“Coming of age between 1961 and 1982, the Boomers benefited hugely from the rapid expansion of the middle-class, welfare state and university education. They enjoyed rising living standards, rising life expectancy and did not need to worry too much about their basic security.” Where did this weird idea come from? I was poor when younger in a way that would now be greeted with incredulity and horror. As in hungry and unable to dress repectably for work.
Outside toilet. No heating upstairs. Ice on inside of windows in the morning. Newspaper squares for toilet paper. All that and my family was not considered poor by the standards of the 1960s. Matthew has rose tinted specs re the Boomers. Life was tough for my parents.
Three day weeks. Blackouts. Miners strikes. Frequent terrorist atrocities in the UK, as well as Cold War anxiety surrounding a nuclear apocalypse (anyone else remember those ads?!). Black Wednesday and the recession that followed, where many people lost (or came perilously close to losing) their homes. I most certainly had no sense of safety through the Gen X years.
Scott Allan
4 years ago
Please forget about “sue” and just tax every chinese product 200% until the full cost of the pandamic is recovered. Suspend China’s membership to the World Trade Organization. Simple administrative stuff. Let them prove their innocence as they have already destroyed most of the evidence you would need for a law suit.
Adrian Smith
4 years ago
I wonder whether, as the pandemic plays out, more people from all generations will see through the politically inspired pseudo science that underpins most government claims to be following scientific advice on the pandemic and also on climate change. I think there is a growing questioning of climate change dogma, just as there is already a growing questioning of the pseudo scientific claims underpinning COVID response.
I think a lot of the anger directed at Sweden for refusing to lock down is actually driven by fear of those who have promoted / religiously followed the pseudo science that Sweden may prove how foolish they have been.
Politicians have always used fear, whether that was fear of the nasty Soviets, then global terrorism, then climate change now a pandemic, which whilst widespread is not the mass killer it has been made out to be, to promote the importance of their role in society. The reality seems to already be dawning, as you say in your article, that politicians really don’t have any proper answers so why bother to vote for any of them. The reality that the “Great threats” that we need politicians to keep us safe from are not really as great as has been claimed and thence to the reality that scientific opinion is divided on these things too, but it is the side of what is actually a healthy scientific debate, where nobody has definitive answers because the only honest answer is we don’t really know, that best supports what the politicians want to hear that gets promoted and those who dare to speak out against it are stupid, racist, homophobic or whatever label is in vogue with the liberal elite at the time.
“The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.”
Belgium stands out as by far the worst county in Europe:
As far as Belgium goes the claim is, ” Health ministry spokesman Emmanuel Andre recognises Belgium’s way of recording deaths pushes the country to the top of the rankings but is unapologetic.
He argues it is the best way to get a true picture of what is really going on.
He said: “So the point of including suspected cases is to get the best picture of the level of this outbreak in our community, including outside the hospitals.
“And if we know this then we can better act on controlling this outbreak at the source of infection.”
But look at it in the wider context and it’s trajectory is nothing like the the hardest hit Western European nations. Norway, Finland and Denmark will all need to return to the same levels of economic activity as Sweden and in fact, maybe doing so very soon.
Lockdown can only last for so long before the economic damage becomes too great. In the absence of an effective treatment or a vaccine, we are all going to have to learn to live with the threat of the virus, just like Sweden is doing.
“Politicians have always used fear… to promote the importance of their role in society. The reality seems to already be dawning… that politicians really don’t have any proper answers so why bother to vote for any of them”
I would add that politicians are also never held accountable when something goes terribly wrong. When time and evidence demonstrates that the public has been misled (often wilfully), there is never any reckoning.
There may be a brief furore, and a little hand-wringing. Perhaps a long and expensive independent enquiry or Royal Commission. Someone may resign from their Cabinet position. Noticeably though, in the last 20 or so years, they don’t appear to feel sufficiently uncomfortable to give up their lucrative constituency role as well. Scandal-induced by-elections used to be reasonably common, when public shaming was still something to be feared.
But the media dutifully plays its part in protecting its own. Closing ranks and distracting the masses before any real damage is done… and the whole circus rumbles on.
I would suggest that this has as much to do with the loss of trust as anything else.
‘Perhaps then ” when yet another crisis has been and gone ” Zoomers will not ask who they should vote for but rather whether they should bother voting at all.’
Which will mean that their silly views can’t do any harm to the rest of us. Jolly good.
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago
Whatever…by the time I was 25 I had lived through the power cuts, the ‘cap in hand to the IMF’, the Lib-Lab pact, the Winter of Discontent, the mass unemployment of the early 80s, the Cold War, Roland Rat…
You just get on with it. There was never any shortage of work, part time or full time. I came on to the jobs market in 1986 when, apparently, youth unemployment reached its peak. (The Guardian always illustrates this with that picture of two youths sitting on a fence with a power station in the background). I was 20 at the time and got myself a job as a copywriter in one of London’s better advertising agencies.
