What Did The Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the 1960s in 2010, Francis Beckett is writing What Did The Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us?, a revisionist, polemical account of the sixties generation and its influence in shaping contemporary British society. Whilst Beckett acknowledges the good that this decade has brought, he argues that now we are able to judge the lasting affect of the youth of the sixties, we can see that the real legacy of its perceived radicalism was the precursor to Thatcherism. Tony Blair's New Labour, the first government to be run by a sixties child, is its clearest example; style before substance and the cult of the young and new. Beckett cites the post-war Attlee settlement as the genuine period of radical social change, in which all the major battles of the sixties had their roots, and many had already been won. This made much of sixties revolution reactionary and ideologically groundless; the issues were real, but there were no clear ways to make them better.