The Life and Times of a Baby Boomer: How World War Two Gave Rise to a Golden Generation

By Edwin Ashton

The Life and Times of a Baby Boomer will make you laugh, but it should also make you angry. Part memoir, part philosophical musing, and part political-economy this book describes how The Baby Boomer generation experienced a life previously unknown by workers at any time before in history. It will take you on a journey through the Golden Age of Britain from 1945 to the neo-liberal economic catastrophe of the twenty first century as seen through the eyes of a Baby Boomer. Beginning with the origin of a Post War Consensus that couldn’t be destroyed by those on the political right, it tells of the fracturing of that consensus and how Capital only needed to wait for an opportunity in order to reverse all the gains that workers had achieved post 1945. The book weaves humour and sadness in the life of a baby boomer in changing times, and along the way explores the flaws in neo-liberal economics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Nov 23, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483439105

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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A BABY BOOMER

How World War Two Gave Rise to a Golden Generation

Edwin Ashton

Copyright © 2015 Edwin Ashton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3911-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-3910-5 (e)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 11/18/2015

CONTENTS

About the Author

Introduction

Chapter 1   Early Years

Chapter 2   Interregnum

Chapter 3   The Beginning of the End

Chapter 4   This is the End my Friend

Chapter 5   Conclusion

Appendix A  The Labour Manifesto 1945

Appendix B  The Conservative Manifesto 1945

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edwin Ashton was born in Gateshead in 1949. After school in Suffolk during the 1960s, he embarked on a serendipitous journey as a soldier, civil servant and banker. He went to college in London, where he studied Philosophy and History of Ideas. He was inspired to write this book after reading works by the historian Eric Hobsbawn. After a sometimes riotous life he now lives quietly in small riverside village in Essex with his wife and their cat.

INTRODUCTION

For roughly seven thousand years, successive civilisations have condemned most of humanity to terrible living conditions: Slavery, serfdom, and, perhaps the worst, the squalid hardship of the nineteenth century industrial worker. These conditions arose out of the need for the organisation of society once the river civilisations of Mesopotamia and China had created the first cities. Families and clans, who had all known each other before, began to live amongst strangers. This need to structure society led to three basic states of being: the king, or ruler, and his attendants; facilitators of the king’s rule, for example priests, scribes and the army¹; and the workers and slaves. Such conditions are still prevalent in the global economic system of today and will be addressed later. This book is about a different kind of life for ordinary working people. One in which they are not subjected to live in terrible conditions but instead, for once, and for the first time in history, in conditions provided by the state for their benefit.

The term Baby Boomer generally refers to those people born in the U.K. between 1946 and 1964. According to Cardiff University:

Boomers are committed, hard working and career focused – which has caused them to be tagged as workaholics by Gen X and Gen Y. The Baby Boomer work ethic is also characterised by dedication, loyalty and a willingness to stay in the same job for a long time. They have a lot to offer businesses with their work and life experience, skills and knowledge, that many younger people can’t offer. They tend to work longer hours – and respect is paramount when managing a Baby Boomer.²

I am a Baby Boomer. Whether I fit Cardiff University’s description of Baby Boomers is doubtful, and shows just how far a descriptive definition can be wide of the mark. This book, as will become apparent, is about my experience as a Baby Boomer, during a unique period in the history of civilisation; the kind of period never before experienced by ordinary people. A Golden Age, which developed out of previous periods of absolute hell, namely World War One, economic stagnation, the Great Depression during the 1930s, and World War Two.

In what way were the two twentieth century world wars and the Great Depression the cause of the Golden Age for Baby Boomers? The First World War originated, in a simplistic sense, from the rival empire building, and their impending demise by the major European nations and was, at some time, described as the war to end all wars. It was an internecine war between families, an accidental event that no one really wanted, and once started, no one knew how to stop. So millions of people died, for a bit of a cock up. After it ended, there was supposed to be a land fit for heroes. Unfortunately there wasn’t. Instead, in Britain, there were miners’ strikes, a general strike, and in America, the Wall Street collapse, followed by The Great Depression, affecting all developed countries around the world. Capitalism was in crisis and the economic orthodoxies of the time had no answer. Different attempts were made to resolve the crisis. In Germany the National Socialists implemented a planned economy and controlled labour. In the U.S., President Roosevelt introduced what became known as The New Deal, which was loosely based upon the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. Britain, meanwhile, blindly continued to struggle on with the Treasury View which regarded balancing the books of the economy as the most important aspect, just as has been done since 2010. Ultimately, only another global war could save capitalism from itself.

