Their near-total annihilation in urban Britain now, however, seems like the least of their problems after their 2024 omni-battering. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the bizarre air of complacency that hangs over their conference, which apparently hasn’t been much dented by John Curtice telling them that they have made no progress since their 2024 hammering, and indeed are actually doing worse. The submerged theme of the conference is that even their natural heartlands are slipping away from them. Worse, neither Kemi Badenoch’s decent personal ratings nor MRP polls showing the Tories reaching the giddy heights of 130 MPs can really cover up this still-ongoing destruction.

Take where I live, a fairly affluent village in rural Cambridgeshire. Over the course of this year’s local elections, not a single leaflet or communication of any kind from the Tories materialized. Indeed, one would have had to have been a detective of considerable ability to uncover any evidence of a Conservative Party activist — a living one anyway — within many miles of my home. When the vote duly came, the Tories came a bad third in my ward, only beating the Greens by 60 votes.

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The death of the Young Conservative

By Alwyn Turner

Until perhaps a decade ago, places like this were rock solid for the Tories. Now, though, they’re pretty much a one-party Liberal Democrat state. There are now just two Conservative councillors left on the South Cambridgeshire district council, compared with 43 Lib Dems — who also comfortably won both of the local parliamentary seats in 2024. It wasn’t close, with Ed Davey’s party sweeping my constituency of St Neots and Mid-Cambridgeshire by over 5,000 votes. Since 2024, there has been almost no sign of a Tory recovery.

To be frank, if the Tories are still the political walking dead in St Neots, of all places — where there are more Green district councillors now than Tories — then anything they’ve said this week in Birmingham is probably a colossal waste of time. This is doubly true because the Tory collapse is not just a result of the short-term impact of Bojo’s travails, or even the Liz Truss debacle. Though 2024 represented a dramatic culmination of Conservative failure, it was not a sudden process.

Cambridgeshire is again a good example. As Cambridge became ever more expensive, the rest of the county has attracted more and more house-price refugees. Most are graduates; many are academics; and others work at tech start-ups in Cambridge Science Park, or at Addenbrookes Hospital. These educated, mostly socially liberal voters have transformed local politics. The farmers, the culturally conservative old rural middle class, the self-employed tradesmen and so on — they no longer dominate, and even many of them presumably couldn’t stomach voting Tory in 2024. Jeremy Clarkson may finally have shown up to their conference, but the people he speaks for are not those that the Tories need to win in their former seats. This new demographic intake is as likely to set up a local Orange Order and hold a “No Popery!” riot as they are to ever vote Tory.

So when I hear breathless online Tories talking up the “Kemi bounce” and the supposed Tory come-back, I can’t help but roll my eyes — and not just at her Timmy Mallett tribute act at the Young Tories’ disco. Yes, Badenoch has relatively good personal ratings; yes, Reform has clearly had a bad summer as Farage’s clown-car by-election backfired and his party’s backbiting intensified. One or two polls even suggest that the Tories may reach the lofty heights of second place.

Yet none of this can alter the underlying truth: that in large swaths of Britain, the Tories essentially no longer exist, because they have a small and contracting social base, which is itself vulnerable to Reform. They no longer retain a comfortable baseline of support anywhere, apart from places with very specific characteristics: non-urban; on average low educational attainment; elderly; white. The only one of these populations that is growing is pensioners, and even among them, polls often show Reform in the lead. That’s even as cohort effects — with whole generations that have no history of voting Tory soon coming of pensionable age — mean retirees are less likely to show loyalty to the party over the longer-term.

Meanwhile, across England’s affluent south, prosperous places that would previously have been Tory shoo-ins are now awash with graduates who can’t afford to live in big cities: Surrey, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire. These people will blanch at voting for any restrictions on immigration, or abolishing Net Zero, or withdrawing from the ECHR. How much future is there for a Tory Party that faces an uphill struggle to remain relevant in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, where they now have respectively one and two MPs?

Tory “moderates” such as Andy Street and Ruth Davidson like to claim that these places can be won back by changing tack on “culture war” commitments, and making a socially liberal, economically center-right pitch. But why the middle classes of Surrey, Cambridgeshire or Hertfordshire are going to favor nicey-nicey Cameroon redux politics rather than sticking with the more socially acceptable Lib Dems isn’t clear. Many of the upwardly mobile younger couples living in the affluent home counties who might in theory be attracted by the Tories’ promise on removing the £100,000 threshold on free childcare are those who have a rigid cultural taboo against voting Tory, even if such a policy would benefit them. They live in a world of ingrained cultural assumptions and status dynamics that make voting Tory an unthinkable solecism.

Even if struggling graduates in these places could be persuaded to vote Tory on a pro-growth platform, there is another obstacle. These same constituencies are also stuffed with older Nimbies, and if they do anything to annoy pensioners, the Tories might equally wave goodbye to their only remaining reliable voter bloc: the gray vote. This is why we have had to endure the contemptible spectacle of CCHQ attacking Burnham as some sort of granny-killing maniac for suggesting a tiny reform to a policy — the Triple Lock — that most senior Tories privately acknowledge is unaffordable. Perhaps such industrial-grade hypocrisy is the price of maintaining any activists at all: a Tory agent told me recently that their party membership is literally dying. Looking at the “deaths” column of a local newspaper is generally the most reliable way to keep their membership records up to date.

In short, it is still hard to see how the Tories can get out of their current dilemma, no matter how many infatuated young Tories write Katie Lam’s name on their pencil-box, and how sharp Badenoch may prove in PMQs. The underlying logic of polarization — between the left-behind provinces, and Home Counties progressivism — hasn’t gone away: and the Tories are still ill-positioned to capitalize on either side of this divide.

What might have saved the Conservatives was doubling down on Boris Johnson’s abortive re-alignment, and becoming the genuine party of the left-behind blue-collar areas that are now, post Makerfield, trying to decide between Burnham and Reform. Unfortunately, between Johnson’s open-door immigration policy and the Truss debacle, the Tories blew that opportunity so comprehensively that the only thing that might save them is Reform’s implosion, or Ed Davey remaining Lib Dem leader. Meanwhile, recent Tory policy ideas, such as abolishing inheritance tax, are little more than an attempt to cling on to what little is left of their base. And their fresh appeal to affluent professionals — best evidenced in their plan to end the £100,000 childcare “cliff edge” — seems much the same. Andrew Griffith, their new Shadow Chancellor, is putting a lot of faith in a reheated Thatcherite tribute act. His ridiculous pledge to abolish a new tax in every budget failed to convince even his own party faithful, let alone any Tory-curious floating voters.

Much clearly depends on Andy Burnham. If he turns out to be Keir Starmer with a guitar — which is still possible, his fluent conference speech notwithstanding — then the main winners will be Reform. Certainly, it would take a singular collapse indeed to render Farage as unpopular in the Red Wall as the Tories are now; let’s not forget that the Conservatives lost their deposit in the Makerfield by-election. If, on the other hand, Burnham succeeds in sustaining a meaningful Labour revival and the Reform wave subsides, there will be only marginal benefit to the Tories.

Given all this, it still seems that even in the best-case scenario, all the Tories can hope for is holding onto their meager 2024 seat haul and perhaps slightly increasing their presence in the Commons. The only viable course for survival would probably be some sort of merger between the Tories and Reform, but even that is extremely hazardous for either side, bedeviled by personal resentments and the emotional fallout from recent defections. Bitterness means that such mergers tend to take a long time to happen: it took the Canadian Right a decade to unite after the main center-right party was near-annihilated in the 1993 election.

For now, the horrible truth for the Tories, irrespective of whatever optimism might be generated at their conference, is that their fate isn’t in their own hands. They have to hope that they can pick up enough scraps in forthcoming electoral scrambles to keep themselves alive. Their survival, let alone their existence as a major party, remains very much in the balance.

This week’s GOP midterm convention — the first of its kind in more than 40 years — was supposed to be the big reset for a party hemorrhaging public support amid an unpopular war, rising fuel prices, and a broader cost-of-living crisis. Against this grim backdrop, the gathering, which became known as Trumpapalooza, was a chance for the party to regroup, fire up the base, and wrest back control of a narrative that could derail its electoral hopes in November. 

It ended with the threat of eternal damnation (albeit a jokey one).

Trumpapalooza was meant to remind Republicans why they had put their faith in the president in the first place. But it had almost the opposite effect, drawing attention to just how different the man standing before them today was from the one they knew 10, or even two, years ago. He could still command a crowd with his impressions of Emmanuel Macron and his pronunciation of Lenin as “Len-een.” But beneath the cheers, it became clear that the populist fire that once drove the Trumpist insurgencies of 2016 and 2024 had greatly diminished, if not been extinguished altogether. Young conservatives, in particular, appeared to have all but abandoned the project, leaving behind a graying bunch.

Nearly everyone I spoke to at the convention acknowledged that a generational divide inside the party was emerging. Some dismissed it as a youthful rebellion, while others offered a bleaker diagnosis. They argued that Trump was the final string in the Republican bow, and once that snapped, there was no coming back. He was supposed to be the galvanizing force around which the entire movement was built. Now, he had become the very thing pulling it apart.

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Trump's Boomer-palooza

By James Billot

Conventions are rarely known for attracting the young and hip. And Trumpapalooza was no different. Inside this jumbo-sized arena, where every doorway and entrance was festooned with some kind of Trump poster, it looked more like a Caribbean cruise holiday than a political convention. The vast majority of the crowd were retirees, dressed head to toe in their finest MAGA regalia: sequin jackets with “DJT” emblazoned on the back, star-spangled cowboy boots, and T-shirts with Trump’s Georgia mugshot on the front. There was no alcohol, but spirits were so high I thought something had been slipped into their drinks. It was like Glastonbury for boomercons.

On both days, the stadium was slow to fill and never reached full capacity. It did, however, grow lively as familiar faces took to the stage. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas got one of the biggest cheers of the convention when he declared that “Sharia law has no place in America” — a point that was echoed, again and again, by other speakers. Most focused on the twin threat of Islamo-communism, punctuated by a recorded message from Trump intoning, “America must never be a communist country,” between each speech. 

It was like a form of exposure therapy, repeated so many times that it felt more like a mantra than a message. Older attendees lapped it up, but the few young conservatives I spoke to were less impressed. “So far, all I’ve heard is communism, communism, communism, and that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon,” said one. “It’s like their brains have broken.” Another told me that he wasn’t even sure why he came. 

Part of their frustration stemmed from the president’s outright denial that anything was wrong. In his two keynote speeches, Trump struck a jubilant tone, celebrating “the most successful two years, financially and every other way, in the history of the presidency.” But it was clear that very few were buying into this narrative. Even Fox’s Laura Ingraham, a longtime supporter of the president, told Trump that he would be “cruising” if he hadn’t invaded Iran, adding that young men were feeling “demoralized.”

They have every reason to be. The same day Trump declared that Iran had been decimated, Tehran-backed Houthi forces seized a major Red Sea port, potentially giving the group greater control over a key oil-shipping route and threatening to destabilize already-shaky global energy markets. Core inflation also grew last month, further squeezing Americans’ finances at a time when gas and food prices were already rising. No one at the convention wanted to talk about these grim developments — it was a convention, not a town hall, after all — and this was about keeping up appearances. 

Still, it was a telling moment on the first day of the convention that young people appeared more interested in sideline remarks from Groyper-courting James Fishback, who lost the Florida Republican gubernatorial primary to Rep. Byron Donalds last month, than in any of the speeches taking place inside the stadium. As he wandered around the arena, greeting fans and even having a tête-à-tête with the far-Right firebrand Laura Loomer, Fishback was trailed by a phalanx of young Republicans hanging on his every word.

“Guys like James Fishback and Nick Fuentes are guys we have to consider,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief adviser, tells me. “Young people are telling older people that they don’t want to hear about legal immigration anymore because legal immigrants are stealing their jobs. They’re not hearing about mass deportations anymore, either. Young people are feeling the brunt of that. They don’t care about the Greater Israel project.” 

This may be an extreme position, but it reflects the anti-establishment sentiment coursing through the young Right and Left. Both camps share a deep hostility toward the party establishment and a desire for a far more radical policy program. One side wants no borders. The other wants a sealed border. One wants to abolish ICE. The other wants to deport millions. One wants to abolish the Senate. The other wants a CEO-monarch. The only point on which the two sides converge is Israel. 

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Trump's Boomer-palooza

By Nikos Mohammadi

I asked Sean Spicer, Trump’s former press secretary, if he is concerned by this dynamic. He agreed that young voters had become more populist in the last few years, but it did not pose a major problem for the GOP. “Young voters are very transactional, and they’re not as motivated as seniors,” he says. “If they’re not going to vote Republican, I’d rather they just don’t vote. That’s not great, but it’s not the worst scenario.” 

The problem, though, is that the longer these issues are ignored by the GOP leadership, the more space they create for irresponsible actors to exploit them. Israel is the clearest example. In recent years, an overdue conversation about recalibrating US-Israeli relations has curdled into something far uglier on the Right, with the rise of figures such as Candace Owens, Fuentes, and Fishback. Yet this has prompted no soul-searching among party leaders, who refuse to countenance any kind of debate on the issue. Just last night, RFK Jr. randomly pivoted from health issues to praising the Jewish state as a “bulwark of democracy” and “America’s most critical frontline ally.” It was exactly the kind of rote statement that will be clipped, circulated, and mocked among Zoomer circles.

A little more than 40 years ago, V.S. Naipaul went to the Republican National Convention, also in Dallas. He bemoaned the quality of speeches, complaining that all contained “the same tone, the same personality (or absence of it), the same language: unallusive, cleansed, sterile; nerveless and dead; computer language, programmed sometimes to rise to passion, but getting no higher than copywriter’s glib,” he wrote. “As though, at the heart of this great, man-magnifying occasion, there was a hollow, a vacancy.” 

