As part of its partnership with the newly re-launched Cambridge Literary Festival (formerly known as Cambridge Wordfest), the New Statesman will host a flagship debate on Saturday 5 April at the Cambridge Union Society. Chaired by Rafael Behr, Political Editor of the New Statesman, six of the country’s sharpest political thinkers will debate the motion: “This house believes that baby boomers left society worse than they found it”.
Is this, contrary to received wisdom, an ideal time to be young? How have technology, travel and science improved young people’s lives for the better, and how much have they benefited from the struggles – sexual liberation, equality and post-war investment in health and education – of the baby boomer generation? Or is this, in fact, a far shallower world than the one the boomers inherited – one in which unemployment, constricted social mobility, austerity and environmental crisis are the end result of an overly selfish, financially irresponsible generation born after 1945?
As Rabbit Angstrom, the quintessential baby boomer in John Updike’s Rabbit series boasts: “I figure the oil’s going to run out about the same time I do, the year two thousand. Seems funny to say it, but I’m I lived when I did. These kids coming up, they’ll be living on table scraps. We had the meal.”
Proposing the motion will be the Guardian’s Shiv Malik, investigative reporter and author of Jilted Generation: How Britain Has Bankrupted Its Youth. Joining him will be Laurie Penny, columnist, activist and New Statesman contributing editor, along with Simon Heffer, Daily Mail journalist, historian and author most recently of High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain. Arguing in opposition will be Kwasi Kwarteng, Conservative MP for Spelthorne in Surrey and author most recently of Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World; Mansoor Hamayun, renewable technology entrepreneur and the chief executive of BBOXX, and Welsh novelist and columnist Allison Pearson.
Elsewhere at the festival, NS staff will be taking part in events with shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander, literary critic John Carey and novelists Jim Crace, A L Kennedy and Adam Foulds. Other highlights include appearances by Melvyn Bragg, Hanif Kureishi, Eleanor Catton, Emma Donoghue, Pat Barker, Germaine Greer and Martin Rees.
Full programme information can be found on the Cambridge Literary Festival website. Tickets for the New Statesman debate, which will begin at 5.30pm on 5 April, can be purchased here.
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