years have seen moderation locked out of British politics by autocratic majority governments elected on spin, scare-mongering and Murdoch’s propaganda machine. At this election the voters forced the return of compromise the only way they could under this constitution. And bizarrely, we had someone available who knew broadly how to handle that situation. I am not one of those who sees Nick Clegg as a kingmaker, because his role is less autocratic than that of either of the other two leaders (triple lock, etc.). What became very obvious through the election and the following five days was that one of the three party leaders knew the territory they found themselves navigating and the other two didn’t.

Anthony also commented on the extent to which the Liberal Democrats’ excellent credentials as European operators offset and the Tories’ ridiculous allies. What hasn’t been talked about as much is the impact of Clegg and Huhne’s route to the top of the party on the remarkable success of the Liberal Democrats at negotiating the minefields of coalition building. More on that next time on “JQP muses”.

[1] For any lost USAians, read ‘bourbon’. For ‘Oxford Union’ read ‘Ivy League law review editors’.

Both regimes exploited the strength of their perceived position as winning teams to orchestrate subtle, and then not-so-subtle, witch-hunts. Bizarrely, in the case of Thatcher’s social services, there was a literal witch hunt. As Reagan was expanding Nixon’s War on Drugs into Wars on other things, Thatcher was declaring war on organised labour, Irish travelers, peace-protesters, environmentalists and the counter-culture in general. And she was winning, because let’s face it, if you smash all the news men’s cameras and if you’re just beating up a gang of filthy hippies and left-liberal wets, why would middle England care? It’s not like your party will ever need the votes of the liberal and progressive middle class. Er, hang on…

Labour, having surfed into Cool Britannia on a wave of BritPop pizzazz, shambled to the right over the War on Terror and then proceeded to abandon the world of rationality all together. Evidence became a deprecated practice, science policy was subjected to political speculation and short-term party interest. The rational but leftist economic inspirations of a young Scottish Presbyterian in the 80s turned into slavish neo-Thatcherite greed in office in the 2000s. The hysterical Christian wing of the Labour Party are just as terrifying as Christina Odone and Nadine Dorries.

Why did I justify typing all of that when I’m lurking deep within the bowels of a pile of boxes significantly higher than my head, moodily smoking and wishing I’d had more than 4 hours sleep at any time this week? Patience, gentle reader, good things come to those who wait.

The last and most significant parallel I need to draw is between Black Wednesday and the collapse of Northern Rock. In both instances of over-long government by a functional dictatorship (full majority in the commons) their term saw the collapse of significant chunks of the Square Mile boom the government had been exploiting to maintain its autarchy. And unlike what usually happens, where a government is lucky to get ten straight years and very lucky to get ten years of a more or less free hand to legislate, in both cases the economic failure actually had been engineered by the incumbents, not the last guys.

Thatcher over-clocked the economy quite deliberately to gain the largest possible advantage from the North Sea, the privatisation binge, and the world-wide economic and financial boom that accompanied the rise of the Tiger economies. Most governments who run their economy too fast with inadequate cooling are safely out of office when the magic smoke escapes. The Tories weren’t, and David Cameron bloody well knows it; he was standing behind Lamont when the Chancellor announced an interest base rate of 15%.

Unexpectedly, Brown’s Chancellorship saw New Labour follow exactly the same pattern. The City was given its head, the communications boom was exploited ruthlessly while its lucrative consumers, mostly under 30, were demonised in Westminster and Wapping alike. The housing market boom was then artificially inflated well beyond its natural term to off-set the horrendous costs of the War on Terror. The Rock did not fall over because it was heavily invested in US sub-prime instruments, it was a home-grown collapse which came about because the government over-clocked the economy until something blew. What blew was Northern Rock.

I would argue that we can in part credit Gordon Brown’s response with saving us some half a million jobs versus the Tory management of the previous recession. Too late, and in the wrong way, but he did try to respond constructively for the country rather than just happily for the city.