I was born on the 21st of April, 1949, at my parent’s house in Gateshead, County Durham. According to the Labour party website,³ I was approximately the 508,563rd baby born under the new National Health Service. I was the first member of my family to benefit from the new free at the point of need NHS, and the only member of my family to receive these benefits for all of my life. Unlike my brother and sister, who were born just before the National Health Service Act came into effect in 1948, I have lived my whole life within the caring embrace of the welfare state. I benefited from the system that was set up to stop the suffering that millions had to endure during The Great Depression, and the suffering that millions had already endured throughout the history of civilisation, from classical slavery, serfdom, modern slavery and industrial servitude.

Gateshead lies on the south bank of the River Tyne, and is dominated by its northern neighbour, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I was born just four years after the conclusion of the most horrific conflict in the history of mankind. Somewhere in the region of sixty to seventy million people died in that war. And for what? Land? Doctrines? Denial of the other? Human history is littered with conflict, and since that culmination of death and horror called The Second World War, continues to be so. Since then, new wars have started; what could, or should, be called post-colonial wars. Wars between the European colonial powers and indigenous populations. Wars between new nations, artificially constructed for administrative convenience. For example India and Pakistan, just about any area of Africa, and the obvious conflicts in the Middle East. Many, if not all, of these conflicts were contaminated by what I would later learn to know as the Cold War, along with its attendant, and aptly named, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). These wars were also fought through the media, particularly newspapers, to garner public support, and then later by the emerging medium of television, which would ultimately have a dramatic effect upon the war in Vietnam. The image of a naked child, running along a road, while napalm was still burning on her skin, became a powerful symbol for the peace movement, both within America and around the globe. This was the world I was born into. The horror of WW2, a global conflict just completed, yet, to be re-lived by my generation, however blandly, through film and television, and then the constant, continuing, and pointless colonial wars, that the European powers could never win. If I had been born with a functioning, rational, mind I would have known that I had arrived in an insane madhouse, but fortunately for me I didn’t. I was just another human baby, who knew nothing, and would come to accept this insanity as normal.

However, amongst all this insanity, there was, in developed countries at least, and particularly in Great Britain, a new society evolving, based upon egalitarian principles. In 1949, there were only fifty-eight member nations in the United Nations assembly. Now, in 2014, there are one-hundred-and-ninety-two, with probably more to come. When I was born, the Soviet Union had been blockading Berlin for nearly a year, in a vain attempt to force the western powers to relinquish their foothold in there. The West, and the newly formed alliance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, N.A.T.O, airlifted all the supplies that the Berliners required to survive, including food, medicines and fuel. It was an amazing effort, which would prove to the Soviets that West Berlin would not be surrendered, and indeed, that any other attempts at incursions into the post-war division of Europe would not be tolerated. It wasn’t until 1967, when I was sent to West Germany as a soldier, that I learnt the simple strategy that N.A.T.O. would use in any conflict with the Soviet Union. That strategy was to hold an attack by the Soviets to an advance of approximately 20 miles a day. This would allow two weeks of political talks, to resolve whatever the issue was, and if a resolution could not be agreed upon, then N.A.T.O would use tactical nuclear weapons to stop the Soviets. And that would be that, I suppose, and the story I am about to tell would have had a premature ending.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Previous to my birth, the lot of the lower classes was, to varying degrees, one of hardship and constant work, with little leisure time. The Second World War was the catalyst that would change this, again to varying degrees, but generally and for most people, for the better, and not just slightly for the better, but to a revolutionary extent. The war changed society in many ways, most of which have been well documented by historians, sociologists and economists. But, missing from these accounts is the real cause of the post-war boom, which was the Second World War itself. After the horrors of the First World War, the old, 19th century, certainties of the ruling classes were left buried within the trenches of the Western Front. Edwardian Britain dissolved into a cash nexus of business taken to the extreme, and epitomised by the insanity that overtook America, in the investments in stocks and shares by anyone who had a little savings, and even if they had no savings, the taking out of loans, in order to be part of the new imaginary wealth. No one knew how to reconstruct the economies devastated by the war. Britain returned to the Gold Standard, rigidly constraining the value of the pound, with all that entails. Germany was devastated, not just by the cost of the war, but also the cost of the peace, that is, the reparations imposed at The Treaty of Versailles⁴. America, the only country that could be said to have had a successful, or profitable, war, engaged itself in having a party, financed by Britain’s and France’s purchase of war materials, but also upon the non-existent wealth of Wall Street. This period also saw revolutions and counter-revolutions in Germany, which almost amounted to civil war. Labour relations, in both Britain and America, were beset by conflict. Strikes were common, and, in America, death on both sides was not unusual. Managers, owners, and even politicians, were assassinated, while workers were often attacked and killed by quasi-legal forces like The Pinkerton Detective Agency. After The Wall Street crash of 1929, things only got worse. The crash lead to The Great Depression, which lasted until 1939, despite attempts by Franklin D. Roosevelt to institute The New Deal.

