Help the aged. Really, someone should help the aged. By this I don’t mean the poor pensioners who’ve been hit by the cut to their winter fuel allowance. Nor do I mean the Baby Boomers who are unfairly maligned for having bought a house when it was affordable to do so, and have held on to it ever since. I mean that generation who came of age in the 1960s and are still trapped in that decade.
Like the callow youngsters they march with, they speak in a sloganeering, agitprop language befitting of the student union
This was in evidence yesterday when the MPs Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell agreed to be interviewed by police following a pro-Palestinian rally in London on Saturday. The former Labour leader, 75, and former shadow chancellor, 73, voluntarily attended a police station after what the Metropolitan Police says was a coordinated effort by organisers to breach conditions imposed on the event (this was denied by the organisers, who accused the Metropolitan Police of heavy-handed tactics).
Corbyn and McDonnell, who said they acted peacefully throughout the protest and criticised the Met’s ‘misleading’ account of events, were one of many oldies who attended the event, and judging by the photographs of the protests in London since October 2023, represent a growing number of oldies obsessed with this cause. They’re a strange lot. Like the callow youngsters they march with, they speak in a sloganeering, agitprop language befitting of the student union. Last week Corbyn released a statement on the Gaza ceasefire in which he spoke of ‘occupation’, ‘solidarity’, ‘genocide’ (twice) and of political leaders with ‘blood on their hands’.
We are prone to deplore the naivety of the young for their simplistic hyperbole and pompous grandstanding when it comes to the Middle East. Yet they are young, so they can be excused for their infantile leftism. Some of their elders, however, should know better. They should have wisdom and experience on their side. Alas, Corbyn and McDonnell personify a certain niche within their demographic that is still stuck in 1968.
They are not isolated examples. Exhibitionist climate change activists these days are either youngsters with purple hair and fanciful names or crusty pensioners. Twenty years ago they might have been parading ‘Not In My Name’ placards at an anti-war march, and 20 years before that they were no doubt camped outside Greenham Common. These are the veteran, inveterate, self-righteous types who fell in love with street protests when it was all the rage back in the 1960s, and are in love with them still.
The political protests beloved of Corbyn and McDonnell also have a comparably retro-feel, imbued with a radical chic that brings to mind Jane Fonda posing with her fist clenched. Even John Lennon recognised in the Beatles song ‘Revolution’ something suspect and nihilist about those carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. One of those carrying a placard could well have been John McDonnell himself, who in 2015 as shadow chancellor quoted Chairman Mao in his response to the government’s Spending Review, while brandishing a copy of the Chinese Communist leader’s Little Red Book.
McDonnell insisted that the whole thing was a joke. A joke? Perhaps. A stunt? Undoubtedly. And that has always been inherent to the spirit of 1968: viewing politics as an act of provocation, a form of theatre, a means to strike a pose and solidify one’s position in the tribe.
It’s a pose that we see apparent in that other relic today, George Galloway, with his penchant for publicity and stentorian bombast. Atavistic overstatement persists elsewhere among those brandishing Socialist Workers’ party placards that invoke the spectre of ‘fascists’ among us, much like Rick from The Young Ones did back in 1982. Just more sorry souls, frozen in time.
In his 1948 book What Is Literature?, before he became captivated entirely by Marxism, and before he himself became centre-stage in the events of 1968, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote witheringly of those who assumed an air of political resistance, who affected the insincere ‘aesthetic of opposition and resentment… a rebel, not a revolutionary’. The accusation rang true back then and has remained so ever since: for the anti-war protesters who believed war was all about them, and for the exhibitionists and fossils of today.
Most of that generation has mercifully grown wise, and are among the best today. But not these throwbacks. They still want to change the world. But they themselves will never change.
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