Robert Chesshyre: We were the lucky generation – and we got it wrong

Australians call their homeland "the lucky country".

Aussies have their ups and downs, but we all know what the phrase means: sunny skies, wide beaches, abundant raw materials, wild and wonderful wilderness ... even "barbies". A similar tag has been attached (in Britain and the US) to baby boomers – those born in the two decades following the Second World War: they have become the "lucky generation".

We know also what that means: free (and on the whole) decent education, at least for the bright, an abundance of jobs, affordable housing, sexual and social liberation, even if – when it came to drugs – this did have a bleak downside. The world was the baby boomers' oyster: they didn't even do National Service. Now, as they reach retirement, the word "lucky" has become two-edged.

Have those who appeared to inherit limitless progress and contentment squandered their heirloom? Did they fail to fix the roof while the sun was shining? This year – in the face of university budget cuts – more qualified school-leavers than the total national complement of undergraduates in 1960 will fail to get college places, while worthwhile jobs evaporate, casting the spotlight on those whose motto might have been Harold Macmillan's "You've never had it so good".

It is easy to look back with rose-tinted glasses: while (mainly) boys from public and grammar schools had a choice of universities or headed off to accountancy or business, millions still crouched among the spiders in outside loos and their children toiled in factories. Alan Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton spoke for them in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning: "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

Carnaby Street and Biba were light years away from Rotherham, where I did my first reporting. For most of my south Yorkshire contemporaries, who were out of school and into the nearest available jobs on their 15th birthdays, even pop music – the Beatles were in full song on the other side of the Pennines – was accessible only on the jukebox.

Odd though it may seem now, this was more or less OK with everyone. Bright working-class children appeared to make it – and many thousands did – through the grammar schools; the less bright (or less lucky: the 11-plus at the margins was a lottery) had wages and could aspire far beyond the horizons their parents set themselves. Society appeared cohesive; the glue that had held it together throughout the war and rationing was still (just) sticky enough.

The morrow, if we thought about it, would take care of itself, much as the present was doing. The idea of inquiring whether a job had a pension (often the understandable preoccupation of our parents) seemed ludicrous. It was the mid-1970s when I was, briefly, an employing editor before I first heard a reporter ask whether there was a pension scheme. He almost didn't get the job on the grounds that, if pensions were his thing, he should seek work in a bank.

Now it is clear that he (a post-baby boomer) was right, and we were wrong. By then inflation was soaring almost Zimbabwean-style; the cost of houses that even the modestly paid could once buy was soaring; society was at war with itself – Ted Heath had lost round one versus the miners; university education was becoming a necessity not a luxury; the boomers were starting to worry about the mundane concerns that they had once dismissed as bourgeois.

As coalmines and steelworks closed, my Rotherham friends, many of whom owned little more than the clothes they wore and survived on their weekly pay packets, were out of work, nursing half-pints in down-at-heel pubs. The sun was also setting for many university friends. I remembered them taking their pick of jobs, and then re-encountered (some at least of) them 20 years on as frustrated, poorly paid lecturers at polys – the joy of that long distant graduation dawn dulled to monochrome reality.

Soon Mrs Thatcher would stand among the ruins of the north-east economy and declare that there was no such thing as society. Only a fool would wait for a bus if he could afford a car. It was the devil take the hindmost.

I went back to my former university to report on student employment prospects during the recession of the early 1990s. Recruiters from a major bank and a large accountancy firm were in town, and the ballroom at the posh hotel was heaving with candidates. I rubbed my eyes: the job-hunters wore suits or smart dresses, some even had briefcases; any man over a certain age (and I qualified) was addressed as "Sir" in case he was one of the recruiters. I suspect that there were more ties in that room than there had been in the whole university 25 years earlier. The game had changed. What mattered now was salary and security: the world had narrowed to sharp elbows, a well-cut suit and a plausible manner.

The baby boomers had made off with the glittering prizes. At one end of the scale the successful commanded the heights of politics, the media, the arts, business: at the other even the fairly untalented had snaffled the decent middle-class housing at knock-down prices. Their parents were dying, leaving many another tranche of wealth. La France profonde was bought up wholesale for summer boltholes for the erstwhile sex, drugs, rock'n'roll generation.

Wider society had become less likeable. Mid-market papers invented "the politics of envy", which really meant that no one should seek anything with which they were not born – especially at the expense of others who had previously enjoyed it. Building societies were sold off; unions demoralised; wealth and the concept of "celebrity" (anyone good-looking with money who has been on the telly) took the place of new ideas and concern for those left behind.

Centre-left boomers (most of us) were let down by the politicians ostensibly on our side. Brought up to admire and enjoy Clement Attlee's achievements in creating a modern welfare state, we had similar hopes of both Harold Wilson and Tony Blair (an archetypal boomer), both of whom failed spectacularly to deliver.

So did the baby boomers go wrong? If so, with what consequences? Although liberal, we didn't follow our instincts with effective action. We were complacent, believing that things would for ever get better, thus absolving us from action. We failed to appreciate that house prices couldn't sustain a way of life, and we didn't spot that a country that manufactured scarcely anything it consumed was headed for the rocks.

We indulged our children, allowing (encouraging?) them to embrace the credit culture that has brought the Western world to its knees. We wanted them to have an equally good life, and credit was the one way that most of them could get it. As we had once been swept along by benign economic currents, so we imagined that a similar tide would bear them safely to shore.

Some baby boomers still sip Sunday morning sherry while congratulating themselves on their "successes". For many others the penny has finally dropped: we were the "lucky generation", possibly none luckier in human history. Britain is less fair and less nice than it was 40 years ago: we now owe it to the future to use our fast declining years to implement the idealism we professed in our youth.