Today, that vacancy feels deeper than ever. As one young attendee succinctly put it to me: “It’s over, but we’re not allowed to say it’s over.”

Speaking not to the American people, but to the Saudi Future Investment Initiative Conference in Miami Beach, Trump went on to show officials from the Persian Gulf region a video clip proclaiming his “100% approval rating” — without noting that it came from a single poll gauging the views of self-described “MAGA Republicans” — before declaring that “Cuba’s next, by the way, but pretend I didn’t say that please.” 

Welcome to the Boomer-uncle war, launched with calamitously vague objectives not mainly because the president fell in thrall to Israeli influence — but because he embodies a broken American gerontocracy: an aging generation of leaders whose perceptions of America’s relative power are stuck in the halcyon 1980s and ’90s; and whose yearning for the war spectacles of old is now fulfilled by short online clips, long-term strategic considerations be damned.

Trump’s wartime command closely resembles the Boomer uncle who can’t help himself from scrolling through social-media reels at the Easter dinner table. His briefings as commander in chief now reportedly consist of two-minute-long highlight reels that show “stuff getting blown up,” as NBC News recently reported. His attention can only be permeated by ever-escalating spectacle, chasing the high of a more intense “fire, boom, fire, boom.” An anonymous White House official has told the media that the president’s efforts to end the conflict are likewise driven by the fact that he’s “bored and wants to move on.” 

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Netanyahu’s attack on US diplomacy

By Heather Penatzer

The trouble is that this time, someone else besides MAGA Boomers gets a vote: namely, the Tehran regime. The Iranians, of course, are good at spectacle and even social-media “dunking” — witness Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s post trolling CENTCOM over the destruction of an AWACS command-and-control aircraft (“caused by a clogged kitchen pipe”). But for the Islamic Republic, the trolling and spectacle serve a larger strategic imperative: to impose high enough costs on Washington and Jerusalem to prevent a third “excursion,” even if this means Iran taking a bad beating, too.

The same cannot be said for the Boomer uncle in charge in Washington. Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” He meant that war itself isn’t an outcome, but rather the means to achieve some political end or range of ends. So what has been the political end pursued by the American military “excursion” in Iran? Trump himself doesn’t seem to know.  

Since the initial American attack on Feb. 28, Trump and his administration have continually moved the goalposts. First it was to support regime change — empowering the Iranian people to control their own “destiny,” as Trump put it in his early-morning speech announcing the war. Then we were told that this was actually an exercise in Venezuelan-style coercive decapitation, in which we would keep the regime in place and continue to assassinate successors to Ayatollah Khameinei until we “find another Delcy [Rodriguez],” in reference to the Maduro deputy tapped to lead that country as an American cat’s paw. 

Later, the objective was to destroy Iranian long-range missile capabilities and to destroy the Iranian nuclear program that we were told had been “obliterated” last June in the course of the 12-Day War. Still later, the war became about reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a problem that didn’t exist prior to American military action. “The objective of the war has become undoing the consequence of the war,” as one online wit put it, adding: “the stupidest war in history.” Most recently, the State Department struck reopening Hormuz from the list of objectives, reprising instead the destruction of capability, which is a tactic not a political objective.

This inability to articulate strategic goals is mirrored by the administration’s failure to consider the consequences of action. While the early pro-war motto of “you can just do things” may be true, it risks obscuring an important countervailing fact: namely, that others can do things, too. Iran’s closure of the strait and the resulting disruption of the global economy weren’t unexpected to anyone paying attention; the IRGC had been preparing for decades to close that chokepoint in response to an invasion. The 2023-2024 Houthi attacks on a similar bottleneck in the Red Sea demonstrated the asymmetry in costs for this type of conflict, showing how relatively cheap projectiles can become overwhelming for expensive and high-tech American weaponry.  

We knew these things before Feb. 28, just as we knew that the Islamic Republic would be preparing for another attack after last June’s incursion. The economic fallout from both the closure of the strait and the destruction of petrochemical infrastructure isn’t yet clear, but one thing is certain: despite the weak attempts to spin this in Trump’s favor, no one benefits more from this disruption than China and Russia. The former, China, is seeing a boost to its renewables industry (Trump scrapped US investments in America’s analog); the latter, Russia, is making a mint from oil sales since Team Trump un-sanctioned its exports (and some of Tehran’s oil exports, as well).

Speaking of China and Russia, both are likely celebrating America’s fumbling pivot back to the Middle East. Apart from the asymmetric impact of the energy crisis, the depletion of US missile stockpiles and relocation of materiel from East Asia have underscored the brittleness of American hegemony. Notably, THAAD air-defense systems are being removed from South Korea (a state with whom America has a formal defense alliance) for use in Israel (with whom Washington has no such alliance). 

More than 25% of America’s THAAD stockpile was used last summer to defend the Jewish state following Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran in June. Such depletion harms the US ability to project power and defend allies in other regions. Plus, the rapid exhaustion of long-range interceptors and air defense should be alarming for anyone who genuinely believes that there is a threat to the American homeland. While America may not “run out of bombs,” it is running short on the expensive, sophisticated weaponry and radar that enable US air-defense systems.  Replacing these stockpiles will take years, and is also dependent on rare-earth minerals, of which China controls a significant portion of the global supply (98%, in the case of gallium).

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Bibi’s ‘existential’ obsession

By Amir Tibon

So what have these expenditures won? No faction on the American Right should be content. For the America First populists: skyrocketing prices and a pivot away from domestic issues such as immigration, poverty, and addiction. For the defenders of Western Civilization: a degradation of those distinctive values the West claims to represent, as the US increasingly takes up Israel’s Gaza-style methods and rhetoric (“maximum lethality, not legality,” to quote Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s edifying hip-hop rhyme glorying in a new disregard for the laws of war). For the congressional Republicans who have largely ceded legislative power to the executive: a newly energized Democratic Party likely to capitalize on these blunders come November. And even for the neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks: no regime change, no democracy, and collapsing primacy. 

None of these groups should trust that Trump will advance their policy aims, for he has no ideology but spectacle. For a man whose life has been so defined by pageantry and performance, the crowning achievement of his presidency is shattering the illusion of American invincibility.  Like a dying animal lashing out, this paroxysm is more pathetic than powerful. 

Yes, those who influenced Trump bear some blame: from the ultra-hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (who used childish word-association games to persuade Trump that he’d clinch a Lincolnian or Rooseveltian legacy by invading Iran); to overconfident Israeli intelligence that recently prompted Vice President JD Vance to dress down Bibi (for overselling an Iranian uprising). Yet the buck stops at the Oval Office and the Resolute Desk: susceptibility to such pressures demonstrates just how unsuited to lead Trump has become.  

Anyone who can be manipulated by Graham belongs in a care facility rather than the Oval Office, and those who continue to enable such embarrassment deserve to answer for the damage they’ve done. As long as Trump continues to seek the next “boom,” the next war, too, will have no political purpose beyond perverse spectacle.

Easier said than done, perhaps. In his book-length essay Changing my Mind, published last year, the éminence grise of the British novel Julian Barnes (and erstwhile friend of both Amis and Hitchens) recounted how he had once looked down on the elder E.M. Forster for the “feeble” arguments of his Aspects of the Novel. Forster’s masterly short novel A Room With a View (1908) was, to Barnes, “a fusty, musty, dusty read, with rather antique prose”. But even worse was the fact that “Forster had stopped writing fiction at forty-five, then lived on for another forty-six years, in the process becoming a grander and grander (if still modest) old man”. But while the younger Barnes had been “less forgiving” about Forster’s literary retirement, he later came to realize that there was something honorable about packing it in: “Nowadays, I would admire a writer who falls silent because he or she has nothing more to say.” 

Now, less than a year later, Barnes himself has called it a day. In his new novel, Departure(s), the narrator (also named Julian Barnes) declares: “This will be my last book.” Written with the wry intelligence and quiet irony we have come to associate with Barnes’s work, Departure(s) also displays the formal hybridity of his earlier not-quite-novels, like Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). The fictional Barnes broadly corresponds with the factual one: he is a widower in his late seventies, his debut novel was called Metroland, his partner is named Rachel (Barnes married former publisher Rachel Cugnoni at a small ceremony in August last year) and he has just been diagnosed with myeloproliferative neoplasm, a “manageable” form of bone-marrow cancer. But this sounds worse than it is: “my life is not seriously compromised,” the fictional Barnes reassures us. “Unless, of course, I get bum cancer etc etc as well.”

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You can tell from the phrase “bum cancer” that the fictional Barnes is hardly po-faced about his diagnosis. He keeps a contemporaneous diary throughout his time in hospital, which displays the kind of avuncular comedy we have come to associate with all of Barnes’s work (one never laughs at Barnes; at best he might persuade you to nod with a wry smile). When an A&E doctor says they “can’t say if it is or isn’t leukemia”, the narrator supposes this “sounds slightly cavalier”; when the phlebotomists draw yet more blood, he refers to it as “pints of Barnes’s Best”. But there is plenty that gets on his nerves: not just the NHS jargon (one poor soul is told that she’s on the “palliative pathway”), but also the broader “attitudes” towards cancer that “make no difference” to one’s outcome: “‘Being brave,’ or being shit-scared, or occupying a midpoint of stubborn self-deception, doesn’t alter anything.” Hitchens made a similar point in Mortality, the posthumous collection of Vanity Fair pieces about his own esophageal cancer, published in 2012: “People don’t have cancer: They are reported to be battling cancer. No well-wisher omits the combative image: You can beat this.” It’s hard to imagine Hitchens using the voguish language of “pathways”; he preferred a pithy one-liner, like “the thing about Stage Four is that there is no such thing as Stage Five”.

The cancer diagnosis leads the fictional Barnes to ruminate on death, memory, time, love and literature: all his usual themes. Indeed the claim that Departure(s) will be his “last book” is undermined by the fact that it is also all of his previous ones. Much of the material on death and memory is practically lifted from Changing My Mind, as well as the Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011) and his sardonically titled memoir on mortality, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008). In this latest novel, whole lines are lifted or rehashed from the earlier work. The sub-plot about Stephen and Jean, two of the narrator’s university friends who attempt to rekindle their student love at retirement age, seems original enough until Barnes reheats the line “Once bitten, twice bitten” from The Sense of an Ending and 2018’s The Only Story. Is this repetitiousness a sign of fading powers? Perhaps. But as the fictional Barnes says to a friend who chides him for all the “hybrid stuff” in his writing: “I don’t mind you not liking my books, but you are mistaken if you think I don’t know exactly what I’m up to when I write them.” 

The habit of thinking and writing about death has left Barnes admirably stoical: “it is now my generation’s turn to die off,” he states matter-of-factly. That generation included Amis and Hitchens as well as Clive James, who died in 2019, and Barnes’s late first wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died in 2008. They met in the early Seventies at The New Statesman: Hitchens worked there as a staff writer, Amis was literary editor, and Barnes his deputy. When he wasn’t on television, James contributed book reviews. From the mid-Seventies to the early Eighties, the four of them met weekly in Soho for the now-legendary “Friday lunch”. 

As Hitchens wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22 (2010), the Friday lunch was never planned, but “began to simply ‘occur’ … as a sort of end-of-the-week clearing house for gossip and jokes”. Other attendees included the up-and-coming novelist Ian McEwan, the poet James Fenton, the Observer literary editor Terry Kilmartin, the critic Russell Davies, and the elder statesmen Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest (known affectionately as “Kingers” and “Conkers”). Much was made of this at the time, as Hitchens recounted: “we were believed to ‘control’ a lot of the reviewing space in London, and much envious and paranoid comment was made then, and has been made since, to the effect that we vindicated or confirmed F.R. Leavis’s nightmare of a conspiratorial London literary establishment.” Taking a line from Flaubert, who wrote after the deaths of his friends Louis Bouilhet and Sainte-Beuve that his “little band is diminishing”, Barnes writes in Departure(s): “the ‘little band’ to which I belonged when I came to literary London half a century ago has been thinned over the decades” and is “now beginning to die out”. 

There is in this more than one ending: not just the death of each individual writer in turn, but the end of a whole era. Barnes, Amis and Hitchens were part of a new cohort of writers who brought British fiction and criticism out from the tearooms of the Fifties and Sixties and onto the world stage. No generation of novelists and essayists before or since has managed to combine aesthetic and intellectual ambition with outright commercial success in such a way — even the legends of modernism like Joyce and Woolf endured periods of relative obscurity. The vitality and interest of this new cohort’s work was made clear enough in spring 1983, when the literary magazine Granta published a special issue on the “Best of Young British Novelists”, with new fiction from 20 writers, including Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Salman Rushdie. An accompanying group portrait was taken by Lord Snowdon and published in the Sunday Times Magazine. The photograph is striking: Adam Mars-Jones looking annoyed, Graham Swift impatient to leave, Amis in his school shirt, McEwan dressed like he has already reached retirement age. 

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By Antonella Gambotto-Burke

As well as their obvious talent and ingenuity, the emergence of the Granta generation was due, in part, to chance: the rapid expansion of the news media throughout the Seventies and Eighties left plenty of space for commissioning young writers and reviewing their newest releases; the growth (in size and esteem) of British universities in general and English departments in particular established a climate of taste for intelligent fiction and criticism; and, fueling both, the 1944 Butler Education Act made state secondary schools free and increased the number of grammar school places. History was on their side: as the former Sunday Times journalist John Walsh describes in his memoir, Circus of Dreams, these were “the baby-boomer generation”, who came of age “in the wild Sixties and felt empowered to do something more creative than join the professions or the financial world”.

