Whilst I generally find Anne McElvoy's radio broadcasts interesting and perceptive, I can't say this of her current BBC Radio 4 series on "The Jam Generation".
As someone who attended a superb Jam concert at Finsbury Park's old Rainbow venue - subsequently a centre for radical Islam - in the cold winter of 1980, I find myself with very little in common with the people of her "Jam Generation".
These are politicians who "came of age" during the period of unsustainable economic growth between the early 1990s and 2007, and include the present prime minister, his deputy and key people from New Labour like shadow chancellor Ed Balls.
When I left the same university as Balls in 1983, the thought of being a "leader writer for the Financial Times at the age of twenty-two" would have been beyond my wildest dreams.
Instead self-employment and economic migration led me to my own"jihad" - in its true meaning of "struggle" - and I returned to Britain to fight "The War on Traffic" through legal channels.
With regard to Ann McElvoy's later generation of politicians, surely these are best collectively summed in words attributed to Tony Benn: "Some of the jam* we thought was for tomorrow, we've already eaten".
*PS - Jam might serve as an analogy to finite resources such as oil.
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