The conclusions are three-fold. Firstly, it is clear that there is a natural cycle which is used by financial traders to consolidate their industry (ensure that very very few new contenders ever make it into the Deep Pocket Club). If permitted by government, it is in the interests of our official gamblers to over-inflate, bust, then over-inflate rather than reflecting the accurate market price of a given commodity or instrument. This is because market men make money in the margin (say that drunk): they can only ‘win’ if the market price is not the same as the actual worth. If the price is too low you make money buying; if it is too high you make money selling. If it’s right, there’s no margin for the Monopoly players in rainbow coats.

Secondly, it is clear that our system promotes governmental short-termism. Both of these two over-powered regimes governed in the short-term interest by actively inflating natural booms until they became insubstantial bubbles which, predictably, burst. This is most certainly not the only way to run a county, it’s just the only way that any Briton under 40 has ever experienced. Safe seats lead directly to ministerial corruption; safe majorities lead directly to autocracy and a bitterly divisive national discourse.

And thirdly, it is bad for Britain to have long-term, majority governments. Both times we’ve tried it in the modern era it has permitted those governments to engineer vastly damaging recessions for short term gain. Twice in that time it has allowed the government to engage us in a war of aggression we didn’t want. Both times won the government significant short-term political gains. Letting either the red or the blue teams run the country with an over-all majority guarantees that they will wreck your economy in their own interest at least once.

Our system is designed to produce majority governments, but it has evolved to deliver (in Sir Humphrey’s words) an aristocratic system of government occasionally interrupted by elections. This situation is well reflected in the educational backgrounds of our current cabinet. In vote-share terms, the country is more or less a quarter liberal, a third conservative and two-fifths labour. That is the direct result of two long, autocratic, socially authoritarian regimes both of which shot themselves in the foot while scuttling the economy. The people, as my friend Laurie suggests, have mumbled. They have spent two generations trying out elective dictatorship in the 19th Century model, and it would seem that they don’t like it much.

After lots of months, more bureaucratic idiocy than you can shake Michael Gove at and two weeks of stress, distress and uncertainty which I hope never to have to repeat, John Q. has bought a pub and is loading the van tomorrow. Then I’m going out.

I may be some time.

Which is interesting, because during the bit of the 20th century while we had things mostly working that didn’t happen a whole lot, no-one really got more than two terms in power, and frequently without a particularly secure majority. That all changed with the coming together of the dividends from North Sea oil and gas, the over-reaching of the militant end of the miner’s unions, the opportunity to start a politically motivated war shortly before an election, and the leadership of one of the best and strongest of our modern politicians. In that intersection a new era of tribal politics was created for Britain. Thatcher could dismiss her own moderates as ‘wets’, because she was winning. As soon as she wasn’t winning, things got messy and Major had to try and restrain the rampant excesses for which his party are famous. He largely failed. But throughout Back to Basics we were following the path Thatcher had charted; absolutism. We Are Right. This Lady’s Not For Turning. Maturity and compromise are not eternally lacking factors in British politics; they are aspects of our political debate which were deliberately excised by a party too powerful for too long, who succumbed to hubris.

Now we come to New Labour (the actual Labour Party have not held power during the new political era I’m describing). When they came in, they had a majority which reflected all of the following about the Tories; the arrogance of their backbenchers and financiers, the hypocrisy of their front bench, and the inadequacy of their response to the recession of the early 1990s which led to considerably more people unemployed than there are now off a smaller market crash. The majority they brought with them also depended from several things about New Labour; the success of Blair’s marketing of his message, the shifting of the Labour Party rightwards to park their tanks on the Tory’s lawn, the desperation of many people in a dead jobs market and the genuine belief in many people’s minds that the Labour Party represented a return to compassionate and progressive politics.