Walsh calls this generation “the 1980s literary renaissance” and that phrase is more accurate than you might think. Just as the daubers of Florence in the 14th century were supported and encouraged by the patronage of the Church and wealthy families like the Medici, the literary baby boomers began their careers when Britain’s cultural institutions had clout, energy and money. Newspapers had cash, universities had cash, the Arts Council had cash, so writers had cash. But now we feel some sense of an ending: the money has dried up, the courses have closed and the epochal young writers of the future are too busy working nine to five. All we can hope is that they take early retirement. 

Thackeray’s great work has special relevance for those of us grappling with the 21st-century economy, which is becoming like that of the 19th in the sense that few own and many want. Vanity Fair, which has the not-so-subtle subtitle A Novel Without a Hero, is about inheritance and the spiritual vacuum that forms when people have little hope for economic security except through the death of their family members. For Thackeray, inheritance is a gravitational force that warps everything — identity, relationships, behavior, language.

The characters in the novel who stand to inherit something, like Pitt Crawley or George Osborne, are fundamentally differentiated from Becky Sharp, one of the novel’s many non-heroes who has to use sex and manipulation to compensate for the lack of any expected funds from relatives. To be disinherited in this world is tantamount to death. Similarly, many of Henry James’s novels turn on the relations between petite bourgeoisie bohemians who don’t have money (often European) and naïve new money Americans whose fortunes stand to last for generations. It is hard, according to these novelists, to be kind or good without capital.

The 19th century was a high and mighty era of peace in Europe and America, and explosive growth in sectors such as industrial production, banking, and global commerce. Its works of fiction mapped the strange social codes and psychological tensions that were produced by wealth distribution defined by new dynasties. The tech economy, now supercharged by AI, has produced its own form of dynastic power, and accelerated what was already a vastly unequal 21st-century economy. It is punishing workers entering the job market, and rewarding asset holders, especially homeowners who acquired homes before the year 2000 or thereabouts. The great bourgeois fiction of the mid to late 19th century, therefore, holds clues about the social pathologies and antipathies that are emerging in our own time. 

A popular genre of posting on Twitter, 4chan, and Reddit, for instance, concerns the selfishness of boomers: millennials vent about parents whose retirement accounts and first, second, or even third homes are worth far more than their children and grandchildren can earn. These parents are refusing to help their children or to disperse their wealth to their children and grandchildren, all with a “we earned this” attitude. No matter how apocryphal, accurate, or fair these posts are, their popularity tells us something about how Americans born roughly after 1980 perceive their inheritance or lack of it.

Post-1980s financial deregulation and the housing inflation of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the zero interest rate policy of the 2010s and early 2020s produced, broadly speaking, asset inflation and wage stagnation. The result of this is that younger people, if they haven’t gone into tech, finance, medicine, or law — and sometimes even if they have — struggle to buy a home without the help of their parents or inheritance from their parents, and cannot achieve middle-class security even with what used to be middle-class incomes.

So while the meme or myth of the selfish, pleasure-seeking boomer retiree is unfair to many boomers who do try to help their children, the larger problem is the demoralizing need to ask for money or assets and the lack of real incentives to get younger people working, marrying, and raising families.

Thus, the Victorian and Edwardian novels, once read as artifacts of a time when class strictures drove people into perverse, deceptive, and morally toxic behaviors, are suddenly cyclical prophecies. The OnlyFans girls and crypto-influencers are 19th-century archetypes in an ultra-contemporary guise. Today, work does not actually produce security, which was the great promise and payoff of mid-century American life; only capital and assets produce it now.

The novels of Thackeray, James, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Eliot, Dickens, Trollope, and Edith Wharton deal with more than class resentment and issues of inheritance and money. A careful reader must work hard to decide what is a symptom and what is a cause. The great novels of the late 19th century ask whether vanity, moral corruption, and spiritual emptiness are eternal human failings or specific pathologies produced by economic structures — or both. The novels themselves suggest the latter: that K-shaped economies don’t merely reveal human weakness but actively generate and exploit it. 

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This has dire practical consequences. As Henry Adams wrote, “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.” Whether of the Left or Right variety, the populist political movements of the last few years reflect a deep and dangerous animus between increasingly ossified classes and generations. It is one of the ironies of history that universal unfairness tends to give rise to revolutions that are far crueler and more destructive than their causes. The end of the 19th century, we should note with trepidation, gave rise to the wars, revolutions, and genocides of the first half of the 20th century. In other words, today’s schemers and social-climbers are the 21st-century equivalent of the younger characters in Vanity Fair. Behind the façade, they’re begging their parents to sell some Nvidia from their IRA, or gambling on altcoins in place of any hope of an inheritance, and they may soon evolve into figures much angrier and more combative.

Speaking as someone born in 1989, I can attest that there’s something maddening about feeling like there’s no amount of labor that can produce the comfortable, normal life largely enjoyed by one’s parents and perhaps grandparents (who worked hard and were rewarded). I feel like my generation has handled this, despite its infamous quirks and social conventions, relatively gracefully. But economic conditions seem even worse for rising generations. It is not unreasonable to expect that pressure in the system and distrust of asset holders by the asset-less will only grow.

If the world is a mirror, and what one sees in the mirror becomes progressively more ugly, dislocated and unhappy, then it is only a matter of time before someone chooses to smash the mirror.

Today, over 90,000 older people live in over 1,700 similar developments, where scenes like this play out all the time. They’re advertised in glossy (and subtly named?) magazines named Silver and Dignity, and their brochures often include salt-and-pepper bearded Adonises playing croquet, or else happy couples watching the sunset with a glass of wine. On-site dining is often offered — restaurants serving the British classics: sausage and mash, fish and chips, the ubiquitous curries — alongside shops, gyms, swimming pools and libraries. Every group is catered for. And, judging by the marketing, these villages look like the kind of place you might tell your children grandma went to play with the other grandmas, or even the perfect setting for a best-selling multimedia cozy crime series.

But the reality, as that lady’s fall in the cafeteria implies, is often very different. Residents face service charges averaging £524 a month, on top of ground rents that can exceed £500 a year. And if some fees are certain, others can bewilder both residents and their kids. While private organizations and charities often own these villages, after all, one provider sold 25% of its properties to the local council for use as social housing. The remaining 75% are privately purchased by residents. With no standardized model, understanding exactly what you’re signing up for can be hard. In some cases, responsibility for selling the property falls to the next of kin — with homes left on the market for months, often years. Research shows that around half are eventually sold at a loss, during which time families can still be liable for council tax, service charges and ground rent.

I got to know this grim reality firsthand. I used to work in one as a jobbing receptionist, translator, delivery-boy, diplomat, and often faux-grandson to the residents of the apartment complex of over 300 flats in the south-east of England. And now, I’m back, for the first time since leaving university. It’s the end of lunch and the café is quiet. Three ladies are in bejeweled finery as if on the Titanic; they sit and sigh and wait. They are, of course, all waiting for the inevitable as I realize when I enthusiastically approach someone I recognize. “How’s Harry?” I ask. “Dead.” “Helen?” “Dead.” “Lucy?” “In care.” “Pirate Paul?” (he wore an eye-patch and a cap with an anchor on it.) “Dead, I found him.” “Mary One?” “Alive.” “Mary Two?” “Nope.” “Bombay Jan?” “In the bar.” “Little John?” “Had a fall”. Either time is of the essence or there’s something in the custard.

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The village tessellates out from a central plaza. The foyer is bright white, its hunched ceiling propped up by columns along the main thoroughfare. There are no windows, only a rectangular skylight along the roof — which, despite easing any ascension, gives me a feeling of already being six feet under. Vast new-build tiers stretch outward, lined with numbered doors and passageways that weave into the distance. I’m told the architects modeled the building on a cruise ship, though the interior feels closer to the Isle of Wight ferry. Along the main walkway, as promised in the brochure, there’s a little shop, gym, hairdresser, and woodwork room. To the right, an expansive bar and restaurant, where white tablecloths are decorated with neatly laid tables — though there was more life on the Mary Celeste.

I find the manager of another site — part of a national chain — in a side room typically reserved for “events” (wakes). He’s the same height as many residents, has a mop of brown hair, and wears a translucent white shirt. He’s quick to burst the bubble that, despite older people’s endearing appearance, retirement villages are a community like any other. “Half the residents here are nobs,” he tells me. “You can get any walk of life here. Some are looking for sheltered housing, others are escaping from domestic abuse, things like that.” There isn’t much of that here, he hastens to add, but in facilities with 300 apartments, there’s always a chance of copping a “wrong’un” as a neighbor.

Not that these risks put a dent in demand. As the manager says, there’s a 12-18 month waiting list for rentals, while sales can take up to a year. “But if you’re a cash buyer,” he adds, with a wry smile, “it puts you up to the top of the list.” It’s impossible, here, not to return to the question of money — for amid the ground rents and tax bills, many of these places are ultimately run as businesses. “Regardless of if you own it or rent it, it always comes back to us,” says the manager of a care home’s business model, explaining that for every year someone lives in the property, 1% of the original purchase price is taken off what the company will eventually buy it back from you (or your estate) for.

If, for example, you buy a flat for £100,000, then live in it for a decade, you’d see a return of just £90,000. That errant 10% is chalked up to maintenance and bills — and excludes a range of other fees — with the money passed back to your next of kin if you die. In practice, though, the economics can be even more brutal than these calculations imply. I meet one resident, a short man, with a flat cap smudged onto his head, who tells me his apartment was worth £170,000 when he entered into a shared ownership agreement with the council. Not only does he lose 1% of its value every year — plus additional fees — but “flats of that size are going for 400 grand now, which is a bit of a kick in the teeth, innit?”

That touches at a deeper issue that gnaws at this community: the buy-back price excludes any allowance for inflation. In other words, then, the man with the cap bought a share of a flat worth £170,000, and it may now be worth £400,000 on the open market — but when he dies, the company will buy back his share from his next of kin for less than he originally paid. No wonder he feels cheated out of the property’s increased value. Certainly, it’s a jarring contrast to how property works “on the outside” — as residents call it. But here, there’s no such thing as capital appreciation.

Defenders of the care home system would claim its benefits are supposedly quantifiable. One retirement village charity commissioned a team from Aston University to investigate the health outcomes for residents. Over their six-year study, the researchers reported a 38% reduction in NHS costs, a 64% drop in depression, a 75% increase in physical activity, with 86.5% of residents reporting they “never or hardly ever” felt lonely. It’s a sentiment echoed by the people I meet. Wally, with his neatly-combed gray hair, wears a checkered shirt and has saved me a seat among his circle. They’re sharing bottles of rosé in the foyer. Wally pours himself a glass, and they all guffaw as he dribbles some onto the faux-marble table. He has lived here for 12 years, and tells me “this is the best thing that could’ve happened to me” — especially given his wife has died and Wally himself faces a range of health issues. “If I’d have stayed in my house,” he adds, “I’d have had a very, very lonely life.”

That might be enough to make Richard Osman smile, but it’s hard to feel sentimental when I recall my own experiences: shepherding confused residents to the toilet; placing cones beside rogue deposits in the restaurant; mopping up suspicious puddles (custard, John Smiths, or other); nudging care teams about overstuffed stoma bags; and politely reminding people of where exactly they live.

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Many in the community I visit feel unhappy with the village’s aging demographics, even as they feel misled by the marketing. The snooker balls crack as I am beckoned by a coven of residents in a circle of armchairs in front of the bar. “If you want the dirt, come and sit with us,” Janet divulges. She slithers into a chair beside John, who wears a polo shirt, glasses, and a marbled mustache, which he marinates with a pint of bitter — immediately noting how it costs “five quid, even though we subsidize it”. They’re both in their late 60s. John moved in 13 years ago, after what he recounts as “18 months of persuasion” from his wife (not Janet). He describes recently coming downstairs into the hall and finding “it’s full of bloody old people!” While this can feel like complaining about sand in the desert, John argues that the place was marketed as a “thriving, active community”. Now, though, “it’s a miracle if you can get a couple coming in and one of them can walk”.

John and Janet are so indignant about the migration of elderly people to the village, I half expect them to roll out a “stop the scooters” banner. They conspiratorially discuss the procurement process in half-whispers. “Old people don’t live long, so [the company] gets a quick turnover,” John explains. “They’re moving the older people in to get the money, see?” They explain that, beyond the clear financial benefit of reselling the apartment to a new resident, departing owners, or their next of kin, are also charged exit fees. Some organizations demand as much as 35% of the property’s market value. Yet with the rising costs of nursing homes — the average monthly rate of residential care is currently £5,192 — John also claims that retirement villages are still cheaper: in the short term anyway.

Beneath the soft furnishings and glossy brochures, it’s anyway hard not to spot something rather cynical, with some residents beginning to sense that places like this aren’t built to care. They’re built, rather, to farm, with elderly residents harvested for their savings and extracted for maximum yield. That’s clear enough from all those costs and fees — but arguably, too, from the fact that many residents also volunteer. “We’re on reception, the bar, groups, facilities, all sorts,” Janet enthuses, with half her peers signed up to unpaid odd jobs. Yet if people like Janet surely find a sense of purpose in this work, it’s undoubtedly cheaper to employ fewer staff. As John angrily puts it: “It’s a money-saving scheme!”

When I ask the manager about this, he chuckles. “We have a bit of a running joke with sales, and we say ‘oh that one can walk!’”. Despite the threshold being 55, he says “people moving in are more like 82-83”. But he pours cold water on the idea that there’s a conspiracy afoot. Rather, he blames the disparity of wealth between generations. Emerging as the wealthiest age group in the UK, Baby Boomers are simply more able to afford life in a village compared to their younger peers.

