By Harry Wallop
The summer holidays are here. And with that comes, for many Keswickians, a sense of dread: the invasion of tourists, the roads being clogged up and the town being overrun with dogs.
Twas ever thus. Even William Wordsworth himself – a man more responsible than most for encouraging tourism to this corner of England – was a terrible snob, writing to the Prime Minister begging him to stop the Kendal to Windermere railway line. “Is there no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?” he wailed.
But what is new, I think, is a sense that the current crop of visitors are worse than those that have come before. That they are the ‘Magaluf crowd’. In a letter to The Keswick Reminder, Carol Ratledge, calling for a wet summer to keep away the crowds wrote that “we now have a generation of arrogant, ignorant, selfish and uncaring people spawned by lockdown and staycation”, who drive at obnoxiously high speeds and are only interested in partying.
I am not sure how spending your holiday in the UK or following Government orders to not venture out of your home made people either selfish or uncaring. But one thing is certain: Carol taps into a definite generational divide that is increasingly causing a schism in Britain.
The older generation somehow believe that the ills of Britain are caused by those younger than them. But the evidence does not back this up.
When it comes to all manner of anti-social behaviour from littering and graffiti to truancy and petty theft, the statistics show Britain is a better and kinder place than it was before. We tend to forget just how dirty and violent our country was only a couple of generations ago.
Keep Britain Tidy was launched in 1955 because people were fed up with the casual tossing of bottles and cigarette packets into byways and hedgerows. The year with the highest ever recorded number of deaths on the roads? That was back in 1966, when 7,985 people died.
Last year, a year when there were far, far more vehicles on the road, it was 1,695. Is this statistic a perfect proxy for poor driving? No. And improved car safety has something to do with the drop in fatalities. But we must not listen to the moans of the older generation who claim everything has gone to pot.
And we should ask ourselves why young people want to spend money coming to the Lakes. Without the security of a final-salary pension, without the ability to jump onto the property ladder on an average salary (as their parents were able to do), no wonder they want to spend any disposable income on the luxury of a few days away.
Who knows, some may end up loving the place so much they one day decide to retire to Cumbria. But by then, they will be the ones doing the moaning.
