I am regularly struck by the abiding truth of an observation made about English society by Evelyn Waugh over 70 years ago in Brideshead Revisited:
They and I had fallen apart, as one could in England and only there, into separate worlds, little spinning planets of personal relationship; there is probably a perfect metaphor for the process to be found in physics, from the way in which, I dimly apprehend, particles of energy group and regroup themselves in separate magnetic systems, a metaphor ready to hand for the man who can speak of these things with assurance; not for me, who can only say that England abounded in these small companies of intimate friends, so that, as in this case of Julia and myself, we could live in the same street in London, see at times, a few miles distant, the same rural horizon, could have a liking one for the other, a mild curiosity about the other’s fortunes, a regret, even, that we should be separated, and the knowledge that either of us had only to pick up the telephone and speak by the other’s pillow, enjoy the intimacies of the levee, coming in, as it were, with the morning orange juice and the sun, yet be restrained from doing so by the centripetal force of our own worlds, and the cold, interstellar space between them.
There is an essay all of its own to be written about the mysterious social forces of attraction and repulsion that shape these circles — the cool civility that keeps us separate, the hidden warmth that binds us intimately together. But I raise it because it so well describes a very different gulf in British culture than the old divides of class and social scenes: the generation gap.
The generational divide in Britain is about much more than the familiar assumptions of changing social attitudes and youthful rebellion, and reflects something far more profound. Rather than changing attitudes within society, economic, technological, demographic and political shifts have led to the emergence of parallel lives and realities. Like Wittgenstein’s lion, even if the zoomer could speak, the boomer would not understand him.
Two recent articles drove this reality home for me. If you opened the Guardian recently, you might have heard from John Harris, who urged readers to “remember this: Britain is much better than it was in so many ways. Don’t swallow the right’s lies”. Or they could have turned to former Archbishop Rowan Williams, who suggested that “Migrants are at the heart of our art, our music, our whole history. That’s what the right won’t admit to you”. Apart from Guardian headline writers running out of ideas, they were sentiments that reflected the worlds in which the authors lived.
For John Harris, the 1980s of his youth teemed with the “horrors of the UK’s past”, horrors he experienced directly in his “Cheshire comprehensive school in the early-to-mid-1980s”. Just what were these horrors? See for yourself:
A couple of the more disruptive boys in the class put red laces in their Dr Martens, because someone had told them that was how you showed your support for the National Front. “Jew” was an everyday insult and the N-word was in regular circulation. There were no more than four or five non-white kids in the whole school: I can recall one Asian girl finding her art folder had been covered in racist abuse, and some adolescent desperado singling out a black boy for a spoken version of the same treatment, before insisting that his victim was in on the joke. He wasn’t: he looked at the ground and rushed away, full of the hurt he must have felt every day.
There are any number of things you could take issue with here. One of the more interesting unconscious tics of this sort of writing is the conflation of racial abuse with a lack of diversity. Not only was it “problematic” that the Britain of 40 years ago had a greater tolerance for racial slurs and stereotypes, it is implied that it is somehow “problematic” that there were “no more than four or five non-white kids” in a small English town.
This conflation of greater ethnic heterogeneity with moral progress is the central feature of Rowan William’s piece as well. Creativity cannot come, he suggests, from static and settled cultures, and displacement and mobility are the “true” characteristic of human culture to which we are reverting:
We find new things in conversation with our own past when we are uprooted from it. We talk and listen to what we thought was familiar, and find new things to say. We absorb the sound of strangers, including oppressors and enslavers, and find a voice of our own.
Such sentiments coming from Harris and Williams are about more than progressive orthodoxies. Both men are intelligent and thoughtful, but crucially, their political assumptions and analysis is distorted by the great generational filter of the millennium.
If you grew up in the 60s-80s, and your career reached its peak sometime in the 90s to 00s, you experienced events and conditions that taught you that certain assumptions were true and historically inevitable. You witnessed the victory of civil rights battles on race, gender and sexuality, and formed your opinions about them at a time when they were vigorously contested by a powerful political right. You saw communism fall in your lifetime, and liberalism triumph. Throughout most of your working life you saw high levels of economic growth, technological progress and new industries and opportunities arise. Cultural and social change that was opposed by conservatives led, in your experience, to new artforms and exciting subcultures.
And, as an individual, for so many boomers and gen Xers, especially in the educated upper middle classes, you ascended a ladder that was about to be kicked violently away. People in older generations attended schools before the quality of teaching and discipline plummeted, and went to university whilst it was still free. They benefited from public services of the post-war era, then cashed in on the deregulations of the 80s and 90s. They got on the property ladder when it was still affordable, and just in time to see their housing equity explode in value.
