We can still aspire to blow the bloody doors off
While not all fab and groovy, the Sixties were a time of hope, creativity and rapid social mobility
This week I went to a showing of the documentary film My Generation, David Batty’s wonderfully nostalgic celebration of Sixties London as seen through the eyes, and interviews, of Sir Michael Caine. Afterwards, there was an equally engaging Q&A with Sir Michael to mark the actor’s 85th birthday.
The music, the fashion, the personalities – even for those of us who largely missed out on the swinging Sixties, the film is a glorious indulgence. But it also has a serious message. This was a time of explosive opportunity and social levelling in which working-class youth was able to make its mark on the world as never before. Despite the leap forward in living standards and consumer choice since, the sense of aspiration, opportunity and excitement seen back then is today sadly lacking.
Instead, we worry about supposedly growing inequality, the wealth gap, intergenerational unfairness and the challenges of an ageing population. The demographic dividend of post-war Britain has faded and has instead turned into a potentially deadly demographic time-bomb.
After the economic stagnation of the past decade, it’s all too easy to be pessimistic. UK record after UK record has been broken, observed Paul Johnson, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, after this week’s “Spring Statement”, but not in a good way – record low earnings growth, record low interest rates, record low productivity growth, record peacetime levels of public debt and record cuts in public spending.
Wrongly, as it happens, the young have begun to believe they will be the first generation in modern history to be worse off than their parents. The hard numbers may say otherwise, but perception is all, and the sense of deprivation, of progress going into reverse, grows stronger by the day.
Not everything about the Sixties was great. The pop culture of the time seems wonderfully groundbreaking by the standards of today’s homogenised world, and indeed it was, but it had its dark side. For many of its defining characters, the licence of the age ended badly in drug-induced self destruction.
Arguably, the decade did too. Beyond the glamour of London, the economy was unawares slipping into the sea, later to be engulfed by wave upon wave of industrial strife. The Bentleys, E-types and Minis – proud exemplars of quintessentially, super-trendy Sixties British design in Sir Michael’s career-defining movie The Italian Job – disguised a growing underbelly of shoddy workmanship, poor reliability and internationally uncompetitive production.
Be that as it may, this was a decade shaped by young people, an age of liberation and iconoclastic rejection of establishment assumptions; it was a time when a working-class cockney such as Sir Michael, the son of a Billingsgate fish porter and a charwoman, could dare to dream, and realistically hope to fulfil those ambitions.
Nor was this a phenomenon confined to the lucky few who made it big in the melting pot of Sixties pop culture. Virtually everyone was getting some sort of a leg up, such that by the early Seventies, some 40 per cent of men were likely to find themselves in the salaried classes, against fewer than 20 per cent before the war. En masse, the working classes were moving out of the factory, out of below-stairs service and into the office. This had very little to do with government policy, or the grammarschool education the likes of Sir Michael briefly enjoyed. It was simply that there was more room at the top. Employers were forced to dig deep into the secondary moderns to fill the abundant job opportunities that were becoming available.
That was then. What hope of recreating a similar level of social mobility today? More than might be thought. True enough, housing is a considerable barrier. London housing in the Sixties was cheap as chips. Never before had so many young people been able to live away from their parents, or indeed been able to afford to move down south to work in swinging London. The cost of housing took up less than 10 per cent of disposable household income in 1957; today it is double that. London was affordable; today, our capital city has virtually priced itself out of opportunity-giving potential.
But other cities are growing fast, while the scale and pace of technological development gives reason to believe that structural economic change just as seismic as that which occurred in Fifties and Sixties Britain will soon be upon us.
As in the early stages of all industrial revolutions, the benefits are not yet apparent. We are suffering, as John Maynard Keynes wrote of the Thirties, “not from the rheumatics of old age, but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another”.
Nothing is going to bring back the Sixties, but we can learn from the optimism and creativity of that time. The pessimism of our current age will eventually lift, and a world of possibilities will open before us.