In June 1952 Britain still had a system of rationing following the end of the Second World War – Tea, for instance, that most British of drinks, brewed as it is using the harvest of bloody empire, didn’t end until October of 1952. 

Growing up as late generation X in the 80s and 90s I still recall how the Second World War would be invoked and told how it changed everything, nothing was the same after the war. Between 1945 and 1951, Britain’s post-War government, a shock when elected as it meant war-time hero Churchill was removed from office, pursued a radical agenda for change with the establishment of the NHS, a huge social housing programme, the extension of education, and an economic agenda that would reduce the gap in power and wealth between the classes, empowering working class people and creating an affluent society, albeit partially with the benefits of a colonial legacy that they were simultaneously trying to window dress in its decline. In echoes of FDR’s New Deal in the USA following the Great Depression, Britain’s Post-War governments taxed those who could afford it highly and invested in large scale infrastructure programmes that guaranteed employment and provided services and systems to the public hitherto unavailable, from affordable communication and transportation networks to affordable homes and community amenities.

The decades that followed the Second World War changed life culturally also. In the immediate post-war years, the Age of Austerity meant that the post-war economic boom wasn’t immediate, similarly the cultural revolution wasn’t immediate. The contraceptive pill was first available via the NHS in 1961 and the first single by The Beatles, Love Me Do, was released in 1962. It is of course an over-simplified absurdity to reduce the social and cultural changes to these events, but they can be viewed as totemic. The post-war generation were coming of age, and they possessed far more disposable cash than their parents and grandparents and using their dominance as consumers, they had the power to reshape British culture. If The Beatles can be seen as the greatest cultural signifiers of these changes, then it is interesting perhaps that the final song, on their final recorded album Abbey Road, was Paul McCartney’s jaunty ditty, Her Majesty – featuring the line, “I want to tell her that I love her a lot…” The cultural revolution of the Sixties was supposed to challenge the established order, do away with deference, and as John Lennon sang in 1971, people were encouraged to, “imagine all the people sharing all the world.”

Around the same time as Lennon asked us to imagine he also wrote Working Class Hero, where he cynically sings, “There’s room at the top they are telling you still” and then commenting that the British working class were still trapped and subservient…

Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV
And you think you're so clever and classless and free
But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see

Generation X that followed was a generation much smaller, who lacked the consumer power for any new ideas to achieve any market share. They barely split from the attitudes of their parents’ generation. The Baby Boom and Generation X that followed became generations identifiable by their passive consumption, the new opportunities were predominantly opportunities to consume, and sources of information became reduced to the papers and the broadcast media, the ownership of which shrunken to a handful of the super-rich and the BBC – and anyone who considers the BBC other than the voice of the traditional British Establish with a few liberal affectations should read Tom Mills’ excellent book, ‘The BBC – Myth of a Public Service’. Mills comments, “…even the BBC’s most committed defenders acknowledge that… impartiality has routinely construed in a manner skewed towards the interests of powerful groups.”

Even as they bucket-listed more and more exotic places to expose themselves to, the variety of alternatives to the way their world is structured and organised at home became fewer and fewer for British people. From the early 1980s trade unions were stripped of power and legitimacy and membership declined concomitantly with the decline of British manufacturing and production. Trade unions had been a source of information to their members that contested the official lines propagated through the mass media. In the 1990s, theorists such as Francis Fukuyama were confident that ideological conflict was over, it was only the management approaches that would differ. Perhaps behind the conceited myopia of this perspective the truth has been that alternative perspectives that challenged establishment entitlements had been obscured.

The generation of The Beatles and contraceptive pill were revolutionary in the Sixties, sweeping away the buttoned-up attitudes of the pre-War era, something that the monarchy should’ve been ill-equipped to adjust to. Lady Diana Spencer was elevated to People’s Princess because, by comparison, she was regarded as resonating much more with the values of the 80s and 90s. Perhaps though, the sustaining strength of the British Royal Family has more to do with the deference and love expressed in Paul McCartney’s Beatles’ song – a love and deference cultivated with the most effective fertilizing agents of the powerful British Media. The centrality of the British Royal Family to the interests of the powerful can not be understated – they function as celebrity distraction, first line of defence for privilege, and an aspiration for the truly ambitious – a small and rarefied circle it is more auspicious to be close to.

The Baby Boom generation that announced themselves in the Sixties, ripping apart tired, old values, and daring to imagine a transformed world, were able to do so because of their size and spending power in the only true arbiter of life in late-twentieth century Britain, the marketplace. They are still the generation where power resides in our country, decades later. Whereas the Baby Boomers once called for ‘Satisfaction’ and for times that “were a-changing”, Generation X was perhaps identifiable more by the disaffected withdrawal of The Smiths’ What Difference Does It Make, or Nirvana’s “Well, whatever, never mind.” Rendered impotent by an inability to transform their world, even if they had the imagination to dream of such change as their parents’ generation did, the anger of Punk was soon turned inward to despair that could only be overcome through assimilation – even where there was little identification between the attitudes of the Baby Boom generation and Generation X, the response of the next generation was cynicism or irony. As Kierkegaard said about irony, “Since my earliest childhood a barb of sorrow has lodged in my heart. As long as it stays, I am ironic, if it is pulled out, I shall die.”

The young represent a new challenge to the established order, and the biggest challenge in the entire post-war era. Fuelled by a new age of austerity and the power to be informed by different sources, without the traditional gatekeepers, through the internet and social media. It is a generation frustrated by a calcified and ossified establishment that is either unwilling or unable to confront long known issues such as climate crisis, as well as enduring legacies of sexism and racism. Although characterised by young people, the age at which this seismic shift occurs grows older by the year, as more and more are people burdened by unaffordable housing prices, food and fuel prices – Millennials are now in their forties. Once again, the royal family appears a ridiculous anathema to a lot of younger people – whether a ridiculous anathema is sufficient to challenge the existence of the Royal Family is as yet unknown, but it’s a Royal Family that appears increasingly incongruous in a twenty-first century world, as the response to Prince William’s recent tour of the Caribbean suggested. It is also a Royal family that, following the revelations of Prince Andrew’s association with child-trafficking paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, has not been held in such thinly veiled contempt by large proportions of the population since the royal scandal of the 1930s.

Nevertheless, many will enjoy celebrating the Queen’s Platinum jubilee this last weekend. There is still much affection for the Queen by swathes of the population, and no doubt, the jubilee celebrations will be used to reassert the country’s love, respect and deference to the royal family, both as people and institutionally. And to those who might question their inherited right to such power and privilege, the lazy response may will be, “well who would you replace them with?” accompanied by a meaningful nod towards the present political leaders; narcissistic liars beholden to the vested interests of the rich individuals who sponsor them, be they British residents or otherwise.

In the midst of a culture war staged by people who oppose cultural change, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis that inspires despondency amongst those without legacies to inherit, where rich people celebrate the philanthropy of Food Banks as other people starve, I am reminded of something that Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1930, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”