If you are a millennial or Gen Z, your formative experiences of history and economic conditions would be radically different
And, crucially, you didn’t see the dark side of progressivism. When you were young, you experienced the civil rights fight as a positive experience, and at the time you were ascending the ladder, the ideal of a non-divisise, “comfortable” egalitarianism in which we would be sexually free, post-racial, post-class, and post-gender divides predominated. By the point that #MeToo and BLM arrived in anglophone offices, you had already reached the peak of your career. For liberal older white men, the idea that young white men are systematically disadvantaged for employment in much of the white collar world, especially some of the most elite institutions, simply existed outside of their experience. Younger colleagues were becoming “more diverse” and more politically militant, but this was just merit shining through from your cushioned perspective.
But if you are a millennial or Gen Z, your formative experiences of history and economic conditions would be radically different. Young people’s touchstone for late modernity is not the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of Blair, but the War on Terror and the 2008 financial crash. Whilst cancel culture was distant and dismissible for older established figures, continual digital scrutiny, and political and social tests that could ruin university admissions, job prospects and romantic relationships were an oppressive reality for many young people.
For younger people demographic change and migration is a more visceral reality. In the most extreme case, if you were a white working class girl in Rotherham, modern Britain might not have seemed better in “every conceivable respect” nor would it seem a question of prejudice to them to suggest that when it came to the men that abused them, that their “predatory behaviour is a direct consequence of their religious and cultural background”.
This divergence is more than a matter of simple left and right. Young people have been radicalised in both directions, often along lines of race and gender. According to new survey data, writes Scarlett Maguire in The New Statesman:
Britain’s young women seem to feel more alienated from their country than their male peers, and are more likely to think that the country is treating them unfairly compared to older generations (men marginally disagree with the statement, women agree 55 per cent to 37 per cent). Young women feel less connected to their country than young men and are 21 points more likely to think that the country is racist than young men (58 per cent to 37 per cent). Only a minority (31 per cent) say they take pride in being British (compared to 51 per cent of men the same age) and only 38 per cent believe Britain is a tolerant nation (56 per cent of young men think the same).
The world that young people inhabit is unimaginably different than the one people like John Harris grew up in, and unimaginably worse. Rates of mental illness have exploded amongst the younger generations, participation in the workforce has fallen and home ownership is an increasingly distant dream for many. Apart from these economic and psychological indicators of trouble, the 2020s is simply a less fun place to be young.
Compared to previous generations, young people drink less, smoke less, and have less sex. They have fewer friends, and a growing number have none at all. Unsurprisingly, they are also less likely to be in a relationship, get married or have children. Not only that but they are more sedentary, and spend their lives in front of screens. The influence of the internet and social media has seen millions of young people internalise the logic of the market and celebrity, as they seek to “sell” themselves and their “brand” online. Even outside of the crazy world of “influencers”, ordinary people seek to maximise their social and sexual capital, and dating apps have created a “sexual marketplace”. Unsurprisingly, many have opted out of this, becoming voluntarily or involuntarily celibate (an “incel”), or have simply leaned into the logic of commodified sexuality through making or consuming porn through sites like OnlyFans.
But younger people simply didn’t grow up in this world
It isn’t that someone like Harris is totally unaware of these trends, but his thinking is stuck in orthodoxies forged decades ago. The idea that younger people might be systematically and permanently worse off economically than their parents is so alien to his own experiences he can’t quite factor it into his thinking. For many older liberals, economic progress is an assumed baseline, and social progress in the form of expanded rights and the loss of taboos and prejudices is the essential contested space. Racism also holds a special place because of the decisive narrative shaping events of the 20th century, with the shadow of the holocaust, the post-war constitutional order, and the civil rights revolutions forming a governing ideology of liberation and equality.
The post-liberal generation
But younger people simply didn’t grow up in this world, for all that older people attempted to pass it on. Far more exposed to its failures and limitations, we grew up with the catastrophic failure of liberal internationalism as it descended into torture and assasination, and witnessed the parallel collapse of neoliberalism in the 2008 crisis, and the rise of China as an illiberal world power. The old assumptions became individualised, marketised and weaponised. Rather than sustaining a common life, human rights became about what you could claim, demand or get, truth and justice be damned. Intersectionality saw different groups placed in an inverted hierarchy of victimhood and oppression, with the most “structurally disadvantaged” strapping on the biggest pair of jackboots to stomp on the face of the hapless oppressors.