Like Thatcher’s Tories, the first term made it look like the country had been right. The economy began to recover. Money from the creation of the multi-billion pound Internet and mobile phone markets replicated for Labour the effects of the dividends from the North Sea finally coming in, after years of heavy investment by mostly Labour governments. A number of good laws, and several progressive policies, were implemented in New Labour’s first term; in Thatcher’s something similar happened, though ‘progressive’ is more debateable. In both cases the party was then given an opportunity to which they chose to react like hysterical authoritarian wing-nuts.

In Thatcher’s case it was Scargill, pushing the (valid, necessary, politically courageous) miner’s strikes into pursuing the wrong goal. Mining is one of those industries where after you’ve been digging up your country for 7,000 years eventually you start running out of stuff it is plausible to retrieve. You can’t keep empty pits running; but you can force the pit owners to look after the men and women who depend on them. You can pump money, education, expertise and industrial incentives into those areas before the pits close. That wasn’t what Scargill wanted. He wanted to beat Thatcher, to gain a symbolic and historic victory over the grocer’s daughter who sided with the mill owners; and ultimately, to have the mines last forever, to have the old economy never change. The support from other mining unions began to erode under him as did support from outside the industry. That handed Thatcher the opportunity to break the Unions, so she did.

Blair had developed a fair amount of token socialism in the first term while rapaciously consuming the short-term benefits of over-clocking your financial markets way beyond the red line. But the underlying nature of the New Labour echelons was Party Line; the signs of their authoritarianism were already there in their voting records. The opportunity was the evolution of the modern war on ‘terror’. The response was to launch New Labour into a spiral of self-referential and hubristic authoritarianism which may yet destroy the party as a force in British politics, if they don’t stop their scorched earth campaign against the Liberal Democrats.

Both leaders were then succeeded by a back-room battler who had significant intellectual credentials and absolutely no hope of controlling their party for the long haul. Of the two I would say Major discharged the responsibilities set before him more competently than has Brown: Major did manage to win at least one election.

All of this is preambulatory; it provides the context for a thesis about the financial economy, post-industrialism, the impact of the information economy and how these intersect to ignite a new desire for constitutional regeneration in a previously apathetic British electorate. Call back tomorrow for a further installment!

It’s about safe seats. AV is the only one of the alternative systems which preserves them intact. Safe seats are graphably the reason for the expenses scandal. Safe seats allow parachuting of candidates, placing too much power in the hands of central committees over local candidates and parties. Safe seats are wholly counter-democratic. And the LibDems have almost none of them, but the other parties have quite a few each.

For voting reform to matter, it must remove safe seats. Only one system does. Neither large party can countenance that easily. 62% of those polled recently support PR. Therefore neither large party can offer a referendum on anything other than AV, which isn’t PR.

For some more interesting analyses, check out Alix Mortimer and MatGB.

And they got him. It was remarkable in British politics to see a spontaneous demonstration of political intent call out a politician to stand on his steps and speak to them. It rather stunned the BBC, whose coverage has a slight scent of the bewildered about it. It seems to have surprised Mr. Clegg, though he was also pretty chuffed.

When I was young and drunken I used to bait people at Speakers Corner. One of them challenged me to take a turn on the soap-box, and I took him up; for a while, I became slightly addicted to the experience, which was invigorating for a fan of the Pythons and Withnail & I who had reasonable reflexes. But Speaker’s Corner is a safety valve; it is a place where the ignored can go to feel heard, without being heard by anyone who matters. The role it once played in providing a public and adverserial agora for the intrepid Foxes and thundering Burkes to sell their ideas in has been transferred to the Internet.

A bit of a theme of my writing since May last year is that Britain hasn’t seen real politics for so long that the denizens of the Westminster bubble and their clattering commentariat have forgotten what it looks like. A more recent theme has been comparison between the progress towards democracy of my adopted nation, and the slow lurch that way currently occurring in the UK. Well here’s installment 3; this is what real politics looks like. Only this is rather more polite than most real politics; though we may have recently fallen into the slough of complacency, we have a lot of practice at this and we do like good manners.