To be fair, volunteerism isn’t merely there to help the village’s bottom line. Jacqueline — in her 80s, with rosy cheeks and heavy makeup — proudly describes her work on the resident’s association. “We meet once a month,” she tells me, “and keep an eye on all sorts of things: the internal situation in regards to the building, the gardens being managed, and the fundraising initiatives.” Their latest victory comes after campaigning for 12 months to get a dedicated bus. “It’s a loop bus,” Wally declares, “it takes you in any direction: hospital, the shops, the garden center, the pharmacy, you name it it goes there. It’s changed our lives, that bus. Without it, we’d be stuck.”

It’s evening now. The bar lights are dimmed and a sea of chairs face a mocked-up stage where a semi-professional singer croons. Couples, new-found and long-weathered, hold hands and sway like anchored boats on a gentle tide. Friends greet each other with hugs and remove handbags from reserved seats. Electric wheelchairs beep as they dock. A joyous squadron of women flaunt their mobility with line-dancing moves learnt in a community class. John joins me at the bar and we observe the scene. “It suits a lot of people down to the ground,” he defeatedly reflects. For those who have lost their loved ones, and who risk being isolated, you can’t put a price on community. But, for John, it “just hurts me to give them thousands of pounds for nothing”.

It strikes me that no matter the service charge, or the quality of the restaurant — which John chides as “more like a backstreet cafe” — or whether privately owned or council-housed, you may still end up defecating onto your shoe in the middle of a bistro. No amount of ground rent can protect your dignity when there is an intrinsic lack of it in aging. That’s the part The Thursday Murder Club glosses over. You don’t see Pierce Brosnan shuffling down a hallway in stained joggers, unsure where he’s going. Helen Mirren isn’t seen denuded of dignity, lying on her back and promising she won’t sue.

Yet whichever way you look at it, this sordid future is exactly what’s waiting for more of us each year. The UK is facing a shortfall of over 487,000 homes for pensioners, with The Times reporting in 2022 that more than 3,000 retirement villages will be needed to meet demand. The Leasehold Reform Act 2024 promised to fix exploitative charges and ban leasehold sales on new homes — except retirement villages. As a society, we turn away from those in their last years, glamorize them in glib novels, perhaps because the truth about aging is so hard to stomach. Looking an old person in the eye, as they lie on the floor, unable to stand, begging to be held, is too uncomfortable. So those who can afford it outsource the problem, outsource the care, and outsource their responsibility. Independent living schemes are here to stay, but without urgent reform, vulnerable older people will continue to be exploited, and that’s not a problem we should simply step over.

As Canadians greeted the announcement of Mark Carney’s cabinet, the expectation was that of far-reaching change. But a day after being sworn in, Canada’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, put an end to those hopes. Robertson, the ex-mayor of Vancouver — which saw one of the most severe localized housing crises — said home prices should not go down. Has his boss’s campaign pledge already been turned to dust?

This is a terrible start to a supposedly new era. What Canada needs is not just a total rupture with the Trudeau years but a break with decades of virtual NIMBY dictatorship under all parties, at all levels of government. At this rate, the divide between the generally affluent home-owning Boomers and Gen Xers and the downwardly mobile Millennials and Gen Zs is only likely to persist into the Carney era. This generational divide, of course, exists as well in the US, the UK, and elsewhere, but the Canadian context is distinct: owing to the lesser relative salience of culture war and immigration issues compared with other Western nations, it is now the central cleavage of Canada’s politics, in a way that it isn’t elsewhere.

So how great is the gulf between them? Statistics Canada shows a 65-67% gap between average Millennial household wealth ($493,423) and the equivalent figures for Boomers ($1,397,609) and Gen X ($1,485,654). On top of this, there is said to be $1 trillion in Boomer wealth set to be passed down soon, but even this is in doubt given longer lifespans and this cohort’s tenacity in holding on to what they have.

The reason for this disparity is real estate, which props up the economy. Young Canadians have either been excluded from homeownership by high prices and interest rates, with big cities like Robertson’s Vancouver and Toronto among the two most unaffordable cities in North America; or they are new homeowners who managed to buy properties but are now squeezed by rising mortgage payments.  Older Canadians meanwhile have seen the value of their properties soar over a much longer period.

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But this snapshot is part of a 60-year-old pattern whereby Boomers exert their influence as the largest generation. Because “Canada’s was the loudest boom in the industrialized world”, as the demographer David K. Foot has recounted, “Canadian boomers are a… more important factor in Canadian life than American boomers are in American life”. The subsequent history of Canada has been one of governments responding with reflexive deference to their demands. The growth of the public sector in the Sixties catered to their educational needs, while the Nineties-era turn towards fiscal austerity (and federal disengagement from housing) coupled with the rise of prohibitive zoning at local levels reflected this now middle-aged cohort’s intention to keep and grow their personal net worths.

They have maintained this goal — through ceaseless real estate appreciation — with fanatical discipline ever since. As Foot wrote, “It was just as inevitable that once the boomers were housed, the [housing] boom would end.”

But it’s not just their numbers that let the Boomers get away with so much: it’s also their enormous capacity for political cohesion. People who voted for the first time in 1965 kept voting at high rates — around 60-70% — throughout their whole adult lives. In contrast, later generations, especially Millennials and Gen Zs, mostly voted at the lower rates of 30-40% range, with few exceptions.

In fact, Foot failed to foresee how the Boomers would prolong their stranglehold well past their working-age primes. He predicted they would relinquish their urban properties and cash in early, mass migrate to smaller retirement towns, and gracefully free up space in the cities for younger cohorts, believing that not long after 2000, “houses will be what they were before the boomers entered the housing market, places to live rather than investments… the days of rapid and huge increases in house prices are gone.” Of course, this never happened — quite the opposite.

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Gen X is in a special position; though they were not able to benefit as quickly from the system set up by the Boomers, enough of them were nonetheless able to break into the housing market and build up household wealth as the price upswing was in its initial stages in the mid-Nineties and 2000s, an entry point that was closed off to many Millennials who came after. As a result, they even have a marginally higher average net worth than Boomers and are not in a position to break ranks politically with the status quo.

Naturally, the flip side of Boomer hyper-engagement is consistent Millennial and Gen Z non-engagement: countless youths who have abdicated their civic rights altogether, citing apathy or ignorance.

What we are dealing with here are gross sociological distinctions, which cannot be put down to partisan differences. Canadian and global outlets who covered the race put special emphasis on a supposed bond between the disenfranchised youth and the populist Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre, just as the over 55s flocked to Carney: in this telling, the former voted on cost of living while the latter voted on anti-Trump nationalism, depicted with scorn in Right-wing media as a luxury issue for Boomers intent on drowning out the affordability debate with nostalgic invocations of their own postwar golden age.

Yet the polling data does not confirm this: yes, the Boomers have gone majorly for the Liberals, but surveys carried out in the lead-up to the election and in its immediate aftermath indicate a very close, competitive race for the youth vote, with apparent Liberal leads for the 18-35 cohorts. It was actually middle-aged Gen X males (along with the oldest Millennials) who went overwhelmingly for the Tories.

But it is enormously comforting for the Right to say that they have a strong lock on the youth vote, and they will continue to do so. To hear Poilievre speak, it is as if the housing crisis sprung up overnight in 2015 right as Trudeau was elected — instead of being the result of decades of joint Liberal and Conservative misrule, including the last Tory government of which he was a part. Other than deregulation, which really needs to happen at the municipal rather than the federal level, it is also hard to see Poilievre’s neo-Thatcherite agenda as anything other than a return to vintage Nineties Boomer conservatism; or as JD Vance said of him, “Mitt Romney with a French accent” (Poilievre doesn’t have an accent, but point taken).

In any event, Canada’s youth is still up for grabs, even as young and old jostle for the favor of the governing Liberals who have historically been the big-tent brokerage party par excellence. In the 20th century, Liberal leaders brokered ingenious compromises to reconcile the divergent interests of competing groups in Canadian society: English and French, East and West, capital and labor. Today, they must do the same with the Boomers and their children; they must first admit, however, that a zero-sum standoff currently exists between them, instead of ignoring the problem in the first place as Robertson did as mayor in Vancouver, and as Trudeau did as prime minister.

Enough first-time voters responded to Carney’s pledge of a Second World War-style, nationally directed industrial policy to get “government… back in the business of building affordable homes”, that is, to mass manufacture homes at scale: the very idea that his housing minister can’t seem to contemplate. But what will it take for such an ambitious plan to actually succeed?

Carney will need to compensate the Boomers and Gen Xers whose home values will start tumbling once new units enter the market en masse. A creative way to do it would be to find ways to deploy the older cohorts’ own wealth toward funding the construction boom, perhaps through the issuance of special Canada Construction Bonds that pension funds and retirees can purchase, the returns on which would be drawn from the profits to be generated by the resulting newly manufactured affordable unit sales. This is exactly the kind of financial alchemy that Carney should be able to perform. The “counteroffer” to the Boomers could then be supplemented by seniors’ discounts, subsidized nursing care, and the construction of retirement villages as part of the new industrial policy.

Whatever the case, young Canadians must realize (as well as young Americans, Britons and anyone else with this challenge) that the conflict will be settled not on the terrain of patriotism or political ideologies but of raw self-interest. Beating the Boomers at their own game will be the only way to humble them.

Katie Law: Why don’t you start by telling us what sensitivity readers are — what are your views of them?

Lionel Shriver: For the few of you who aren’t familiar with the concept, sensitivity readers started out being hired mostly in young adult fiction — a genre that, for some reason, woked out earlier than anyone else. The idea is that these people are self-nominated experts on whatever category of humanity they happen to have been born into. So I’m a professional American and a professional white person. They’re supposed to go through, line by line, and find anything in this book that could possibly offend anyone, especially their hallowed group. And unsurprisingly, that results in a much more anodyne, boring manuscript. Basically, you can’t win, because if you have a character do something that most people in that category wouldn’t do, then it’s inauthentic; but if they do things that that category of people are renowned to do, then it’s a stereotype.

I should make it clear that no one at HarperCollins has yet had the nerve to subject me to these people. And I object to the whole idea of it. There’s nothing wrong with being professional, being accurate. If the book you’re writing requires you to write people who are credibly disabled or black or Muslim or what have you, and it’s a realistic piece of fiction, then you should probably do a little homework. But it shouldn’t be against the law not to do your homework. If you’ve made glaring errors, then it’s the part of criticism and a responsible reader to notice. But it’s a very different thing — deciding to do a few interviews or a little reading on your own account — from having your publisher sic these self-nominated experts on your manuscript to tell you everything that’s wrong with it and everything that has to go. I won’t mention her by name, but a very successful novelist who I talked to recently was subjected to multiple sensitivity readers and they reduced her to tears.

What few authors understand is that they don’t actually have to take the advice of these interfering little people. But most authors think they do and therefore make these moronic changes. What the publisher is really doing is protecting themselves, so that if this book gets it in the neck, on social media or in criticism, then they can say, “well, she didn’t do what she was told”.

KL: How have these edicts affected you personally? Have you had any pushback from an agent or your own editors in your fiction writing?

LS: I have been subjected to very little of that kind of interference, but it’s not foreign to me. One of the things that now makes people extremely nervous is the use of accents. Now, I don’t generally like heavy-handed transliteration of accents in fiction. I think you can sometimes convey an accent with a few little touches. And those little touches can be very useful in creating the character. But even expressing the way people actually talk when, for example, English is not their first language is now considered offensive. And there are whole books, therefore, that would be cancelled for this very reason.

In The Mandibles, there’s a short dialogue with African immigrants, and I had used those little touches, and I had my British editor say that it was “othering”. I find that word so repulsive. And rather than take her head on, because I wanted to keep things cool and she had restrained herself in relation to a lot of other things, I obliged, except that I did so in an underhanded way. There was a way of changing the dialogue so that you did get the accent, but I expressed it with whole, legitimate English words. So you couldn’t quite say that it was transliterating and “othering”, but I still got my way.

There was another instance where I got myself into trouble with objecting to the concept of cultural appropriation. I had written a short story in which there was a girlfriend of a white character who was black. She was a very appealing character. She’s smart and very well spoken. And she’s upper-middle class and her mother’s rich — so not a stereotype. The story takes place in Atlanta, where there is a huge upper-middle class black population. So this was credible. But my agent suggested that I changed this person to a white character, because if we submitted the story to the New Yorker — eye roll! — and they rejected it, we would never know whether or not it was rejected because I was culturally appropriating, or the story just sucked. I always allow for that possibility. Sure enough, it was rejected, and I do not know whether or not it was because I culturally appropriated or this story sucked.

KL: Authors seem to sometimes apologise too quickly if they’re accused of a particular misdemeanour.

LS: Oh, I have never apologised in public for anything as a matter of principle. Once you go down that road, you have lost the battle, you have finished yourself. And the irony is that apologies don’t even work. They’re never accepted. You never apologise enough.

But it’s worth pointing out that transparent cowardice is not so much on the authorial but on the publishing level. As I wrote in a Spectator column, one of the reasons that publishing has become so timid, and frightened, and compliant, and risk-averse, is because it’s been taken over by women. I do not say that with any pride in my sex, and there are many exceptions, but women err on the side of being fearful. They also have, as a group, a fatal desire to please. What’s needed in this circumstance is balls, and I don’t care whether they’re literal or figurative.

KL: You won a prize in 2005, The Orange Prize. It’s now been renamed as The Women’s Prize for Fiction. At the time, did you think there was a good reason to have a women-only prize? And today, do you think we still need women-only prizes for fiction?

