The death of the Airfix generation

By Pete North - January 24, 2021

Though born in 1979, a full generation after WW2, I think it fair to say that I was still raised in the long shadow of that war. I grew up going to airshows which originally had been all about demonstrating our technological and military prowess. Until the early nineties, the RAF was still largely a Cold War force, itself a continuation WW2 hostilities by other means.

It is no coincidence that the RAF saw the retirement of several types shortly after the Berlin Wall came down. In many ways the Gulf War of 1991 was a salutatory, almost nostalgic, display of allied air power as a final show of force. British crews would adorn their aircraft with nose art mascots much like Lancaster crews of WW2.

There was a certain pageantry to that war in that, unlike the wars following in the region, there was no legal or moral grey area. Saddam Hussein had invaded a neighbouring sovereign state and we raced to the rescue – and (almost) everyone was able to feel good about what we did. One almost feels nostalgic for those simper times.

This was a victory, much like the Falklands, that the whole nation could raise a glass to and feel that, by our armed forces participation, we were by association still part of that greatest generation that came before. Sales of Humbrol Desert Pink that year skyrocketed as the Airfix generation took to their workbenches to build Tornados, Jaguars and Buccaneers. I did, and I still do.

It’s only since, when our military engagements have been less clear cut, starting with intervention in the former Yugoslavia, through to Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, did we as a nation question our own sense of identity and started to wonder if we really were the good guys after all.

We had moved from clear cut wars to wars of humanitarian intervention and “neocon” wars of liberal imperialism which were far harder to understand and even more difficult to evaluate in terms of their success. Before Vietnam it was simply a question of pushing back the evil invader, but my lifetime has been dominated by military interventions that have done more to divide the country than unite.

In that respect, though I’m only just creaking into middle-age, it puts me apart from the the millennials in that they were the first generation to be born out of the shadow of WW2. Having been a teenager in the 1990’s, and a Sea Cadet, I was witness to the end of a military era that had influenced men and boys for half a century.

In that regard, I have lived through a transition – to see major societal change – change that has made us weaker, more profligate, far less disciplined and much less united. There are fewer shared national experiences and fewer unifying endeavours. It is little wonder that the country is beginning to fragment.

The monarchy, Westminster, Downing Street all used to represent power, prestige and authority but now they tend to represent decline, corruption, incompetence, and obsolescence.

It’s easy for us to look outside at America and as disinterested observers see a nation that has come to its natural end for much the same reasons – but far harder to admit that the UK as we have known it, is at the end of the line too. It cannot step into the world with confidence and its intelligentsia is embarrassed and ashamed by virtually everything it does. In both cases, the great Western Allies are broken and demoralised.

In this, my generation and older are seen as relics, with outdated values – and to a large extent we are. We are used to nation states as sovereign powers with coherent politics, and a particular order of things we could at least comprehend. Modernity, however, brings a new form or dangerous anarchy best articulated in 1996 by Carl Sagan:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

That grim future has arrived. That said, as a Telegraph reader since childhood one might dispute that our media has ever been “substantive” but at least most of us were working from roughly the same bullshit. Now the bullshit is tailored to individual prejudices. Meanwhile we have reached a point in globalisation where markets states and democracy struggle to coexist and some argue that they can’t coexist. Something, somewhere, has to give.

If you’ve followed my writing over the last week, you’ll know that I’ve fallen down an East Germany rabbit hole. It’s an interesting prism through which to examine all inner of issues. It is, though, an example of a sovereign state attempting to go against the tides of global political and economic forces and the more desperately it tried the more inevitable it would collapse.

This, I think, can inform the political changes we’re seeing as we attempt to bring some kind of order to the chaos, essentially trying to put the genie back in the bottle, while the younger generation has not concept of what it has lost. Not for nothing is Brexit viewed as a generational dispute. Younger people tend to see the EU as more of a loss in terms of the liberties and opportunities it affords them.

Though I have compared Scottish Independence to the GDR, aspects of it could just as easily apply to Brexit as the UK attempts to reassert itself and an independent state only to t find that independence, as such, no longer exists. Moreover, it is an attempt to re-establish the UK as a nation at a time when its formerly unifying symbols are actively despised by the young and separatist movements.

Though on paper, we “got Brexit done”, it remains to be seen whether a weakened and demoralised UK can remain intact. A question mark hangs over Northern Ireland’s place in the Union while Scottish departure hangs in the balance.

Remainers will, of course, argue that this is the inevitable consequence of Brexit but I don’t think that is. Brexit has merely brought these dormant questions back into the light. When a union had been superimposed on our own union of nations these questions had less urgency, but they remained ever present in the discourse of the British Isles even in times of comparative prosperity. Further entrenching that discourse was our disastrous devolution project.

Essentially the UK that went into the European Union is not the same UK that exists now. We are not the same economic or military power nor do we have the same kind of societal bonds. There has been no binding national experience probably since the first Gulf War. The closest thing we’ve had to a shared experience is Covid – and of course, Brexit – which has done more to divide than heal.