As for some of the other claims, I don’t recall the Blair years to be any more ‘liberal’ than the 1980s. And although I think Mathew is one of the more rational academics out there, II really find all this sociological Gen-this and Gen-that to be rather silly, along with all this ‘needs’ stuff. Most of these people have more stuff than they will ever ‘need’. And, as we saw in the London riots of 2011, the one material possession they might benefit from i.e. books, is the one thing they have no interest in.
i do agree with this:
‘Such findings challenge the seductive narrative that Euroscepticism will steadily ‘die off”. Marine Le Pen’s largest cohort of support came from the young in the last general election in France, and the euro has laid waste to the whole of southern Europe, as predicted by economists since 1970. Moreover, I don’t see why even ‘the young’ should be expect to admire or trust a bunch of unelected tyrants in Brussels.
Scott Allan
4 years ago
Now we have sly sexism. Wow. Where can I get some of that?
Can I pick it up from the same place I get my male white privilage?
Sinclair Black
4 years ago
‘Great recession’, what great recession? I have lived through several and in the decade after the 2007 recession my income increased by 150%. The recessions of the 1970s and 80s lasted longer, had a bigger impact on unemployment (roughly 50% more) and devastated company and individual earnings far more than 2007. Even Wikipedia is trying to call 2007 a great recession. Twaddle. If it was that great then where is the depression that followed?
Recessions are cyclical and for those new to one each time it seems the worst ever. A little look at history will show that view as being mostly exaggeration or politically motivated wishful thinking.
Millennials have been underwhelming on many levels. Having them as parents for Gen-X dooms them to what? I am not sure but it will certainly be bad. Lets hope they develop some self reliance, personal initiative and drive. I am not holding my breath on that one.
Scott Allan
4 years ago
So many false statements, where do you start? How about with “UK only 1.4% of reported rapes in 2019 will result in a conviction” The premise is all reported rapes are rape. Well it seems when tested by the courts the amount of rape reports that are actually rape is 1.4%.
But the omitted statistic is that most reports are culled prior to the being taken to court. The conviction rate in the UK of procecuted cases is 78%.
The goal of Femanazis like this author is to suplant the presumption of innocence with the presumption of guilt. Every man is a rapist until he proves otherwise.
Already the ability for a defendent to confront the accuser has been destroyed. Further steps are taken that so called victims can tell “secret advocates” and men will have to defend unspecified allegations.
Femanazism is a Cult filled with hate that strips any agency from a woman and replaces it with a victim mentality.
Let us proceed to the gender pay myth. The UK like all other western countries see the same general set of facts: Women are 70% of university graduates, occupy 67% of all government jobs and up until 32 years are paid on average 8% more than their male counterparts.
This advancement at 32 gradually declines until the age of 40 when men and women’s earnings reach parity.
The difference after 40 is directly influenced by many women choosing to work part time or not at all whilst mothering their children. (Oh so horrible. They have betrayed their sex)
All other nonsense spewed by Femanazis about gender earnings is because men travel further to work or are more flexible about working away from their family, work substancially longer hours and work very dangerous jobs. (97% of all workplace injury and death is male)
But I want to even the playing field. Next armed conflict we enact the Femanazi conscription act where we ensure that the 96% of fatalities from the next conflict are all women. Please enlist now to show that the next wave of Feminism (Cult of Neo-Marxist Femanazis) is on the front line.
My bet is neither Julie or any such Cult member is stepping forward. This whole narrative is a sham and we know it. That is why your Labour Party was decimated at the election.
kellylogan195
4 years ago
The Great War, with the Holocast imbedded then immediately the Spanish Flu where probably well over 100 million patents and relatives and friends died , then 8 yesrds later the Great Depression ( which was a REAL depression, where a generation lost all their savings and asserts, these didn’t just last a year or two, but were years long in duration, then followed by the Second World War, and Korea, and you reckon these snow flakes are going to do it tough. Take an Aspro.
Jeffrey Shaw
4 years ago
“We must always be available for destiny….” Jerzy KosiÅ„ski could have written those lines for Chauncey Gardener. In fact, I would appear that he did and that Chauncey has been elected and is currently in power.
Jeffrey Shaw
4 years ago
In the penultimate paragraph – shouldn’t those be called LaKarens?