LS: I think at the time there was some good reason for it. There was a real historical disparity in the award of prizes, especially the big prizes, to women. We just weren’t getting acknowledged. Now, I was quite forthright, even at the time, about the fact that if I had my druthers, I would prefer to have won a prize that was open to both sexes. I have no problem with going head-to-head with men and I do not feel that I need special protection. But it was at a rather low point in my career, and I would take what I could get.

I have made a habit of not doing down the Women’s Prize. For the most part, it doesn’t do any harm, it’s just one more prize. It means that there are more people out there who have a little more money and a little more profile. But if you look at the statistics of who’s being awarded what now, if anything we need a men’s prize. We now have a serious reverse discrimination situation, whereby authors, especially debut authors, simply cannot get into print if they are straight, white males. And you know what, I think even the gay white males are starting to struggle.

KL: Do you put that down to the number of women running publishing? Do you think that they are wanting to push their own interests?

LS: It’s partly a matter of fashion. Publishing is utterly obsessed with diversity. And that means that they are not choosing books strictly on the basis of whether they’re any good. This is a huge, society-wide problem and it’s not just publishing — we have ditched excellence and even competence, and all we care about is what category you belong to — but publishing is the worst of it. Women are slaves to fashion, including ideological fashion, and have this drive to please, and regard talking about diversity all the time as pleasing because that’s what you’re supposed to do now. However, I do not think the problem is female readers. I sense no demand, from the ground up. “Listen, stop foisting these male, white writers on us. We only want to read books by people from Zimbabwe.” I do a lot of events and I just don’t hear it. The readership wants good stories and good characters, and also something with a little edge, which is where I come in.

KL: A lot of the management in publishing houses are terrified of their very young staff, who are calling the shots, who are feeling offended, who are feeling uncomfortable about JK Rowling’s views. Is that something you’ve experienced?

LS: Yes, which is bizarre. It’s just a complete inversion of who has the power. I mean, we’re dealing with an entire administrative class that doesn’t realise that they’re wearing Dorothy’s shoes. They have the power; they can fire all these people. Look at what happened at Netflix. They did a trim after the Dave Chappelle brouhaha, and the first people in the firing line were the people who’d made a big stink about the Dave Chappelle comedy special.

But in publishing there’s just this complete failure to exert control. I’ll tell you an interesting story. I hope Douglas Murray is cool with this. Douglas recently changed publishing company from Bloomsbury to HarperCollins. And by the way, HarperCollins, in the big picture here, has acquitted itself quite well. They’re my publisher and they have not given me a hard time, much less fired me. And they have been a refuge for a number of other authors who have fallen out with their publishers. But this particular instance of leaving Bloomsbury was interesting to me because of a twist. They were wrangling over the contractual details — they didn’t actually want to lose Douglas — believe it or not but they threatened Douglas with their younger staff. They used their younger staff as a weapon and said, “you know, you’re lucky: our younger staff hasn’t gone for you. The younger staff of all the other publishing companies wouldn’t put up with you. So we’re the only people who would have you.” It’s really underhanded, really creepy. And of course, it was a lie. Douglas didn’t have any trouble finding someone else to publish him. He’s very profitable. It was using the current political situation to get what they wanted in a much more mercantile sense, not in an ideological sense.

The real problem is that, in the elevation of these ostensible values of diversity, equity and inclusion, whole organisations and corporations forget what they are for. I got myself into trouble in 2018, after Penguin Random House sent round a declaration to all the agents of their authors that, by 2025, they were going to have both their authors and their staff perfectly reflect the demographics of the United Kingdom — it’s hard to say this without laughing — in relation to sex, sexual preference, ethnicity, gender ID, of course, race, and even class. Now, that’s a hell of an algorithm. I thought it was hilarious and I wrote about it for The Spectator — about how the purpose of a publishing company is not to perfectly reflect the demography of whatever country it’s selling books in, but to sell books. And somehow that column got twisted so that, according to the Guardian — they’re so creative there! — I thought only white people wrote good books.

KL: I’ve actually got the sentence that you wrote here: “If an agent submits a manuscript by a gay, transgender Caribbean, who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter, it will be published whether or not it is incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible.”

LS: That line was endlessly quoted back to me as somehow terribly prejudiced. If you examine each element on its own, there are no pejoratives. There is nothing insulting in that line at all. But it is, in its composite, funny — and that’s a crime.

KL: You talked on the Today programme about what you had meant when you wrote that and why you’d written it. I think you defended yourself and acquitted yourself brilliantly — but I wonder how these things affect you, and whether you come away from it feeling bolshier? Or whether you ever fear you’ve gone too far?

LS: Well, so far, I’ve got away with it. So I don’t live in fear all the time. I realise that the era we’re living in is dangerous to me — the irony being, however, that it’s also been very useful to me. I mean, you are probably here not just because you like my novels, but because I have stuck my neck out politically. And therefore I have benefitted from wokeness more than I have suffered from it. And that makes me rather gleeful.

KL: And do you feel that you can harness it for your next novel?

LS: I really broke the rules in The Motion of the Body through Space, which came out in 2020. One of the secondary characters is an incompetent diversity hire. You’re not supposed to do that. And, of course, it was widely criticised. And that made it really fun. But I don’t want to become just an ideologue and I don’t want to just write books that are shadowboxing with the enemy. I want to write books that would be interesting beyond this moronic era.

I don’t always want my novels to be focused on the culture wars, but I have used the culture wars and more broadly, I have found the whole experience of the last several years informative, not necessarily in a cheerful manner. It’s been very discouraging — in the same way that I found the whole Covid era incredibly discouraging — and I think less of humanity as a result. But I find this time period illuminating in relation to any number of other political movements that I have known about in theory, but have not known in practice. It illuminates the French Revolution and Year Zero in Cambodia and Maoism and Stalinism, the whole package of authoritarian movements which have not always been top-down but have sometimes been ground-up — instituting an orthodoxy, which if you do not hew to it, you lose your job, your livelihood. That is what’s happening. I sometimes worry that it’s petty and I shouldn’t get that concerned with it, but on reflection, I don’t think it’s petty. I think it’s real, I think it’s important. If it gets much worse, we’re really talking about total dysfunction. We’re talking about countries just not working anymore.

KL: Have we reached peak woke, or do you think it’s just going to get worse?

LS: Everyone I talk to wants to know whether or not it’s started to subside. The real problem is that it has a life of its own, because it has produced this entire class of people whose jobs rely on this DEI nonsense. And you know that theory of the overproduction of elites? If you haven’t encountered it, basically we’re sending too many people to university. There are not enough jobs. And this DEI crap, it creates lots of little useless sinecures — often very well paid — for these overproduced elites to fill, and they’re going to cling to those positions for dear life.

For the organisations involved, or the companies, they’re a terrible drain but what’s happening is that these whole layers of management are being maintained as a protection. It’s a little bit like the sensitivity readers. They don’t cost that much and it’s good PR: “look at us, we have a whole department of 30 people who do absolutely nothing”. And furthermore, the ideology, which began in the universities, is still being promoted in universities. At places like UnHerd, we may feel we’re winning the argument because the essays are so good but that doesn’t mean that they’re teaching UnHerd essays in university, as they should do. I’m afraid that none of the people who need to be persuaded are reading this stuff. It’s a very atomised media situation.

I think there is a role to be played in preaching to the choir: the choir needs sermons. And we need to reach out to each other and to feel that we’re not alone and that there are other people who are sane. It makes you feel, in the current parlance, “safe”, because everyone is not crazy. And it gives us a sense of community, a much-misused word, but this is a community. You are actually physically here, and we are of like minds, though we don’t agree on everything — that would be creepy.

KL: If the woke tide is a youthful one, and more young people are coming out of universities and going into the workplace, then what is going to stop it?

LS: The problem is not only young people. And I have to say, I feel a kind of funny mea culpa in relation to my own youth. I grew up at the tail end of the so-called Sixties, which in truth lasted well into the Seventies. And this is where a lot of this stuff was born — and by the way, as a kid, I bought into it hook line and sinker. I would still oppose the Vietnam War, if I could go back, and I still recycle. But this whole obsession with self-criticism, which has an almost communist touch and feel, started back then. And I was very proud of being critical of the United States and being ashamed of the United States and being obsessed with all the terrible things we’d done wrong. People these days act as if we only started talking about slavery yesterday. No, we were obsessed with it in the Sixties, slavery and the genocide against the Indians. A lot of the stuff that you hear harped on now, we harped on, and I’ve internalised this stuff, and I was very proud of how ashamed I was. When you’re ashamed, you’re superior, because you know how terrible you are and everyone else is dribbling around in their ignorance, and they don’t know what evil they hail from.

That lasted well into my young adulthood, until I became a permanent expat. Even for the first few years of my ex-patriotism, when I was living in Belfast, I was ashamed of being American. I was a little self-conscious about opening my mouth with my accent and giving away that I was from this terrible place. And honestly, I’m not quite sure what did it. Maybe it was just living in Belfast, where I realised there are other terrible places. I grew up politically and I grew up personally. I came to resign myself to being American.

I didn’t choose to be born American. There are worse places to be from and I was not responsible for slavery. I didn’t kill any Indians. Everyone has to be from somewhere and actually, that shame is perhaps the main thing that I should have felt ashamed for. Because it is a false pride in being so illumined and it’s an empty pride. And frankly, from the outside, it is unattractive. We don’t really like people who are ashamed of where they come from. It’s a kind of betrayal and it’s a lie. It’s as if you can repudiate that which cannot be repudiated. It’s also a denial of fact, of physical reality. I was born in the United States in a little town called Gastonia, North Carolina: that is a fact. A fact, and I can’t live it down, and for me to feel that I have to is, well, shame on me.

So, I came round — but this self-hatred stuff goes way back, this very Western-centred, “oh, haven’t we done terrible things”. And it starts with my generation. The Boomer generation brought this stuff to life. And those are the people who took over the universities. So, it is not just a bunch of young people who got some stupid notion in their head. They got it from us.

KL: On that note, shall we take some questions from the audience?

*

Do you think that books like Satanic Verses wouldn’t be published now? Or that series of books called The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, which was beautifully written by an elderly Scottish professor, Alexander McCall Smith, but from the perspective of a black woman?

LS: Funnily enough I had a conversation with somebody in the upper levels of HarperCollins — they publish Alexander McCall Smith — and he was bemoaning the fact that if one of those books came in today, they would not publish it. And that’s HarperCollins, the refuge. The truth is that HarperCollins’s CEO is a Brexit supporter. Very conservative. And that helps explain why HarperCollins is a bit of an island politically. But even they would probably turn down The Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency, because it’s an older Scottish white writer with a main character who is female, black and African — which is, from my perspective, admirable. It’s an extension of imagination, of empathy. I’m far more interested in reading that book than I would be if it’s about a barely disguised older, white Scottish male who happens to be the main character and writes novels for a living.

*

You said a while back that the best way to fight this war on language was to either ignore it or to laugh at it. Do you still think that?

LS: That’s a hard one because, yes, my tendency is to laugh at it. I find these lists of words we’re no longer supposed to use, which get longer and longer, hilarious. You can’t refer to a “field” of study anymore, because it’s going to remind people of slavery. I mean, it is beyond satire. These people are doing our work for us in making a mockery of themselves. The trouble is that it does start trickling down. The Associated Press guidelines set a standard that is largely observed across the journalism industry, but now they’ve said that you can’t use the word “the”. Now, obviously, it’s in certain contexts, but honestly, they are banning articles. You can’t say “the disabled” because it defines a person in terms of a particular aspect of themselves. They even said you couldn’t say “the French”. The French got really pissed off!

For this lunacy to have filtered down to even the AP Stylebook means that it’s a little more serious than I would like it to be. I would like us to be able to laugh it off. But honestly, they have successfully made it almost unpublishable in mainstream newspapers to say “slave”; you have to say “enslaved person”, because otherwise we idiots are not going to know that we’re actually talking about a human being. They’re starting to endanger whole classes of words that pertain to people. Pretty soon we’re not going to be able to talk about me as being “a writer”, because I’m also a person. So, I have to be a “writing person” or a “person who writes”. It’s dumber than dumb, but at the same time, it is starting to have an impact on what is considered acceptable use of language.

My biggest sense of upset about all of this stuff is that I just hate bad writing. I hate the mangling of language. I hate stupid use of words and that’s what they’re promoting. They honestly have people on the news saying, “people living with obesity”. And again, this is funny, but there’s another level on which it is more insidious. It is denial of reality. I gather there’s a series called Goosebumps — I haven’t read it; it is for children — which is removing the word “fat”. I mean, first off, no matter how many references to the word fat you eliminate, it doesn’t change the fact that being massively overweight is bad for you. It also doesn’t change the fact that most people do not find being massively overweight attractive. If you eliminate the word, you don’t eliminate the prejudice against that state. And by the way, that’s a healthy prejudice. We don’t want to encourage everyone to be massively fat. So I don’t think we should stop finding it funny but we do also have to take it seriously. I use the word “slave” at every opportunity.

*

I wonder whether there’s any way of engaging with a lost generation of people who are completely captured by weird, weird ideologies?

LS: Fortunately, I don’t have to confront people who have swallowed this ideology whole very often. One of the problems with the ideology is the way it seals itself off. So that part of the ideology is a refusal to have a conversation, that it causes you harm to talk to somebody or listen to somebody with whom you disagree. It’s anti-education, which is why I find it incredibly ironic that this stuff originates in universities. Because it’s the antithesis of what real education is.

I think parents may have a role to play. I’m not a parent, but I wouldn’t give up on trying to talk to your kids. One of the things that dismays me is that a lot of the parents believe the same stuff. And so the kids are not entirely against the parents. What dismays me about younger people these days is: they don’t rebel. This is what they’re being told. This is what a lot of their parents believe. It’s not rebellion, it’s anything but: it’s conformity, total conformity.