This does point to the obvious need for a new constitutional settlement and major democratic reforms. I think just about everyone who thinks about politics understand this, but while we have a Tory party very much enjoying and abusing all the power, those such initiatives are not going to come from the inside. Moreover, Tories prioritise their “free trade” experiment over the Union which is why they were so readily able to sacrifice Northern Ireland in the Withdrawal Agreement.

In that, the former chancellor, George Osborne, has ventured that England will not care if Ireland is reunited. To a point, he’s right. It’s not a part of the UK you can simply jump in the car and go and visit. You could grow up in Bradford, and Belfast is as conceptually far away as Amsterdam. It’s that bit of the UK where sectarian violence happens for reasons no-one is entirely clear on, and is not interesting enough to find out.

As to Scotland, there exists a similar indifference. It’s getting to the point where many of us simply don’t care either way just so long as the issue goes away. The SNP are intent on boring us all into submission – and it’s working. We all know it’s a terrible idea, but it just has an air of inevitability and the Westminster establishment lacks the gravitas and credibility to stop it from happening. In the case of the USA, EU, Ireland and Scotland, the main barrier to repairing relations with our neighbours is Boris Johnson, and for as long as he remains in office, relations will continue to deteriorate.

If there is to be a United Kingdom, then much has to change. As has been remarked so often, you cannot expect the next generation to defend capitalism when they themselves have no means of acquiring capital. There needs to be a new deal for the young particularly those whose lives have been turned upside down by Covid. What they will probably get though, is a massive tax bill and and a package of measure to maintain current house prices. The generational divide will likely not heal at all.

In the meantime the fabric of the nation will gradually be eroded by wokeism. My working theory on this is that it’s a result of the gradual feminisation of education, combined with curriculums designed by the post-modern left which seeks to deconstruct and dismantle the very idea of nationhood, while turning national heroes into villains and great victories into amoral imperialistic crusades. The illiterate graffiti scrawl of “Churchill was a racist” during the BLM riots gives us some indication of how successful that agenda has been.

Ultimately a nation is defined by the stories that pass down the generations. As we noted this week, new constructs such as the GDR were founded on an anti-fascist mythology – one which could not withstand the information age. That is not to say Britain doesn’t have its own mythology. My generation and older believes that we were saved by a plucky Few in their Spitfires and Hurricanes, and to date, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight graces our skies in moments of national remembrance.

Those stories have been weakened by multiculturalism, and ethnic minority youths have no real idea who we are and where we came from because we no longer teach it or celebrate it and encourage them to instead celebrate their own ancestry. With such disparate narrative foundations, it’s hard to see how a cohesive nation can survive. And that’s the entire point of attacking those national ideas of who we are.

If you’re on Twitter for any length of time, you soon come across the likes of “Otto English” who likes to impress upon us that fish and chips aren’t British and none of the things we consider our own are valid objects of national identity. They lament the national story as racist and imperialistic and chastise the country for being obsessed with WW2.

Personally, I don’t get why anyone isn’t fascinated by WW2. It not only defines Britain and explains much of our national psyche (conscious and unconscious). In the space of a decade we go from wood and canvass biplanes to four engine jet nuclear bombers. We go from armoured vehicles barely more sophisticated than the Model T Ford to the Conqueror Main Battle Tank. From this is born a world beating aerospace industry that connected the world.

More than that, though, we move forward to develop a global system of multilateralism, human rights, and the word trade system that became the WTO. Our international endeavours are still built on these foundations. To understand modern trade requires a knowledge of how these institutions came into being. They are all part of the peace architecture that followed that war – particularly human rights, following the holocaust. Similarly Middle Eastern politics cannot be understood without a firm grasp of WW2.

From a personal perspective, much of my intimate local knowledge of the places I have lived comes through my fascination for WW2. Where I live presently, I’m surrounded by the stations of Bomber Command and I still recall my Grandad telling me all about the rows and rows of Wellingtons, Lancasters and Halifaxes lined up at Linton and Dishforth.

This, in part, gives me a sense of who I am and where I came from and what the previous generations endured. But if you show me a man who takes no interest in such warlike things and I’ll show you a man who’s been raised almost exclusively by women (and other men raised exclusively by women). Kids will grow up round my way without realising that the villages of North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire were once the front line in a pivotal battle.

We see this in primary schools in which teachers are 80% women and the situation doesn’t improve into secondary schools. Children no longer come into contact with men of the Clergy and in all likelihood have no fixed male role models in their lives.

It’s not at all surprising that boys are falling behind and are no longer inspired to take up engineering. They get a boring, politically sanitised education with no heroes and they only place they’re going to get that from is from their dads – who are increasingly ridiculed and scorned by public intellectuals for teaching outmoded attitudes and wrong-think history.

Britain as we know it is dying because the left has prospered in academia and civil society institutions. It crumbles and as an indolent political class celebrates its demise and as the new generation won’t lift a finger to save it.

But that’s how it goes. The story of the Western allies since the war has been one of gradual and inexorable decline, and we’re looking at the swansong of the post-war national and international constructs – particularly as China ascends. The peace that was won is dying and we shall have to fight all those same battles again – all largely because we’ve forgotten the lessons of history. Little can be done to stop Woko Haram erasing what’s left to build their androgynous communist utopia. They’re going to find out the hard way why communism sucks.