This whole trend towards intergenerational warfare, then. What do you think?

I think it’s a complete red herring. Just the latest ostensibly attractive way for a thoroughly fucked society to take out its anger – which, not to Godwin myself or anything, is a bit of a slippery political slope. I do wish this was a cause I could believe in, but the greater the volume of ink and cyberspace I see devoted to this spurious blame-game, the more it irritates me with its obvious logical inconsistencies. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think the Sixties were shit. I may know, and like, but I have great difficulty in respecting, any fucker who calls themselves a hippie. I do hate ‘baby boomers’, but only as much as I hate anyone else. And I have been non-specifically annoyed lately anyway, so here we go, in vague order of importance:

1. Blaming one’s parents’ generation is a very obvious distraction from the actual conflict of interests that currently exists: that between the very wealthy and the rest of us. Just like the whole debate over whether men or women would suffer worst under the recession and under the consequent government cuts. Just like the artificial divisions being drawn between the ‘deserving poor’ or ‘hardworking families’ and Scroungers Living Large Off The Welfare State. They’re all distractions and they’re distracting by divide-and-rule. I can’t believe people are swallowing it. The Tories must be laughing their arses off.

2. Too much of this debate is framed in laughable, patronising, Rik from The Young Ones ‘kill your parents’ schtick, which apart from its rhetorical shortcomings is a really bizarre argument. Look – I understand that if you’ve got middle-class, home-owning, highly-educated professional parents and you now find yourself in rented accommodation and in debt from your student days and without a white-collar job, then you’re entitled to be pissed off. But a) you are in a minority and b) how on earth are your parents, specifically, to blame for the economic and political decisions which brought this about? I assume ‘parents’ is used mostly as metaphor, but it’s very hard to tell.

3. I’m not you, and my parents aren’t your parents. My parents did not vote for Thatcher, did not jump on the buying of council homes, did not squander the post-war settlement and did not benefit from anything that went on in government over the past thirty or so years. I’m not blaming my parents for this shit, and if you’re going to blame my parents, then mate, let’s step outside.

4. But most of all, jesus christ. I am indescribably hard-pushed to feel a shred of sympathy for any ‘generation’ I might be part of. My generation is wildly overprivileged, entitled, solipsistic and drowning in conspicuous consumption, and the majority of us have done absolutely nothing but take what we have for granted. I have neither the time nor the mental energy to properly explain this, but here’s one example: I was at the heart of what little fight there was for free education, from the loss of the grant to the imposition of top-up fees, and do you know who some of the most active proponents of a paid-for education were? Do you know who visibly Sold Us Out? Yeah, it was my fellow sabbaticals, my fellow union officers, who were playing the long game and who wanted a foot on the ladder at Labour HQ when they got into the real world. And do you know how they got away with it? Because the vast, overwhelming majority of their membership knew fuck-all about the political issues affecting them, cared less, and were mostly concerned with cheap pints and School Disco nights. Fuck off. We are the generation that think oppression means having our smartphone nicked while we’re pissed in soi-disant directional London pretending to be avant-garde, and by Christ we get what we deserve.