I didn’t personally vote in the 1975 referendum on what we then called the common market, though a vote was fraudulently cast in my name. In the middle of university finals I was barely aware of what the common market was, let alone that there was a referendum about it. I answered the door to a member of the International Socialists – the precursor to the Socialist Workers party – who said they’d heard I wasn’t voting and could they have my polling card to vote in my place.
They would vote no on my behalf because the common market was a businessmen’s club, a noose of capitalism tightening round the throats of the working class. Yeah, whatever, I would have said, if that word had then its current meaning of an indifferent shrug.
Forty-one years later I spent a Thursday night in sleepless dread and nausea, tipped into hellish stomach-clenching anxiety by Sunderland’s 60-40 vote for Brexit. Dread for the economy, our political system and for the future of young family members.
The dawn light filtered past the “Remain” poster in my window. We were out and it was, I was already starting to hear, my fault, part of the only generation to put our young in a cage and feed on them as meat. We had had everything we were snatching away from our children and grandchildren – free higher education, cheap housing, good jobs and secure pensions. In the age group 55-64 – the younger end of the babyboom cohort – 57% voted to leave. For those 65 and over, the figure rose to 60%. On Facebook a friend of a friend said she would never again give up her seat on the bus to anyone over 45.
There’s a theory that anyone born around 1948 got the winning lottery ticket of British life: the welfare state, the NHS, grammar schools, leaving school in time for the expansion of free higher education and once there, sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. We then went on to well-paid graduate entry schemes in industry, the professions and the arts with no need for work experience or unpaid internships.
We bought our first houses in our early 20s, our second homes abroad in our 40s, and our buy-to-lets in our 50s, culminating in a guaranteed final salary pension that was paid out just before the 2008 crash. And even if you didn’t go to university, at least you had the right to buy your council house at a discount; working-class babyboomers had the social mobility to escape into the middle class through either education or the property market or both.
And, yes, for a few there was a winning lottery ticket, and who can deny the legitimate outrage and anger of the millennials at their bad luck? Yet while I was dozily not voting in 1975, less than 10% of the population were in higher education (by 1990 it was 19%, and in 2000 it was 33%). Because there was another lottery ticket available – more of a £5-win supermarket scratchcard. This is the one most babyboomers got. If grammar schools were the escape route for a privileged few members of the exam-passing classes, the majority who failed the 11-plus were shunted into secondary moderns (the pass rate being gerrymandered to provide more grammar school places for boys than girls, who weren’t thought by local authorities to need an education).
Most people left school at 15 and went straight into unskilled and semi-skilled jobs in heavy industry, factory assembly lines, shop work, hairdressing. The workers at the Golden Wonder crisp factory in Widnes – where I spent a gap-summer in 1972 packing cheese and onion and ready salted – paid through their taxes for my free university education.
Waves of economic recession battered the secondary-modern generation. Who were the miners and steelworkers whose industries were thrashed in a series of recessions, the decline of Britain’s manufacturing base and ideological assaults on their unions? Working-class babyboomers who were the human face of Thatcher’s Britain, the ones urged by Norman Tebbit to get on their bikes and look for work as cities such as Liverpool were scheduled for “managed decline”. Those with the highest educational qualifications voted to stay in the EU on Thursday while those with nothing to lose voted out.
They did so not with a gloating thumbs up to the next generation, pulling up the drawbridge behind them, but because if you were a babyboomer in the 1960s and didn’t make it out and into the middle class by one route or another, your fate today is to be old and poor and dependent on the NHS, suckered by false promises of its rescue.
My suspicious Facebook friend of a friend said, OK, but how do I know which type of babyboomer it is when I’m considering whether to give them my seat? Think about who drives and who takes buses, I told her.