Now, what is wrong with young people who don’t tell the adults that they’re full of shit? That’s what we were like. I bought into my parents’ liberal ideology, but I grew up and I overthrew it and started thinking for myself. My first experience of asserting myself was overthrowing my parents’ Presbyterianism. Both my parents were professionally religious, and I instinctively didn’t buy it. Now it turns out everyone else is the same way, so it doesn’t seem especially interesting, but it was risky in my family, to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t want to go to church anymore. I don’t believe this.” And it gave me practice for later, when I realised that I didn’t entirely buy their political ideology. I became an independent intellectual being.

What is wrong with younger people that they don’t go through that process? It is empowering, as we used to say; it is exciting and it’s fundamentally Oedipal. It’s overthrowing the previous generation and asserting yourself and growing into yourself, and deciding that you are capable, and that you can think for yourself. Why is this generation — and even to some degree, the previous one — not going through that rebellion and that self-assertion? I’m afraid that a lot of the self-assertion we do see is an assertion of weakness, so-called vulnerability, mental illness, feeling unsafe? It’s all soft. I would like to see a little strength.

*

As a sensitivity reader, I advised somebody to remove something because he was calling able people “blessed”, implying that disabled people are not blessed. But I felt bad, because at what point does it become self-censorship?

LS: I don’t think there’s any formula. There is such a thing as being edited well, and my editor occasionally calls attention to something that’s going to alienate people. I don’t mind having that called to my attention. I’ve been a little careless, or I wrote something in such a way that it could be interpreted in a way that I don’t want it to be interpreted. So, if you’ve got a line that seems to be dissing anyone with a disability and that’s not what you’re trying to convey, then you should fix it and there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t believe in gratuitous offence. I sometimes offend on purpose, but there’s nothing wrong with having another perspective, and I’m always willing to listen. If someone can make a good case that I should cut a line or change a word, or whatever, I’ll listen to it and I will entertain it. And sometimes I’ll reject it, but sometimes they’re right. There’s always a danger of becoming so dogmatic in the service of anti-dogmatism that you close yourself off to information that actually is very useful to you. I sometimes have to watch that myself.

*

I’m left with the feeling that this is an era of even greater polarisation than I had thought. And perhaps what we’re missing is more of a voice for the centre ground and the middle ground. And I wonder if, to get through the era, that voice might be better than the two polars fighting each other?

LS: That’s what got us here, the centre ground! I’m afraid that the centre ground is now interpreted as Right-wing. Nothing I’ve said, 30 years ago, would have been faintly controversial. And now it is. It’s funny, I was just speaking with another audience member who said that she’s from my same generation and she started out a liberal, and she hasn’t changed any of her opinions and now she’s regarded as Right-wing. And that’s what’s happened to me. The irony of the position I find myself in is that most of the positions that I advocate for are expressing the views of the majority of the population. And the views of the majority of the population are no longer acceptable. And that bothers me. It shouldn’t be brave to say most of the stuff I say, and unfortunately it has become so.

Rule Makers, Rule Breakers explores Gelfand’s research into differences between cultures. Specifically, she describes cultures that are (using terms invented by Finnish-American anthropologist Pertti Pelto) “tight” and “loose”. Tight cultures are conformist “rule makers” while loose ones are creative “rule breakers”. According to Gelfand, tight nations include India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, China and Portugal; loose nations include Spain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, the Netherlands and Ukraine. (The UK sits somewhere towards the middle, and is slowly becoming looser.)

Life in tight nations can be strict compared to looser places, which have weaker social norms and a more permissive way of being. Gelfand contrasts tight Japan where “trains almost never arrive late” with loose Brazil where “clocks on city streets all read a different time, and arriving late for business meetings is more the rule than the exception. If Brazilians want to insist on timeliness, they will ask you to arrive “com pontualidade britânica” (“with British punctuality”). In notoriously tight Germany there are “mandated quiet hours” on certain days, during which lawn-mowing, loud music and washing machine use is forbidden. “After one Cologne resident complained about a yapping dog, a judge allowed the dog to bark for only 30 minutes a day in 10-minute intervals.”

What makes all this especially powerful is Gelfand’s understanding that we absorb the rules of our time and place, internalising them so that, to an extent, we become them. The halting but demonstrably true fact is that certain cultures produce, on average, certain kinds of human. We’re a tribal species and our brains are programmed to learn local norms, to follow them and to judge others by how closely or otherwise they conform to them. We need rules in order to live successfully in co-operative groups; they are our “cure for chaos”. And we love our rules. Gelfand quotes the Greek adventurer Herodotus who, in roughly 450 BC, observed our ethnocentric nature: “If one were to order all mankind to choose the best set of rules in the world, each group would, after due consideration, choose its own customs; each group regards its own as being by far the best.”

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It’s not that loose nations don’t have any rules at all, then, but that they take them marginally less seriously than the tight. And so sometimes dramatic differences arise between people of different cultures. Loose types, raised in a more laissez-faire environment, tend to possess less self-control than the tighties. “People in the United States, New Zealand, Greece and Venezuela weigh much more than people in tight countries like India, Japan, Pakistan and Singapore, even taking into account a country’s wealth and people’s average height,” writes Gelfand, adding that, in the US, “over 50% of dogs and cats are overweight or obese, including my own dog, Pepper”. Similarly, loose countries such as Spain, Estonia and New Zealand are some of the booziest in the world, while tight Singapore, India and China are among the most abstemious.

In cultures that have “little tolerance for deviance”, though, life can get rather hatey. Tight nations are often not welcoming of outsiders. China reportedly “ranks in the 90th percentile of countries with the most negative attitudes toward foreigners”, while in Japan “many landlords have a ‘no foreigners’ policy, and certain bathhouses, shops, restaurants and hotels deny entry to foreign customers”. Closer to home, surveys show that “almost 30% of Austrian citizens hold anti-Semitic attitudes”. Research by Gelfand and her team, involving more than 33,000 people in 19 countries, found loose nations to be the most tolerant, being “much more willing to live next to a wider range of people, including homosexuals, individuals from a different race or religion, foreign workers, unmarried couples and those who have AIDS”.

In an especially fascinating passage, Gelfand examines the causes of tightness. Her conclusion is straightforward: it’s a response to trouble. When the going gets tough, groups get tight. Each tight culture her team looked at “had (or has) to deal with a high degree of threat, whether from Mother Nature and her constant fury of disasters, diseases and food scarcity, or from human nature and the chaos caused by invasions and internal conflicts”. Take China: here is a nation that borders 14 countries, each of which it has fallen out with at some point. As well as experiencing “massive conflict throughout its history”, internally and externally, China has suffered terrible assaults by nature, having lost 25 times more lives to natural disasters, over the past 50 years, than the US. It also has relatively few natural resources, when compared with looser nations, and suffers from poor access to safe water and significant food deprivation. (It’s worth noting here that tight and loose differences can also be found across individual states of the US, with looseness found more in the north, and tightness down south.)

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As I read Rule Makers, it occurred to me that you could apply the tight-loose paradigm not just to cultures, but to all human groups. I applied this to the book I was researching, The Status Game, in which I note that some political movements are tighter than others, as are some religions — even some corporate cultures. The tightest groups of all are cults: they’re extremely ethnocentric and demand absolute adherence to their rules with sometimes terrible punishments meted out to deviants. Cult members, like culture-members, tend to internalise their group’s rules. One former participant in the Heaven’s Gate cult wrote (the caps are his): “I WANTED TO BE IN [THE HEAVEN’S GATE] PROGRAM AND WANTED TO ABIDE BY ALL THEIR RULES. [Not conforming] would be tantamount to wanting to be a NASA astronaut but deciding this or that procedure didn’t need to be adhered to.” Another wrote: “We weren’t here to be programmed or brainwashed. We were here to beg to be brainwashed.”

It also occurred to me that it might be possible to view the culture wars through this lens. In The Status Game I note demographic research by More in Common that described a cohort called “Progressive Activists” as those “motivated by the pursuit of social justice” (you know who they mean). Progressive Activists make more contributions to social media than any other group, and are also the wealthiest and most highly educated group in the UK. And they have certainly tightened up over the last 14 or so years, becoming more conformist and less tolerant of those who don’t share their beliefs.

It’s significant, then, that this group has suffered a drop in perceived status: highly-educated millennials are more qualified but 20% less wealthy than Boomers were at the same age: the average millennial’s worth in 2016 was 41% less than those of a similar age in 1989. They’re finding it harder to secure jobs suited to their level of education, or get on the housing ladder, and are burdened with student debt, graduating with an average deficit of £40,000. Since 2008’s Global Financial Crisis, they’ve lived with the sense that the game of life is fixed against them; that there is major trouble afoot for their group.

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Meanwhile their enemies — Brexity-minded, anti-globalisation, anti-immigration nationalists — have also endured a period of trouble. During the era of globalisation, the white working-class communities of Britain have been significantly impacted by incoming populations of black, eastern European and Muslim workers. This group feels ignored and disrespected by highly-educated politicians and much of the media-class, who dismiss them as little more than aggressive, ignorant bigots. So, they tighten up. Of course they do: they’re human, and that’s what humans do.

My analysis here is speculative. While it may be impossible to prove that tightness, fuelled by declines in relative status, is at work in the culture wars, the evidence is there. It’s also a potentially worrying augur for the future. The ramifications of the Covid economy, the invasion of Ukraine and Brexit are descending. It’s possible that all this pressure will tighten us up on a national level, as it did in the Second World War, and we’ll all move closer together; the two sides of the culture war may focus less on their own local battles as their attention moves to recession, fuel bills and winter blackouts. But if these groups continue to look inwards, neither the wealthy, educated activists nor the angry, dismissed white poor will be loosening up their mindsets, or their prejudices, any time soon.

Some will call this progress — in sanitation, diet, medicine — as if more is always better. But the cost of this “progress” is rarely factored in.

£12 billion every year is the latest pledge to fix health and social care, mostly for the elderly. But what are we doing with all these extra years?

It depends, of course. Some will work longer; some will have more time with their grandchildren and great grandchildren. Others will be warehoused in care homes, living out their twilight years amid the background smell of stale urine, bored ridged between monthly visits from their guilty children. Many are not like this, but a great deal of them still are. My mother has made us promise we will take her to Dignitas long before it comes to this — and that when we bring her ashes back from Switzerland it will be in a Harrods bag, not a Tesco one. This, apparently, is dignity in dying.

Social care has come a long way since it was conceived in alms houses provided by the church: through Victorian workhouses, state-funded provision in the twentieth century and, more recently, to profit-making private companies. As our population gets older, so the need for such services grows ever larger. It is commendable that the Government is seeking to address the growing cost of social care, albeit through a tax levy that falls disproportionately on the working poor and the young. But the one thing that we are not talking about — and our silence is becoming ruinously expensive — is what a good life, and indeed a good death, looks like.

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To put it another way, without a sense of what human life is for, and what its basic natural or even theological rhythms might be, we fall back on the idea that more is always better. Without some sort of agreed understanding that human life exists within fundamental limits, society will inevitably find itself unsustainable.

The idea of growth, of always seeking more, is built into the very nature of capitalism, as it is within liberal progressivism. In a secular society, meaning tends to get replaced by the idea of more; or rather, more becomes the meaning.

It is not a coincidence that just as we are pouring billions into end-of-life care, the fantastically wealthy are seeking their own way of outwitting ageing and death. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is now throwing his fortune at some comically ludicrous “eternal life” start-up that seeks to keep him alive forever. “Man plans, God laughs”, as the old Jewish proverb puts it. It’s not just that Bezos can’t succeed in this ridiculous vanity project, but that we shouldn’t want him too. Death, after all, gives life its purpose.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum once asked why it was that the immortal Greek gods would often fall in love with mortal human beings; Calypso with Odysseus, for instance. Her insightful response was that those who can die are capable of things that immortals are not. They are, for example, capable of courage, of risking everything for others on the battlefield in a way that immortals cannot. Indeed, the very possibility of love itself is bound up with the ability to sacrifice oneself for another. A life without the possibility of death becomes some sort of meaningless extension of mere existence — the unbearable lightness of being.

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This means that there is no way of solving the social care crisis in purely economic terms. Because one cannot address a metaphysical question through economic policy. Indeed, the very basic question of what human life is for is one that politicians, still less economists, no longer feel they have any use for.

The first stage to recover a basic metaphysical scaffolding would be to reclaim something of that story in which death has some sort of wider significance, rather than being viewed as just some anticlimactic end. Because if having more — going on longer — is the meaning of life in a secular society, then death is inevitably and always some sort of failure. Whereas we would once have said of the dead that they have passed into glory, we now hear the medics apologise that “there was nothing that we could do”. Death was once — potentially, at least — an expression of some ultimate triumph. Now it is the bitter failure of our technology. And whatever we spend on it, no amount of money will overcome this gap.

Death, then, is the political issue we are not talking about. Even after the pandemic, when the daily death figures were broadcast on every news broadcast, we continue to say little about death other than making the uncritical assumption it is always to be avoided.

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And so we are sleepwalking into a state of affairs in which the young will resent the elderly for the burden they place upon them. Of course, we should support the generous funding for social care. What we ought to be challenging is whether the medical technologies that are keeping us alive for ever longer complement our understanding of what human existence is for.

But I see little appetite for that. In a secular society, we have few intellectual or cultural resources to challenge the pervasiveness of more-ism. And to live deeper, more meaningful lives is not the same as living longer ones.