For most of the early 20th century, the dominant countries of the world were beset by war, labour strife, economic incompetence, and basic greed; but everything was about to change. During the 1930s, and especially after the taking of power in Germany, in 1933, by the National Socialists, WW1 morphed into WW2 and the world would be saved not by intelligent design, or inspirational political choices, but by the deaths of somewhere in the region of 60 to 70 million people, in the worst conflict the world has ever witnessed, using the most brutal, industrial, and sophisticated weapons available. Out of this conflict a new world would be born.

Once the war had begun, there was no real difference, as Eric Hobsbawm has stated in The Age of Extremes, between the economies of a democratic Great Britain and a National Socialist Germany, nor even, though slightly later, of the United States. Governments took over all aspects of production, and had the power to requisition anything that was deemed a requirement for the war effort, including private property. Hobsbawm has implied that Great Britain was more of a dictatorship than Germany. For example, Britain brought more women into the economy via institutions such as The Land Army, munitions and military service, even to the extent of them flying spitfire and hurricane airplanes for delivery to frontline airfields; in effect, accepting the concept of Total War fully, whereas Germany preferred, in general, to use women to breed. In his book, A Nazi in the Family, Derek Niemann, referring to his mother, tells us that:

She played the subordinate, domestic role that Hitler’s Germany demanded, an ideology that reduced women’s role to Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church).

Despite this democratic dictatorship in Britain, for the first time in history, if war injuries and deaths are discounted, ordinary people, workers, were generally better off in every sense of such a concept, for example, in health, diet, and emotional wellbeing, than they had ever been. For the first time in history, ordinary people, the descendants of slaves, serfs, and industrial appendages, had a healthy diet, due to the introduction of food rationing. For the first time in history, there was a national conception of solidarity, due to the imagined or believed threat of invasion. J.B. Priestley said on the B.B.C. production of The World at War:

The British were absolutely at their best in the Second World War. They were never as good, certainly in my lifetime, before it, and I’m sorry to say they’ve never been quite as good after it.

And at the end of the war, these experiences caused a major upset at the general election of 1945, by returning a Labour government. Some on the left romantically put this victory down to Robert Tressel’s book, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist, but it was the memory of the aftermath of the Great War, and the economic disaster that followed, which was the real cause. Post-war Britain, America, and Western Europe, would embark upon a Golden Age for ordinary working people. The French would come to call it, Trente Glorieuses. A period unique in human history, which has never been seen before, and may never be seen again.

