Farage's War on Home Workers

 

It was quite a spectacle when viewed through the lens of generational antagonism; Nigel Farage attacking the idea of Gen Z working from home, in front of an audience of Boomers clapping like seals. It was the intervention nobody asked for, at a time when we have the most horrific details from both Rupert Lowe’s Grooming Gang Inquiry, and from the Epstein Paedo Island files trickling out. You would think that, between these and the other immigration or identity-related issues, which Farage’s party, Reform, was apparently founded to address, that Farage may have bigger fish to fry. But no, he went with home working, and his audience of Boomers lapped it up.

As I sit here this morning, a random thought suddenly occurs to me. The criticisms of the Boomers by subsequent generations - Millennials and Gen Z- are actually the same criticisms that the Boomers’ own parents, the so-called Greatest Generation, had of them, just from opposite ends of the timeline. On the one hand, you have “if you carry on like this, you’re going to make an awful mess”. And on the other hand, you have “look at the mess you’ve made”. One could conclude that the Boomers getting it from both sides lends credence to those criticisms.

 

 

The Boomers love to imagine that they are the hardest-working generation. It’s at the core of their perception of themselves because it contradicts the criticisms of their parents, and it’s probably the reason it cuts so deep to hear the same thing from their children.

My own mother, born in 1945, not technically a Boomer but close enough, cannot tolerate the suggestion that youngsters today have it harder than she did. She has her own tale of woe, which goes as follows. “We had to go and work in Paris for a year (in the entertainment industry hob-nobbing with celebs) to get the deposit for a house. The absolute horror!

I don’t like to blame them for everything, but it is the case that the country went down the shitter on their watch, and it’s obviously easier to lash out at youngsters for the heinous crime of working from home than it is to self-reflect, or better still, actually attempt to clear up their own mess.