I was born the year Thatcher came to power, and came of age just as the rave scene began to be pried loose from illegal parties in fields and sweaty, underground warehouses. By the time I turned 18, the countercultural hedonism of rave culture was a regulated multi-million-pound industry. Even so, clubbing felt subversive: a form of self-expression where social norms could be dissolved in a bath of pure hedonism, shorn of stuffy rules and social norms.

Hearing the bass get louder as you approached the entrance, and the way the air became a warm, rich fug of dry ice, hormones and ear-bursting noise. The spark of sexual tension, the illicit substances, the sheer extravagance all felt thrilling.

But with the cynicism of my now-wizened age, I’ve come to believe that nightclubs have replaced their subversiveness with a sort of cuddly fascism. I’m not talking jackboots-and-flags fash, of course; but instead about how the absolute hedonism and self-expression of a nightclub needs a single point of authoritarian control — the DJ. Usually enthroned in an elevated position that resembles a dais or altar, everyone surrenders to this monarch of the decks, while order is kept at the margins by his unaccountable enforcers: the bouncers.

It’s a note-perfect representation, in other words, for the way an individualistic society seems to combine the pursuit of freedom with a drift toward authoritarian governance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, studies suggest the generation that came of age after me — just as clubbing went mainstream — is the most authoritarian generation alive in Britain today. One 2019 report showed 35% of under-35s supported having the army run the country, compared to just 15% of over-65s. And just 75% thought democracy was a good way to run a nation, down from 93% of over-65s.

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But if the hedonistic autocracy of a nightclub is the perfect metaphor for an emerging millennial authoritarianism, so too is the crowd: a mass of people united in the shared thrill of the music, yet also atomised, every dance unique. And indeed, a study released last week by the think tank Onward reported the most authoritarian generation is also the loneliest.

According to the study, 22% of under-35s say they have one or no close friends. This proportion has trebled over the last decade, while the proportion with four or more close friends fell from 60% to 40% over the same period.

I’m not suggesting that growing up clubbing somehow caused a generation to become lonely or authoritarian. But we’re all, to a great extent, what our parents made us; and the millennials, children of the boomers, were raised to express themselves. We can hardly blame them for doing so — or for accepting the trade-offs. And even if self-expression inadvertently makes us lonely, there’s always Big Tech to help. This industry is now rushing to fill the gap, with apps to help you find friends as well as a partner.

Will this work? Loyalty and affinity have their own arithmetic, and it’s not very amenable to individual control — or computer algorithms. I’ve drifted through numerous social scenes, careers and geographies over the last two decades; people who’ve become and stayed friends over that time are often not those I might have clicked as a “match” on some website.

Besides, contrary to the stereotype that sees younger people as so self-absorbed they don’t want friends they can’t choose, Onward’s report questions the idea that young people are selfish. For example, under-35s were twice as likely as older generations to look in on vulnerable or elderly neighbours on a regular basis during the pandemic.

Nor is it purely a matter of spending too much time on social media. While another easy “young people nowadays” stereotype paints them all as too Very Online to socialise in the real world, it seems that only 25-34s now conduct their social lives mainly online. For this group, 42% agree that “I have more friends online than I do in real life”, while only 25% disagree.

This lonely, very online demographic, though, has been heavily represented in political unrest over the pandemic. Indeed, as lockdown after lockdown has rolled out, I’ve come to suspect a link between those shuttered nightclubs and flourishing mass demonstrations.

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By Mary Harrington

I’ve argued elsewhere that pandemic-era protest is less directly about politics than self-expression: a rave-like experience, ordered by a generalised, emotive cause without clear links to any specific policy outcome. The expressive quality of this phenomenon was richly illustrated by the protest against lockdown that took place to mark the end of restrictions. It remains to be seen whether this energy that migrated from clubland to street politics will go quietly back to its box now that dancing is permitted again.

I dare say those millennials who’ve done well over the last two decades will be happy to see that happen. The older edge of this generation is reaching positions of political influence now, and will likely be happy to help roll out legal, cultural and financial infrastructure for the authoritarian hedonism they themselves have largely evaded. Who cares about a little more state control, if that’s the price of expressing yourself with an evening dancing? No wonder the kids are being offered a return to unrestricted clubland partying — but only in exchange for willingness to be vaccinated, and perhaps to show a vaccine passport.

And perhaps for some this will be enough. When the BBC filmed elated clubbers at Fibre in Leeds on Monday, the watchwords were “friends” and “freedom”: that paradoxical cocktail of individualism, mass participation and hedonism that only a nightclub delivers. “We’ve been blamed for the spread of the Covid”, said one twentysomething woman, “and it’s just nice to get freedom”. But others may find the buzz wears off.

For Covid abruptly switched off most of the compensations offered to those millennials who didn’t do so well in an increasingly brutal economic race, that’s engulfed everyone my age and younger — and whose sharp strictures are helping to drive an epidemic of loneliness. Its contours are well-documented. Home ownership was 53% in the early 1980s, for example, in outer London — but by 2018 it was just 16%. A twentysomething working full-time on minimum wage would have to pay at least 71% of their wages even to rent a one-bedroom flat anywhere in the UK.

It’s hard to picture settling down in those conditions; and indeed, the age of first marriage has been rising steadily for years. Onward’s study suggests many feel too overworked and precarious even to build neighbourly relations or local friendships. This generation, then, may not just be lonely and liquid by choice but also by circumstance.

Against that backdrop, perhaps the appeal of individualistic hedonism isn’t so startling after all. Clubland offers a dream of freedom and self-expression, albeit with little of enduring value to go home to in the morning. But if your home is a shoebox owned by a private equity firm, why would you not want to have a good time?

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If this seems bleak, there is some hope that Gen-Z will turn the tide. For this generation, Onward suggest, rejects the internet’s offer of a lonely existence: under-24s are more likely to disagree than to agree with the statement “socialising online is better than socialising in-person”. And in keeping with this turn away from hyper-mediated mass loneliness, there’s evidence that Gen-Z is also backing away from the kind of mass hedonism of clubland; Gen-Z drinks less, has less sex and is more interested in getting good grades and time with family and close friends than getting blitzed and dancing till 4am.

The more prescient members of Gen-Z, then, seem already to have grasped that the clubland no longer offers a promising social metaphor. They’re adjusting their party (and life) plans for a different mode. The question ahead of us is what becomes of the millennials now sliding, in my footsteps, into middle age.

Banks and private equity firms are snapping up rental housing, and investing in build-to-rent new construction. This spate of investment implies a financial sector confident in having a captive market for private rental housing for a long time. The Dalston warehouses where I queued on Friday nights in the noughties have long since been converted to luxury apartments for the millennials who did well over the last two decades: the coming generation with cultural influence, OBEs and budgets.

And because freedom has been good to them, we can expect them to go on pushing the authoritarian-tinged policies of hedonism and atomisation that delivered freedom (and fond memories of clubbing) with few obvious downsides, until they were ready to buy a house and have kids. But for the also-rans, the ones now missing the boat for starting families, the eternal renters, the chronic gig-workers with seemingly insuperable student debt, the “freedom” to get mashed for an evening may not feel like compensation for long.

In clubland, if you lose track of your friends and dance to the bitter end, you’ll see the lights come on to reveal a dance floor in its true colours: shabby, lonely, devoid of fun. More importantly, partying may not pacify Britain’s lonely and increasingly pessimistic young people forever — with or without a vaccine passport. In such a scenario, expect a bitter political comedown.

Initially, however, the opposite seemed to be true. The Government’s official messaging dictated that the entire population had a moral duty to “save lives”. In response, younger people, by and large, complied with the restrictions and showed high levels of concern about the deadly impact of Covid on the elderly. Yet when we look more deeply at the rhetoric underpinning today’s emergency measures, and the rumbling discussion about how we will pay for them when the bills come pouring in, a familiar theme emerges.

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By Jennie Bristow

For the past few decades, debates about population ageing have been increasingly framed around the presumption of diminishing social resources, with retired people having taken more than their “fair share” while younger generations are left to pay off public debt from their shrinking wage packets.

This has given rise to an outlook of generationalism — the exaggeration of generational differences to account for economic, political, and cultural problems. It is essentially a prejudice masquerading as economic and social analysis, one which relies on cherry-picking data from particular historical moments and drawing on poorly conceptualised categories to make crude generalisations.

Take the most widely-aired example of the generationalist outlook: the claim that the cohort born in the two decades following the Second World War  — the “Baby Boomers” — were uniquely blessed by the post-war economic boom, the developing welfare state, world peace, rising house prices and “gold-plated” pension schemes. According to this narrative, the Boomers’ determination to live life to the full, and refusal to die before their time, has resulted in a series of policies designed to protect the elderly at the expense of the young. Therefore, argue the generationalists, the only solution is to redistribute wealth and power from the old to the young.

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I have written extensively about the problem of generationalism, and its negative impact on old and young alike. The tale of untrammelled Boomer privilege skates over the significant differences of class, gender, and ethnicity. Nor is there any mention of difficult historical moments — the Sixties are always talked about, the Seventies barely mentioned. Such mendacious myth-making fosters resentment among the young, who soon find themselves trapped in a generationalist narrative. Told that older people “had it all”, it’s only natural for younger generations to lower their expectations about what they can expect society to do for them.

Generationalism also has a pernicious impact on policy thinking. Since the concept of “intergenerational equity” was first formulated, in the USA in the 1980s, social policy scholars have used it as a smokescreen for less palatable arguments about the need to restructure welfare states — in particular, by limiting entitlements to older people. Dig into today’s grandiose claims about “generational fairness” and little has changed. They generally amount to little more than what I have termed “granny-mugging”: the demand to abolish the “triple lock” on state pensions, to scrap free TV licences and bus passes, and to make older people pay more for social care provision.

None of this, of course, will help younger people. Indeed, given that the children of today are the pensioners of the future, such penny-pinching reforms are likely to hit them hardest in the end. More broadly, by presenting economic and social problems as conflicts between generations, we avoid tackling far more profound causes of inequality, such as sluggish economic growth and inadequate welfare infrastructure.

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By Ben Sixsmith

Far from pushing back against this approach, the UK’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed its dangerous consequences. As a disease, Covid-19 causes disproportionate suffering among the elderly. Yet in social and economic terms, the lockdown measures could cause disproportionate suffering among the young.

This has given the pandemic many of the ingredients for a generational conflict. In fact, it seems to me that generationalism already underlies two dangerous myths about our response to Covid-19. The first is that the extraordinary social experiment known as “lockdown” was done to protect the elderly. The second is that the focus of future policy should be about paying off the consequent debt.

Thus channelling these myths, Martin Daunton, emeritus professor of economic history at the University of Cambridge, is able to argue: “To tackle the intergenerational divide, society’s protection of  Baby Boomers by locking down the economy must be matched by social and economic policies to compensate the young.”

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It bears noting that Daunton presents lockdown as an attempt to protect the “Baby Boomers”, rather than the more vulnerable 80-plus cohort. This is a classic generationalist’s sleight-of-hand. Nobody wants to look as though they are having a go at Captain Tom, so the “Boomer” category is routinely deployed to capture both the relatively fit Boomers and the growing numbers of very old people.

More importantly, the myth that lockdown has been about protecting the elderly can be dispelled by considering how they have actually been treated in the past year. During the first wave, the scandal of discharging Covid-positive patients to care homes revealed how literally policy-makers had taken to heart the imperative to “protect the NHS” — even if it resulted in the virus spreading among the most vulnerable.

In that spirit, the “stay at home” orders were essentially an instruction to elderly people that if they ventured outside, they would not only be responsible for their own deaths but could also add to the burden on hospitals. Now, with vaccines offering a release from almost a year of isolation, the Deputy Chief Medical Officer instructs that they must not act with “wild abandon and go off to the bingo halls”.

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Yet it is the notion that it should be down to the elderly to “compensate the young” once the pandemic subsides that is the most callous of the generationalist blows. Elderly people did not choose to be ravaged by Covid-19, and nor did they design lockdown as the predominant response. Insofar as lockdown has brought disproportionate disadvantages to the young, politicians should be taking responsibility, as well as considering how to address them going forwards. Engaging citizens of all generations in a discussion about social policies would certainly be a good start.

For when we emerge from this crisis, it should be with a determination to confront the policy problems that Covid-19 has so cruelly exposed. The effective collapse of state education, soaring levels of unemployment, increases in poverty and the inadequacy of housing — all have been starkly revealed in the past year.

Solving these issues requires going beyond the divisive approach of generationalism, as demonstrated by the success of our age-stratified vaccination strategy — which, after all, is a clearly focused attempt to protect those most at risk from Covid-19. But when the time comes, the energy expended on protecting the elderly needs to be matched by a concerted attempt to free the young from lockdown. For if it isn’t, I fear that post-pandemic Britain will be shaken by a malign sense of generational injustice. And that really will be unhealthy.

Puerile as he was, he was witty and audacious. Eminent Victorians, his most famous book, might have been unfair to its subjects but it was entertaining and original, and tore through staid post-Edwardian propriety. Bertrand Russell, who was in prison for his pacifist activities when he read the book, wrote to a friend that he had been laughing so merrily that a warden had had to remind him that prisons were places of punishment. Strachey’s portrayal of the Victorians as being rather foolish and hypocritical helped young Britons to believe in progress more than tradition, and not to be bound by reverence for the past. As World War One thinned their ranks, the older people who had got them into such a mess seemed especially deserving of criticism.

Boomers, the debut book of the brilliant American critic and commentator Helen Andrews, takes a similar form to Eminent Victorians. Notable representatives of the titular generation, including Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin and Camille Paglia, are dissected. Like the Victorians, boomers steered the West through a time of great technological and societal change, taking in the Space Race and the internet age, as well as rock n’ roll and the sexual revolution. The history of their time, as Strachey wrote of the Victorians, could “fill innumerable volumes.” By examining certain “characteristic specimens”, however, Andrews can illuminate important tendencies.