How did such an epoch, because surely that is what it was, happen? And how long did it survive? The Treasury View of a national economy during the inter-war years had clearly failed, leading to stagnation, due to trade tariffs and barriers, as each nation attempted to increase their own exports, while at the same time reducing imports, in a vain attempt to remove debts and deficits. While token attempts to implement Keynesian economic ideas were being introduced, particularly the New Deal in America, they were not enough to have a noticeable effect on the western economies⁵. As already said, it required the Second World War to effect a break with the Treasury View of economics, but only because of dire necessity, not because of intelligent thought. In Britain, during the 1930s, various National Governments, led by both Labour and Conservative Prime Ministers, could not resolve the economic problems. Coming off the Gold Standard, in 1931, was supposed to boost Britain’s exports but the slump in global trade, due to the tariffs every trading country had imposed, ensured that the depression remained, and would remain, until events forced the major trading countries into moving towards planned economies. After twenty years of inaction, through a belief in political economic dogma, as represented by the Treasury View of economics⁶, Winston Churchill’s Coalition Government, formed in 1940, contained both Conservative and Labour politicians who were ready to take control of all economic activity in order to fight the war. Churchill had no qualms in ditching the Treasury View of economics for a planned economy under these circumstances. Towards the end of First World War, he played a central role in armaments production, after being made Minister of Munitions by Lloyd George in 1917, and was very aware of the need to incorporate labour politicians and socialist economists into the wartime coalition, as at that time they better understood the importance of a planned economy, which would prove to be essential to fight a total war.

There were no substantial differences, as Hobsbawm stated in The Age of Extremes, between the wartime economies of the combatant countries. Indeed he points out that:

It is, therefore, a strange paradox that among the government-run planned economies of both wars … those of the Western democratic states – Britain and France in the First war; Britain, and even the U S A in the Second – proved far superior to Germany with its tradition and theories [of] rational-bureaucratic administration.

Every aspect of life in wartime Britain, with the obvious exception of crime, was controlled by the government, including industrial production, agriculture, mining and labour. Private property could be commandeered, if required, for the war effort. Capitalism’s market forces could not have undertaken such a project. All the theories advanced by the political right had failed for over twenty years, yet, faced with the threat of annihilation even the Tories realised the necessity of a planned, or controlled, economy, and for the next five years, until victory was attained, Britain had an efficient economic system, which provided for the needs of its people.⁷ Great Britain during those years, as Hobsbawm has implied, was effectively a dictatorship. These conditions continued throughout the war, and led to a zeitgeist of national fraternity which was so powerful that, despite being a national hero for his wartime leadership, Churchill and the Conservatives would lose the 1945 general election by a landslide. It is inconceivable that the private sector and market forces could have marshalled the necessary forces for victory. Only a planned, and tightly controlled, economy could have achieved that desired end. And that planned economy was accepted, even welcomed, by the people of Britain for the common good.

Churchill fought the 1945 election without great gusto:

I had hoped to preserve the Coalition Government, comprising all Parties in the State, until the end of the Japanese war, but owing to the unwillingness of the Socialist and Sinclair Liberal Parties to agree to my proposal, a General Election became inevitable, and I have formed a new National Government, consisting of the best men in all Parties who were willing to serve and some who are members of no Party at all.

In other words, there was no real Conservative Party to support him. It had fractured. There was no necessity for a party of Big Business within a planned economy, and his manifesto differed little from the Labour Party’s, except in one important factor. Though his plan was to continue with a planned economy, including the control of industrial movement to peacetime activity, a massive house building programme and the organisation of national agricultural food supplies, these measures would only be temporary, until such time as the private sector could organise itself into a viable economic movement again. But those who had effectively run the war economy, the Labour ministers, now had their own agenda, which was to win the peace. The Labour Party was adamant that:

The great inter-war slumps were not acts of God or of blind forces. They were the sure and certain result of the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men. These men had only learned how to act in the interest of their own bureaucratically-run private monopolies which may be likened to totalitarian oligarchies within our democratic State. They had and they felt no responsibility to the nation.

And they had a detailed manifesto of how to run the post-war economy, the theme of which:

… makes no baseless promises. The future will not be easy. But this time the peace must be won. The Labour Party offers the nation a plan which will win the Peace for the People.