Whilst many people on the wrong side of this shift, especially older people, tried to reassert the old classically liberal model, many, the young especially, simply inverted the “woke” model. Fascism, nationalism, racial science, reaction, theocracy and a dozen other radical right ideas became a sort of secret symbolic language of gleeful offence and in-group signalling. Much of this was a symbolic youth rebellion against the censorious schoolmarms, but some of it was all too sincere.
Fuelling this mutual embrace of divisive politics amongst younger people is a shared feeling of precarity and alienation. Mass migration has opened up ethnic divides which undermine solidarity, even as the shrinking of economic opportunity has put people into competition with one another.
In an age of instant mass communication, it is ironically the case that perceiving shared realities has become harder. Whilst these things seem relatively obvious to me, as someone who was never invested in liberalism in the first place, and grew up seeing it decline all around me, history does not occur universally, to everyone and at the same pace.
When I travel around the country seeing friends and relatives, attending events and conferences, I frequently feel the chill sting of Waugh’s “cold interstellar space” as if I was jumping between impossibly distant dimensions. For those already ideologically and committed, it’s hard to communicate that there are worlds, equally real to their own, existing just a train journey or taxi ride away. You sit in cosy sitting rooms in picturebook villages and try and explain that a man killed two people at your tube station last year for looking at him funny, and wasn’t charged with murder. You explain how hard it is to find a house, or save any money if you’re young. People are sympathetic — but they don’t see it themselves.
Even under the same roof, you see young people enfolded in a virtual world, glued to their phones, subject to the baleful gravity of invisible influences. Parents vaguely bemoan this fact and scratch their heads, and smile at the awkward introverted girlfriends gleaned from Bumble who crowd around the Christmas table, or look bemused at the latest mental illness or eating disorder that has descended on their daughter’s friend group as she composes a 20 minute voice note on the topic from the sofa.
Time-warp politics
Such benign cluelessness is forgivable, even a little lovable in the ordinary boomer at his dinner table, but it’s much less cute when it comes from the people running the country. It isn’t just decent but out-of-touch commentators like John Harris, or even somewhat otherworldly former Archbishops who keep their minds chastely behind a veil of ignorance about modern Britain — it’s Sir Keir, our less than beloved national Don Quixote.
His faith in public institutions which have manifestly failed, his reverence for international laws that nobody is following anymore, his assumption that economic renewal will take care of itself and his confused obeisance to progressive trends all reflect the time-warp generation. He believes in institutions because they worked for him, he blindly worships international law because it was a fiction still indulge in his youth, he expects the economy to turn around because it always did before and he takes the knee to the BLMs of this world because he liked to sing along to Free Nelson Mandela as a young man. There are no nostalgics like progressive nostalgics.
The reason that any of this has traction, or that people like Starmer can still get elected, is that he is not alone in the time-warp. Older middle class voters are economically, socially and geographically sheltered from the rapid and negative changes that have taken place over the past two decades, preserved in the amber of rising house prices and triple-locked pensions.
Things that were once Britain’s chief strengths … have become collective curses
Even in populist parties, the over-representation of older voters and the demoralisation of younger ones means that structural concerns go unaddressed. Outside a kamikaze wealth tax, Polanski’s Greens are a party of blocking housing developments and obsessing about foreign policy. Reform is the closest thing Britain has to a radical party, but it has failed to win over younger voters on the scale of European nationalist parties. On the policy front, there remains a void, and a real risk that it will be filled with the failed dogmas of Thatcherite Toryism.
Things that were once Britain’s chief strengths — stability, the rule of law and institutional continuity — have become collective curses when removed from the context of patriotism and a government focused on the national interest. Whilst other countries have woken up to the reality of a changing world and new threats, unanticipated by the framers of the post-war Western order, Britain remains asleep even as the house burns down around it. Leaders care more about international law, proceduralism and liberal civility than they do about their fellow citizens.
The effect of this almost vampiric continuity at any cost is deeply unsettling for those able to stand aside and witness it. You pass from brightly lit pools of nostalgic light into the strange, uneasy shadows of post-modern Britain and back again. One day you’re in a bustling Waitrose in the countryside, surrounded by Radio 4 listeners who follow current affairs via the News Quiz and The Rest is Politics, the next you’re back in London being shouldered aside by Deliveroo drivers in a street full of vape shops. Right-wing zoomers online joke about the “Yookay”, and it’s a place you can visit in many corners of our capital. But you don’t have to travel far, exploding into the cheerful holiday hubbub of Richmond to be right back in “Cool Britannia”, eating Ottolenghi by the Thames.
But history always takes its revenge eventually, and reality is lapping hungrily at the shrinking shores of the sceptered isle of middle-aged liberal nostalgia.