An editor gave Andrews the idea for the book, she writes, because, “You’re like Strachey. You’re an essayist, and you’re mean.” I don’t know if “mean” is the right word but Andrews has certainly displayed lemony wit, from her early years writing at “The Cigarette Smoking Blog” to her erudite and iconoclastic essays for journals like First Things and the American Conservative, where she is now editor. You can never guess what Andrews is going to write about — it might be the suffragettes, or Zimbabwe, or the films of Paul Schrader — but you bet that it will be challenging and entertaining. No one is better placed to fuse insights with insults.

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Whereas Strachey insisted that he wrote “without ulterior intentions” — in much the same style that a liar will loudly preface a mistruth with “to be honest” — Andrews is openly critical. Unlike Strachey’s subjects, her targets are less than sacred (Jobs was, perhaps, but his reputation has taken a bit of a posthumous beating). Millennials, never mind Generation Z, have not been raised to respect their elders. “Boomers” are a running joke, the target of a million irreverential memes. What Andrews hopes to accomplish, though, is not just to puncture inflated reputations but to explain where people went wrong, and how to avoid making similar mistakes.

What Andrews finds most pitiful about her subjects is the hubris of their attempts to reshape the world. In a tightly argued, cheerfully one-sided opening chapter, she suggests that their liberatory enthusiasm birthed a world of savage economic insecurity, chronic fatherlessness, pill-popping, depression and porn. Rather than being freer, Andrews maintains, many of us are inhibited by poor education, addicted to screens and immiserated by a lack of ownership. Would anybody want to argue that there is not a significant amount of truth to this?

Pop culture is one of Andrews’ biggest targets. Aaron Sorkin, she writes, saw television as a means of mass enlightenment. Camille Paglia saw pop stars and actors as being icons of a chain-breaking sexuality. Andrews, like Richard Hoggart in the innocent 1950s, sees popular culture as a stage for “mass publicists”, promoting “group individualism”. Sorkin, she writes, failed to appreciate that “pseudo-knowledge might be worse than no knowledge at all.” His characters are archetypal “upper normies”: endlessly scornful of the received wisdom of the masses and sycophantically devoted to the received wisdom of the liberal bourgeoisie. The dangers of this were easy to identify in 2020, where sophisticated opinion held that masks were comically useless in March and essential in May.

Paglia, meanwhile, waxed lyrical about the glamour of pornography as men and women scrolled mindlessly through ever more bizarre sex scenes in search of something they had not grown numb to. She celebrated the provocations of her muse, Madonna, but ended up griping about her “juvenile Instagrams [and] her trashy outfit” as the pop star followed erotically charged attention-seeking to its ignominious endgame. What is sold as freedom can become captivity.

One expects swipes at hippies in a book like this, but Andrews, cleverly, holds her fire when it comes to flower power and the Grateful Dead. It would have been easy to do a line-by-line analysis of “Imagine” but it would also have been cheap. She is far more harsh on hippie ideals infusing corporate and bureaucratic institutions. She is damning, for example, and righteously so, on how the sunny universalism of Silicon Valley has been exploited by hard-nosed Chinese nationalists. Imagine all the people, sharing all the apps. It hasn’t quite worked out. As a spicy Wall Street Journal article put it in March, “Tim Cook and Apple Bet Everything on China. Then Coronavirus Hit.”

Boomers, Andrews writes, thought that they could wield the power of their predecessors without all the nasty bits. Adventuring economists like Jeffrey Sachs, for example, believed that they could teach foreign governments how to run their countries without actually having to subordinate them. Andrews argues, however, that such meddling was not less but more hubristic and presumptuous about the world than that of honest old-fashioned imperialists. It is only a shame that the neoconservatives, who planned short, painless wars to make space for the flowering of liberal democracy and ended up with long, attritive wars making space for snake oil salesmen and ethnic strife, don’t get more of a look-in here.

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Perhaps to the disappointment of Andrews’ editor, Boomers isn’t that mean. Andrews scorns Camille Paglia’s verbose sexual utopianism, for example, yet also salutes her intellect. While her chapter on Steve Jobs laments the overvaluation of the temporal, Andrews seems to quite admire him as a man. This is admirable, and makes her critiques more incisive for being so measured.

When Andrews wants to make a point, though, she makes it mercilessly. A chapter on Al Sharpton assaults the idea that “white flight” was a symptom of prejudice and leaves it twitching. Even Left-wing activists moved to the suburbs, Andrews writes, so their children “would no longer have their liberal opinions beaten out of them.”

Unlike Strachey, Andrews writes with moral seriousness and no illusions about the future. Millennials “seem intent on making the boomers’ same mistakes”, fetishising self-expression, oikophobia and iconoclasm. Nonetheless, she sympathises with their predicament, working in jobs beneath the status they would have expected from their education, and without prospects for home ownership until they have paid for that same education. One can disagree with their conclusions but one has to empathise with their discontent.

Boomers, understandably, is longer on diagnosis than prescription. Andrews defends older institutions, but many of those institutions are long dead. Modern technology does serious harm, meanwhile, but it is hard to imagine people getting rid of it.

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The least we can be is honest. As this witty, truthful book makes clear, there is no sense in pretending that modern sadness is the result of too little freedom from tradition rather than perversities of technological and cultural innovation. There is no point in elevating identitarian opportunists who exploit without ameliorating demographic tensions. There is no point in blaming dysfunction in developing nations solely on the errors of colonial and not also post-colonial rule. There is no point in Big Tech issuing calls to build without more contemplation of what to build and why. Even the best treatments could be useless if a condition has been misdiagnosed, and Andrews is an excellent diagnostician.

Although all of the social ills described apply equally to Britain, it is interesting that “boomer” discourse cannot be smoothly recreated in a British context. Who would British boomers be? Pink Floyd? Monty Python? Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis? It doesn’t quite work. Hitchens actually wrote one of the earlier, funnier critiques of the boomers himself for Vanity Fair almost 25 years ago, writing: “In the therapy generation, which scripts even its own lenient satires, you are by all means allowed, if not encouraged, to feel guilty. Just as long as you don’t feel responsible.”

In truth, while boomers are often attacked in Britain over the widespread tendency to prize their pensions and unblemished view across the fields over the need for young people to have functioning institutions and affordable homes, they have not the cultural prestige of their American cousins. America, after all, was in the ascendance. It was slightly younger people — born too late for the heydays of Bob Dylan and Beatlemania but early enough to witness Bowie and the Sex Pistols — who left a boomeresque imprint on Britain with New Labour. Caustic online critics in the dark corners of Twitter have dubbed this phenomenon “Britpoppers”, and defined them as people whose political imagination never escaped 1997 and whose cultural imagination is stuck in 2012. The archetypal Britpopper hates “toffs”, “cranks” and “populists” and loves smooth-speaking managerialist, Science(TM) and a limp, Richard Curtisesque conception of British soft power.

What is the point of generational analysis? Of course, not to indict each man and woman born in a specific period. Most people who complain about “boomers” love their grandparents after all. Instead, it is to isolate styles of thinking and behaving — and, where necessary, to reject them.

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Of course, everything seems clearer in retrospect — and there is a danger of this generational critique descending into a childish, screw-you-dad petulance. Millennials, such as myself, have to take some responsibility for the world as we advance into our thirties. GenZ is already TikToking their own scornful critiques of us. But being responsible means understanding one’s conditions, and who and what was responsible for them.

We are all both architects and victims of our times, shaping them and being shaped by them simultaneously. Dwelling on blame might be unhelpful. But we must still understand causes and effects.

Now, about those good-for-nothing Generation X-ers…

This runs counter to the long-held and entrenched narrative that in Britain family is in decline. Its preservation was a cause for moral conservatives from Mary Whitehouse to Margaret Thatcher in the final three decades of the 20th century, worried that the permissive 1960s had triggered a loosening of values and the breakdown of the family, with rising levels of divorce and teen pregnancy.

But tell anyone under 25 of the moral battles of the Eighties and they may well switch off, so alien is it to their experience. In fact, contrary to fears that the family would wither, the opposite has happened over the past 20 years, with a quiet revolution taking place within Britain’s homes. Not only has there been a massive decrease in teenage pregnancy, as prayed for by social conservatives, and a drop in divorce rates, but a more fundamental strengthening of the family has taken place, too.

As the state has withdrawn and the housing market has become dysfunctional, more and more of us have invested in the family, creating a new culture of dependency between parent and offspring.

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How Covid is domesticating millennials

By Eliza Filby

Britain has often been contrasted with our Mediterranean counterparts, with their trestle tables full of family. We Anglo-Saxons, supposedly, are inherently more individualistic — more likely to strike out on our own, move far from home. Historically that has been the case, but in fact, 40% of children starting primary school live fewer than 15 minutes away from their maternal grandparents. And as the cost of nursery and childminding has rocketed, grandparents have become increasingly valuable, saving parents an estimated £16 billion by providing informal childcare. During lockdown, thousands of dual-income couples struggled to care for their children without the support of now-isolated grandparents, revealing how increasingly dependent we are on our relatives.

In recent years, Britain has mirrored the rest of the Western world in shifting its economic model from the nuclear to the extended family. A third of UK households — around nine million in total — are now multi-generational (classified as more than one adult generation living under one roof). “Grannexes”, to use the neologism, are increasingly popular; some 5% of UK households are already equipped with such a space, and an additional 7% say they plan to add one. The reciprocal benefits are obvious, and if you had space for a pram, why not a wheelchair?

For an ageing society, filial responsibility is vital; in a pandemic, of course it may prove fatal. One thread of research by demographers at Oxford suggests that early death rates were much higher in those countries that have a large proportion of multi-generational homes. It is thought to be one reason why we have seen higher than average infection rates among Asian communities.

Politicians have been scratching their heads for the past decade trying to fix the social care crisis, and the scale of the cost is daunting, but most elderly care comes not from private or state organisations but from families themselves — worth an estimated £57 billion of their time and money. The majority of these carers are of course women — daughters and daughters-in-law — and one-fifth expect to have to leave their jobs to care for an adult relative. Some companies have started offering paid leave for those with such responsibilities, and eventually the state will begrudingly have to catch up.

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But the contemporary boom in family values is better understood in our treatment of the young rather than the old. The “boomerang” children phenomenon — in which adult offspring remain in the family home well into adulthood — may reflect 30-something economic woes, but it is also testimony to the strength of familial relations. Britain is not unique in this respect. In Italy, 73% of male 18-34-year-olds still live at home, known as mammoni (“mama’s boys”), while in South Korea they are called “kangaroos”, forever in their parents’ pocket.

That younger generation are also proving far more conventional than their predecessors. According to the ONS, divorce rates for young people are at their lowest rate since 1973, while divorce is increasing for older people. And although young people also have lower marriage rates to start with, it remains a popular institution, nowhere more so than among same sex-couples.

The children of those marriages also see a lot more of their parents, especially their fathers, reflecting the changing nature of parental commitment over the past 40 years. As the fertility rate has halved since 1960, this has meant greater investment in our children. In 2012, mothers spent nearly an hour more each day looking after their kids than they did in 1965, despite the fact that the majority was now working. Fathers’ time with their children rose from 16 minutes a day to 59. A 2015 study by the University of Texas found that same-sex couples actually spent the most time with their kids, with gay dads spending as much time parenting as straight mums, and twice as much time as heterosexual fathers.

We are giving our kids not only more time, but more money. To have a child today is a 30-year financial commitment, as many older people are now learning: and parents now expect to be supporting their kids until they’re 29 (and even that might be optimistic). Parents are putting twice as much into their kids’ living costs as they are their own future retirement fund, perhaps assuming that it will all be paid back, one way or another.

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These days, university open days are populated with over-excited parents, and tutors direct their “sales pitch” mostly at the grown-ups (unis know who their real customers are). Even employers are being forced to engage with mum and dad.; in 2018, over 20,000 parents took part in LinkedIn’s “Take your parents to work day” initiative, a strange modern twist on an older tradition.

What is most strikingly conservative is how well all the generations get along. Teenage rebellion is no more: Generation Z are more likely to see their parents as friends than as enemies, while a quarter of girls have been clubbing with their mums, something that would have been the stuff of nightmares to children of the 1980s. And although the 18-30 holiday market has struggled, the 18-70 market is booming: 79% of 20-30 year olds in the UK have taken a multi-generational holiday while one-fifth say they prefer holidaying with their parents than their mates.

But how many would go on such holidays with their parents if they were the ones paying? Families may enjoy hanging out more than they used to, but the trigger for this shift is changing economics, not changing values. Affluent millennials have been financially dependent on their parents like no other generation before them — for an education, a house deposit, a wedding, support with childcare and the family crash pad if it all goes wrong. The “Bank of Mum and Dad” is now the sixth largest mortgage lender in the UK. But how long can parents keep giving their kids so much? The next generation doesn’t have anything like their parents’ wealth.

The real divide within the under-40s demographic lies not between graduates and non-graduates but between those who can rely on the parental safety net and those who can’t. This is the new dependency culture: one where aspiration and opportunity is conditional on family support and there is little the market or the state can do to level the playing field.

Much of what the social conservatives of the 1980s craved has happened; and yet everything they said about the family was wrong. The reinvestment in the family unit is not down to the reinforcement of moral or religious responsibilities, but economic interdependence. Family values, especially for the young, means more parental support than ever — with the expectation that they’ll take filial responsibilities seriously, as our society ages. Both now and in the future, relatives simply cannot afford to live apart. The family has become society’s guarantor, which even in a global pandemic, is both a curse and a source of relief.