Effectively, there was a consensus regarding the immediate needs of the country and the people after the war, but whereas Churchill regarded this as only a temporary state of affairs, until the private sector could supposedly be able to take over the running of the economy, the Labour Party envisaged a new system based upon the requirements of ordinary people. Britain, under a Labour government, would not be returned to the Edwardian Treasury View of economics. Churchill’s aim was to keep the planned economy, at least until the defeat of Japan, but certainly only for a limited period, and then eventually to reinstate the Treasury View of the economy, with all the disastrous results that such an action would entail. It would take more than a generation before economic ideologies proffered by the neo-liberals, such as Milton Freidman, became fashionable again, and it would take another catastrophe, the oil crisis of 1973, before they would become acceptable. Even then, it would still take another decade before the old, discredited, neo-liberal economic policies would be implemented again, by Thatcherism and Reaganomics. Over forty years of experience and knowledge would be wiped away by, as the 1945 Labour manifesto described them, These men who acted in their own interest. And so, in 2008, the world witnessed another collapse of an economic system run according to neo-liberal principles. Seventy nine years after the Wall Street crash, the neo-liberals had done it again. And again, they would implement policies that could not repair the damage. They would implement austerity measures and shrink the economy. All so depressingly familiar, and since, hopefully, it is highly unlikely that another global war and millions of deaths are coming to save us, the future for working people may well become as bleak as it was before the Second World War.

Labour won the 1945 election, as has already been stated, by a landslide, and had the mandate they required to implement the new, more egalitarian society that they envisaged. This new society was not really that new. It had been created already, as a response to the requirements necessary for fighting a total war. All that the new labour government needed to do was move from a war time industry to a peace time industry. No mean feat, but not revolutionary. The system was already in place: the planned economy, control of production, control of agriculture, and essentially, an already existing socialist state. Within a few years, they would consolidate what was already existent by creating: the Coal Board; the National Health Service; the 1944 Education Act; and by bringing into public ownership fuel, power, transport, iron and steel. This was the world I was born into. A Britain created out of a war, by the need to run the economy for the single purpose of winning that war. A Britain with a new single purpose, that of winning the peace for ordinary people. A Britain created from an opposition to the misguided belief, throughout the 1930s, that free market forces are the best way for economies to work, despite the evidence of The Great Depression and all the economic failures during the inter-war years. A Britain created from a determination not to return to the class system of the Edwardian era. A Britain which would grow out of the destruction, and near bankruptcy, resulting from the war. A Britain that would give hope, and ultimately a better life, for ordinary people, which would be unprecedented in history. A Britain that would create wealth for ordinary people on a scale unimaginable during the inter-war years. A Britain which, for ordinary working people, can only be described as a Golden Age.

CHAPTER 1

Early Years

This was the economic and social environment into which I was born, on the 21st of April, 1949, in my parent’s bedroom, along with attendant midwife; one of the first times our family had used the new NHS. To commemorate this momentous occasion flags were displayed on public buildings on that day, and have subsequently been displayed every year ever since. Coincidentally, the 21st of April also happened to be the Queen’s birthday. The experience of all being in this together of the war years carried over into what would become known as The Post-War Consensus. One other momentous occurrence happened that year, which was the coining of the phrase The Big Bang by the astronomer Fred Hoyle. This would lead to a massive interest in astro-physics by lay people, and would eventually turn scientists into celebrities.

I was born into what was then known as a conventional family, or, somewhat ironically, as it was also the infancy of the atomic bomb, a nuclear family. That is, one with two parents, one of each sex, and two siblings, a sister and a brother. Both siblings were older than me, with all that that entails. My brother was just over a year older, and my sister was two and a half years older. I have no idea of when I became aware of sharing a world with my father or sister, but one of my earliest memories was of being put into a pram along with another small person, who I believe was my brother, by what would later become my mother. The reason that this event has stayed with me, throughout my life, is because it was the first time I experienced the vicious, self-interested, actions of another. My dear brother, for some reason I had no knowledge of, began to kick me. I can only presume now, that my mother had purchased a pram of the wrong size, and that it was actually too small for her two infants. But still, I had learnt a valuable lesson of how wars begin; space, and the control of it, was clearly a key element. My brother won that war by the way.

My second memory occurred about three years later. I was riding my tricycle up and down the pavement, outside of our home. There was no fear of child abduction, nor of traffic, as there were very few cars on the streets, so it was quite safe, and normal, for an infant to be playing alone, outside, in their own street. At the corner, there was a butcher’s shop, and on the road to the left of the butcher’s shop, there