“Coming of age between 1961 and 1982, the Boomers benefited hugely from the rapid expansion of the middle-class, welfare state and university education. They enjoyed rising living standards, rising life expectancy and did not need to worry too much about their basic security.” Where did this weird idea come from? I was poor when younger in a way that would now be greeted with incredulity and horror. As in hungry and unable to dress repectably for work.
Outside toilet. No heating upstairs. Ice on inside of windows in the morning. Newspaper squares for toilet paper. All that and my family was not considered poor by the standards of the 1960s. Matthew has rose tinted specs re the Boomers. Life was tough for my parents.
Three day weeks. Blackouts. Miners strikes. Frequent terrorist atrocities in the UK, as well as Cold War anxiety surrounding a nuclear apocalypse (anyone else remember those ads?!). Black Wednesday and the recession that followed, where many people lost (or came perilously close to losing) their homes. I most certainly had no sense of safety through the Gen X years.
Please forget about “sue” and just tax every chinese product 200% until the full cost of the pandamic is recovered. Suspend China’s membership to the World Trade Organization. Simple administrative stuff. Let them prove their innocence as they have already destroyed most of the evidence you would need for a law suit.
I wonder whether, as the pandemic plays out, more people from all generations will see through the politically inspired pseudo science that underpins most government claims to be following scientific advice on the pandemic and also on climate change. I think there is a growing questioning of climate change dogma, just as there is already a growing questioning of the pseudo scientific claims underpinning COVID response.
I think a lot of the anger directed at Sweden for refusing to lock down is actually driven by fear of those who have promoted / religiously followed the pseudo science that Sweden may prove how foolish they have been.
Politicians have always used fear, whether that was fear of the nasty Soviets, then global terrorism, then climate change now a pandemic, which whilst widespread is not the mass killer it has been made out to be, to promote the importance of their role in society. The reality seems to already be dawning, as you say in your article, that politicians really don’t have any proper answers so why bother to vote for any of them. The reality that the “Great threats” that we need politicians to keep us safe from are not really as great as has been claimed and thence to the reality that scientific opinion is divided on these things too, but it is the side of what is actually a healthy scientific debate, where nobody has definitive answers because the only honest answer is we don’t really know, that best supports what the politicians want to hear that gets promoted and those who dare to speak out against it are stupid, racist, homophobic or whatever label is in vogue with the liberal elite at the time.
Not a mass killer? Which pandemic are you following ? Look at Sweden’s death curve next to Norway and Finland. Don’t be like Sweden 🙂
Deaths per capita in Sweden still well below UK. When we get to the end the death rate will be <1%. Covid 19 was downgraded as not an HCID on 19 Mar:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance…
“The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.”
Belgium stands out as by far the worst county in Europe:
https://ourworldindata.org/…
I have not heard any coherent explanation for that from the “scientists” criticising Sweden
As far as Belgium goes the claim is, ” Health ministry spokesman Emmanuel Andre recognises Belgium’s way of recording deaths pushes the country to the top of the rankings but is unapologetic.
He argues it is the best way to get a true picture of what is really going on.
He said: “So the point of including suspected cases is to get the best picture of the level of this outbreak in our community, including outside the hospitals.
“And if we know this then we can better act on controlling this outbreak at the source of infection.”
But look at it in the wider context and it’s trajectory is nothing like the the hardest hit Western European nations. Norway, Finland and Denmark will all need to return to the same levels of economic activity as Sweden and in fact, maybe doing so very soon.
Lockdown can only last for so long before the economic damage becomes too great. In the absence of an effective treatment or a vaccine, we are all going to have to learn to live with the threat of the virus, just like Sweden is doing.
“Politicians have always used fear… to promote the importance of their role in society. The reality seems to already be dawning… that politicians really don’t have any proper answers so why bother to vote for any of them”
I would add that politicians are also never held accountable when something goes terribly wrong. When time and evidence demonstrates that the public has been misled (often wilfully), there is never any reckoning.
There may be a brief furore, and a little hand-wringing. Perhaps a long and expensive independent enquiry or Royal Commission. Someone may resign from their Cabinet position. Noticeably though, in the last 20 or so years, they don’t appear to feel sufficiently uncomfortable to give up their lucrative constituency role as well. Scandal-induced by-elections used to be reasonably common, when public shaming was still something to be feared.
But the media dutifully plays its part in protecting its own. Closing ranks and distracting the masses before any real damage is done… and the whole circus rumbles on.
I would suggest that this has as much to do with the loss of trust as anything else.
You just need to look at the inquiry into the “war criminal” Phoney Blair to know everything you said is true.
OK, now do Chad.
Oh, I wouldn’t bring landlocked African nations into this.
thank you for that
‘Perhaps then ” when yet another crisis has been and gone ” Zoomers will not ask who they should vote for but rather whether they should bother voting at all.’
