Monday 26 March 2012

The Generation Game

I have just caught sight of myself, and I am dressed like a member of Blur from back in the glory days. A bit of nice weather, and I am back in the long summer of 1995. It was hot. They were hot. I was hot. Only one of those things is still true. But which one, and why?

I am amending my forthcoming collection of book reviews, out by the end of the calendar year, to include Alwyn Turner's Things Can Only Get Bitter: The Lost Generation of 1992. He means people in their early thirties at that General Election, who opted out of politics in response to it and have never come back. The Conservative Party also has a Lost Generation of 1997, with the result that there is now an Economic Secretary to the Treasury who was a few days short of her fifteenth birthday at that Election, who was only just able to vote even in 2001, and who will not be 30 until May of this year.

The SNP is laden with the older schoolchildren whom it wishes to enfranchise, with undergraduates, and with recent graduates, all the sort who are used to winning academically, athletically and so forth, and all of the age when one thinks of one's own views as the Zeitgeist. Therefore, the coming No vote to Scottish independence could easily leave it with a Lost Generation of 2014, the members of which simply will not be there to be council candidates in 10 or 15 years time, or to stand for Holyrood, Westminster or Strasbourg in the years and decades after that. It happened to Labour, and it has happened to the Conservatives, in both cases enabling a certain clique to stage an unchallenged coup.

Unchallenged, that is, until now. I have been sent the Call For Papers relating to the book of responses to Confessions of an Old Labour High Tory. The rising freelance and activist who has splendidly taken it upon himself to compile that volume calls both my work and its author "generation-defining". I make no bones about my own debts to Maurice Glasman, Neil Clark, John Milbank, Phillip Blond, Stuart Reid, David Goodhart and others, and to the practical political milieu that formed me, especially in Lanchester and around the old Derwentside District Council. But those are all people older than I, in several cases, they will not mind my saying, really quite considerably older.

Oh, well, my lot is not going to be The Lost Generation of 2010. Not if I have anything to do with it. And the word on the street seems to be that I have.

16 comments:

  1. I got that. With the end of August deadline in order to accommodate us busy people, I might well do it. Having read your book, I would agree that it was the voice of a generation; of, as the CFP puts it, the man who has spent half his lifetime quietly formulating that generation's alternative to neoliberal economics, social liberalism and neoconservative foreign policy. Look at your enemies who are of comparable age. Not one of them has ever had an original thought, making it no surprise that if anyone has ever heard of them at all, it is only ever in relation to you.

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  2. If they don't like it, then they are perfectly free to respond in their own way.

    The book of responses does seem to be by invitation. But if Jon Simons, or Neil "Break Dancing Jesus"/"You've ruined his career" Fleming, or even certain figures a touch older or younger, wished to email me straight reviews of my book (not personal abuse - quite a challenge for them, I realise), then they would be posted here for general discussion.

    Or even a whole book? Simons, Fleming, Oliver Kamm, Damian Thompson, Vinnie McAviney: manifestly none of them is short of time to devote to vilifying me. Let them pool their efforts, and put their energy to more constructive use.

    Plenty of rather more distinguished people (not saying much, but there we are) seem to be finding my work worth the effort. So, how about them? Or is it beyond them? Even if it is, they could give the rest of us a laugh by pretending to understand any of it.

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  3. If Jon Simons is the Jon who used to comment here and on your Telegraph blog, I am familiar with the "work" of three of those five and I have known a fourth for as long as you have. Never saw the point of him, nor did anybody else. I hope that permanently confining him to putting the kettle on is your very proudest achievement. And are all your enemies gay? Two out of five is a very high proportion, and I do not know about the other three so they might be. If Kamm isn't, he is one of those people who should be.

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  4. PJ O'Rourke suggested that there should be two political parties, one a social & economic libertarian party, the other a social & economic collectivist party. Perhaps "After the Boomers" we shall see this happen.

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  5. That would certainly be an improvement. Although I am not sure that "collectivist" is quite the right word. But I know what you mean.

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  6. You're a professional cynic, but your heart's not in it.
    You're paying the price of living life at the limit.

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  7. Educated the expensive way, he knows his Claret from his Beaujolais.

    And he lives in a house, a very big house, in the country.

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  8. That's more like it. Barely condescending to wipe your shoe on the people who have to do it for money. "Charming" is one word for you. Undeniably both anti-60s and anti-80s. A generational marker after all. Titanic academia and Downton Abbey journalism, with the pin striped or black tied, port swilling, plummy voiced son of an archdeacon as the Countess of Manton and the Dowager Countess of Grantham.

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  9. Priceless. Maggie Smith has nothing on David Lindsay. Go through the list of his enemies and you will see that he would regard each and every one of them as his social inferior. He doesn't know what the world is coming to when someone like Neil Fleming is preferred over him, but he has had his revenge a hundredfold there and shows no signs of ever stopping. The rage of the dispossessed, of the rightful heir denied his inheritance. Do you know who I am? The sense that he thinks of paid journalists as being in trade whereas he is a gentleman also rings true. No wonder they love him at Durham. What is it they call him there? "A glittering ornament". Just don't ever look below the glitter.

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  10. They are out tonight, aren't they, Mr. L?

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  11. I have always been very proud of my enemies.

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  12. So you should be. It is always a joy to witness the paroxysms whenever they are confronted with the fact that the people who read you might not be very numerous, but they are very "influential". You have said in the past that the loons come on here quite a bit, but you usually reject their comments. You should let them up more often. They reflect very well on you.

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  13. You are very kind. But on topic, please. And I would rather that people did not conduct the same thread under more than one post.

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  14. Your forthcoming collection of book reviews? Gosh, how thrilling. I can hardly wait.

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  15. You are not the only one, apparently...

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