George Kerevan: A little hardship is no bad thing – ask the austerity generation

Published on Wednesday 19 November 2008 20:45

I AM unusual among my male acquaintances in that I like to shop. A little retail therapy goes a long way to dispel the blues. I'm also notorious for leaving lights on around my house, which friendly critics remind me is usually lit up like a Christmas tree.

Nor can I bear to throw anything away, even if I never intend to use it again. My wife has caught me removing from the dustbin old clothes that she has carefully consigned to oblivion.

This weird mix of habits betrays that I am of a certain age. I was brought up in the 1950s just as post-war austerity was turning into the first age of full-employment, hire-purchase affluence – the period when Harold Macmillan told us we'd "never had it so good".

I leave the lights on because my mother, a daughter of the Great Depression, meticulously turned them off in any room not inhabited by a living, breathing human being. She had a minuscule carbon footprint in the days before such a thing was ever thought of. Of course, she'd learned to turn off lights because no-one in her day could afford to have them on. I leave the lights on as some Freudian response to the darkness of my austerity childhood.

My shopping mania is just as easily explained: I remember a Glasgow of the early 1950s when the shops had very little to sell. Super markets – what's a supermarket? As an economic historian, I know that Britain in the decade after the Second World War was an economic basket-case. Everything that could be exported to pay for the precious dollars needed to import oil and raw materials was shipped abroad. Bananas and oranges were exotic. Luxury was tinned peaches.

My mother (a trained seamstress) made my school uniform – a secret source of embarrassment to me at the time, and something I'm very proud of now. Shopping in the 1950s was a "looking, not buying" experience, but no less fun for all that. I could stand for hours in front of the window of the Clyde Model Dockyard, a toy shop off Glasgow's Argyle Street, and not get bored.

There has been much talk in recent months of a so-called "return to austerity". Of course, we've heard this before – during the recession of the early 1990s, and during the Thatcherite downturn in the 1980s. It's the sort of notion that makes a feature article about shopping in Lidl rather than Waitrose, or taking your holidays at home. But it rarely extends to a discussion about living on benefit, or having no holidays at all.

However, there is a sense in which the current economic crisis is different from those of recent memory. We've just lived through a 16-year boom – the longest and biggest I can think of. For young adults under 30 it will be the first time they have encountered an economic downturn of any sort, never mind a once-in-a-generation show-stopper. Many of the rest of us, who have been here before, had forgotten what it can be like. And if you're about to retire, and your savings nest egg has just evaporated on the stock exchange, it is a historical rerun you could well do without.

And yet, there is a bit of me that remembers austerity Britain of long ago with a little rose-coloured affection. I don't want to exaggerate this. I also remember that hand-me-down clothes were the norm and that wee Glasgow boys in working-class families wore sandals like their sisters because they were cheaper than regular shoes.

But a culture not defined by consumer values and restless acquisition had its own merits. I can still summon up the pungent flavour of concentrated orange juice (which I hated to dilute) delivered to every child by the new Welfare State. Ditto with cod liver oil, which I still swear I liked.

We were healthier then, because we ate enough but never too much. Alcohol was too expensive to consume outside the pub, at least among the working class. Working men did binge-drink on payday, but not 13-year-old girls. Scotland in the 1950s was no medical paradise – adults smoked too much and industrial diseases were all too common. But it is the adults of that generation who are now motoring into their centenary years – I'll take a bet that today's 20-somethings are not so lucky.

There was also a collective sense to society – that sounds like a redundancy, but it's not if you think about our own fractured one. Partly this solidarity was born of the fact that most adults had been in the forces. It also came from the extended family, which only collapsed in my own, baby-boomer generation. Austerity itself bred a more collective culture: we went to the cinema rather than watch television at home; the crowds at weekly sporting fixtures could reach six figures; people worked in factories with tens of thousands of employees; and everyone (except the local pest) took their turn mopping the tenement stairs.

Can our current economic downturn reproduce any of these benign conditions? One thing is for sure: at some stage we will have to construct a social model that does not rely on infinitely increasing consumer debt to fund economic growth. Otherwise we are doomed to repeat the boom-bust cycle. So it might be sensible to use the present economic meltdown to build a new machine, rather than just repair the old one.

That is not to ignore the fact that we need economic growth to secure a decent standard of living for our growing band of pensioners. And to bridge the terrible gulf in earnings between rich and poor, which is a peculiarity of British society. But how much of that growth needs to go into conspicuous or binge consumption is a matter of debate.

The word austerity has two meanings. Crudely, it can refer to poverty – the virtues of which are grossly overrated. But it can also mean simplicity; not as in boringly plain, but more as in focused and determined.

If that is the austerity we are bound for, it could have its advantages. I may even start turning off the lights.