Which will mean that their silly views can’t do any harm to the rest of us. Jolly good.
Whatever…by the time I was 25 I had lived through the power cuts, the ‘cap in hand to the IMF’, the Lib-Lab pact, the Winter of Discontent, the mass unemployment of the early 80s, the Cold War, Roland Rat…
You just get on with it. There was never any shortage of work, part time or full time. I came on to the jobs market in 1986 when, apparently, youth unemployment reached its peak. (The Guardian always illustrates this with that picture of two youths sitting on a fence with a power station in the background). I was 20 at the time and got myself a job as a copywriter in one of London’s better advertising agencies.
As for some of the other claims, I don’t recall the Blair years to be any more ‘liberal’ than the 1980s. And although I think Mathew is one of the more rational academics out there, II really find all this sociological Gen-this and Gen-that to be rather silly, along with all this ‘needs’ stuff. Most of these people have more stuff than they will ever ‘need’. And, as we saw in the London riots of 2011, the one material possession they might benefit from i.e. books, is the one thing they have no interest in.
i do agree with this:
‘Such findings challenge the seductive narrative that Euroscepticism will steadily ‘die off”. Marine Le Pen’s largest cohort of support came from the young in the last general election in France, and the euro has laid waste to the whole of southern Europe, as predicted by economists since 1970. Moreover, I don’t see why even ‘the young’ should be expect to admire or trust a bunch of unelected tyrants in Brussels.
Now we have sly sexism. Wow. Where can I get some of that?
Can I pick it up from the same place I get my male white privilage?
‘Great recession’, what great recession? I have lived through several and in the decade after the 2007 recession my income increased by 150%. The recessions of the 1970s and 80s lasted longer, had a bigger impact on unemployment (roughly 50% more) and devastated company and individual earnings far more than 2007. Even Wikipedia is trying to call 2007 a great recession. Twaddle. If it was that great then where is the depression that followed?
Recessions are cyclical and for those new to one each time it seems the worst ever. A little look at history will show that view as being mostly exaggeration or politically motivated wishful thinking.
Millennials have been underwhelming on many levels. Having them as parents for Gen-X dooms them to what? I am not sure but it will certainly be bad. Lets hope they develop some self reliance, personal initiative and drive. I am not holding my breath on that one.
So many false statements, where do you start? How about with “UK only 1.4% of reported rapes in 2019 will result in a conviction” The premise is all reported rapes are rape. Well it seems when tested by the courts the amount of rape reports that are actually rape is 1.4%.
But the omitted statistic is that most reports are culled prior to the being taken to court. The conviction rate in the UK of procecuted cases is 78%.
The goal of Femanazis like this author is to suplant the presumption of innocence with the presumption of guilt. Every man is a rapist until he proves otherwise.
Already the ability for a defendent to confront the accuser has been destroyed. Further steps are taken that so called victims can tell “secret advocates” and men will have to defend unspecified allegations.
Femanazism is a Cult filled with hate that strips any agency from a woman and replaces it with a victim mentality.
Let us proceed to the gender pay myth. The UK like all other western countries see the same general set of facts: Women are 70% of university graduates, occupy 67% of all government jobs and up until 32 years are paid on average 8% more than their male counterparts.
This advancement at 32 gradually declines until the age of 40 when men and women’s earnings reach parity.
The difference after 40 is directly influenced by many women choosing to work part time or not at all whilst mothering their children. (Oh so horrible. They have betrayed their sex)
All other nonsense spewed by Femanazis about gender earnings is because men travel further to work or are more flexible about working away from their family, work substancially longer hours and work very dangerous jobs. (97% of all workplace injury and death is male)
But I want to even the playing field. Next armed conflict we enact the Femanazi conscription act where we ensure that the 96% of fatalities from the next conflict are all women. Please enlist now to show that the next wave of Feminism (Cult of Neo-Marxist Femanazis) is on the front line.
My bet is neither Julie or any such Cult member is stepping forward. This whole narrative is a sham and we know it. That is why your Labour Party was decimated at the election.
The Great War, with the Holocast imbedded then immediately the Spanish Flu where probably well over 100 million patents and relatives and friends died , then 8 yesrds later the Great Depression ( which was a REAL depression, where a generation lost all their savings and asserts, these didn’t just last a year or two, but were years long in duration, then followed by the Second World War, and Korea, and you reckon these snow flakes are going to do it tough. Take an Aspro.
“We must always be available for destiny….” Jerzy KosiÅ„ski could have written those lines for Chauncey Gardener. In fact, I would appear that he did and that Chauncey has been elected and is currently in power.
In the penultimate paragraph – shouldn’t those be called LaKarens?